Big tech is too big to be punished.

I perused the news this morning (party foul) and saw an article with the headline:

"Apple Siri Eavesdropping Payout: Apple agrees to $95 million settlement in Siri privacy class-action case."

Progress? Hardly. The only winners here are the corporations and the lawyers—not the privacy advocates, not the people.

$95 million for a trillion-dollar company is a parking ticket at worst. A minor inconvenience. A worthwhile trade-off for spying on millions of users. I'll bet you my net worth that their ad deals far exceeded that $95 million.

At this point, the legal system is just a cog in the financial machine. It’s not a pillar of justice but another player in the economic game. The government sets rules to serve its own financial incentives. Corporations calculate whether breaking the law is worth the cost. And when the payout of breaking the rules surpasses the penalties, they choose to violate.

Privacy is thus commodotized. It is not held as an inviolable right but a purchasable entity.

Let’s extend the rant a little further. Who are the winners in a class-action suit?

Spoiler alert: it’s not the people who were spied on.

Articles about the Apple payout lure readers with the promise of a share in the settlement. The amount? $20 per device, up to 5 devices. A maximum of $100. But how long will it take you to navigate the process? Filling out forms, entering data, dealing with website glitches, following up with an unresponsive rep, or resubmitting your claim. Hours of effort for a measly $20.

Meanwhile, guess who pockets the real money? The lawyers.

Typically, class-action lawyers work on contingency, taking a 30–40% cut of the settlement. That’s $28–38 million for the lawyers, often split among just a few individuals.

So, the people who were spied on get ice cream money. The lawyers? They retire. What a beautiful system.

I don’t often rant about the broken nature of our economic systems, but let’s face it: we’re staring down a serious power and accountability imbalance. Most of our economic games are winner-take-all.

I’m not here to foment revolution or pull a Mangione, but these imbalances prime the soil for unrest. When the delta between wealth and poverty widens, people can no longer ignore it. And eventually, there’s a breaking point.

We need a rebalancing of accountability. We need better checks and balances on powerful institutions and individuals. We need to cap runaway economic incentives to serve the greater good.

Prizing the unbridled pursuit of economic gain without skin in the game, without downside or accountability, increases suffering in our society.

That said, the only thing we can control is our daily actions within our sphere of influence. Take a small step today—towards justice, towards healing. Make the world 0.001% better each day with your ripple effect.

It’s all we can do.