Prologue: The 30-Year-Old Mistake We Are Still Paying For In 1994 Marc Andreessen made the error he later called “the biggest regret of my life”: shipping Netscape without native payments. Regulatory panic and bank conservatism killed the Navigator-Visa alliance; Microsoft’s Mastercard deal died the same quarter. The vacuum was filled by the only model left—surveillance advertising. Thirty trillion dollars of value have since been extracted not from direct exchange, but from selling human att...

Prologue: The 30-Year-Old Mistake We Are Still Paying For In 1994 Marc Andreessen made the error he later called “the biggest regret of my life”: shipping Netscape without native payments. Regulatory panic and bank conservatism killed the Navigator-Visa alliance; Microsoft’s Mastercard deal died the same quarter. The vacuum was filled by the only model left—surveillance advertising. Thirty trillion dollars of value have since been extracted not from direct exchange, but from selling human att...