Sometimes I’m really wrong. In 2008 I heard about a funky new search engine called DuckDuckGo, took one glance, and predicted it would die a quick death. After all, back then Google was on the rise and the fields of tech were littered with the wreckage of rival search engines, like starships shot out of the sky. How could a new one succeed? (And with a name like that?) Worse, DuckDuckGo’s business model was paddling against the current. Its central feature was a commitment to privacy: Its code wouldn’t track you at all. A delightful idea, to be sure! But it seemed like financial suicide when all other tech giants—Google and the ascendant Twitter and Facebook—were racing in the opposite direction to build surveillance-capitalist tools for scraping together as much data as possible about you. “Big Data” was the turtle-necked catchphrase of tech conferences, and tech CEOs promised that feasting upon your every activity—and personalizing their services—would produce an epic win-win. You would get search results (or social media feeds) tweaked for precisely your interests; they could offer advertisers laser-guided targeting. Those hippies over at DuckDuckGo? Adorable business model, folks. Good luck.