Thank you for http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=unZZCykRa5w. Your notion of 'bundling' was one of my top three most mulled ideas in the past five years. Once I started looking, I see it everywhere.
Watched it last night. The very short summary is "bundling" is a kind of inside out Trojan Horse, the example Moxie used was "Google Analytics" which has some functionality that is undesirable to some users, enough so that it was blocked by some privacy extensions. Over time, Google started adding "useful" features to the GA code for websites, arguably because "you're already loading GA, why not get some utilities for your web site?" Well... this means that if you (the web dev) use the GA "utilities" on your web site, privacy extensions will break the website or have to allow GA to load. Some of those privacy extensions started to whitelist GA because of this.
Now the undesirable effects have come back and users now have to make a harder choice between a broken website or being another datapoint for someone's analytics.
The talk is not just about this, but more so about the way the world changed from attempted mandatory "controls" upon people to allowing them the "choice." The scope of "bundling" (features added to encourage use) gets larger and larger until you realize that you're living in a corporate panopticon along with everyone else. If you're not paying for it---you're the product---and bundling becomes the method used to keep you providing them with the best product.
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