Red Scare Austism
Mar 24, 2026
Razib Khan, a geneticist and operations lead at Futo, and Eron Wolf, founder and CEO building decentralized consumer software. They discuss Futo’s mission to escape big-tech surveillance and practical privacy-first products. They debate AI’s centralization risks, deplatforming, and tradeoffs between decentralization and convenience. They also share lore about building teams and moving tech communities to Austin.
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Users Are The Product Not The Customer
- Big tech treats users as the product rather than customers, driving surveillance and behavior manipulation.
- Eron Wolf explains Futo builds everyday software (e.g., image apps, browsers) so users can avoid Google/Apple surveillance and host data on personal Linux servers.
Make Privacy Products As Easy As Google
- Make privacy-respecting alternatives as easy as mainstream options to win users.
- Eron insists if an alternative matched Google's ease and convenience, people would choose it over surveillance-laden free products.
Gatekeepers Chose Centralization Not Necessity
- Centralized platforms choose to be gatekeepers and could have enabled competition but opted not to for control.
- Eron contrasts historic competitive search engines to today's single recommendation engines like YouTube's monopoly.