Small edits to the introduction

I know where you're going with this, but it is currently pretty flammable stuff. I think that citing cases of all of these points will help mitigate the story that you're weaving. I would also run this by Outlier at some point, maybe - it's kind of hard to come down on VCs when we have VC money. Something to think about.

Happy to work through this all with you in person. I think a nice session outlining how this chapter should go would be a good idea for the Azores.

I am going to move on to the next chapter. This one clearly isn't done yet. That's OK!

Author: RichardLitt

00_Introduction/00_Introduction.md

@@ -2,27 +2,25 @@
 
 ## Centralized Power: The Present
 
-Anybody that has been paying attention during the last few years has been a witness to some truly landmark events:
+The last few years have been a watershed for how we collectively understand the internet, data, and our increasingly interconnected world. For instance, here are a few major events that have changed our perceptions of security, privacy, and access:
 
-- Data stores in centralized locations has been breached time adn time again in the form of government and criminal hacking, exposing the data of millions of people per attack
-- The Internet-of-Things has linke your behavioral and usage data directly to the headquarters of megacorporations
-- Artists, musicians, performers, and writers alike are now able to use platforms like Spotify and Amazon to publish their work to a larger audience, but the devaluation of art and music is complete, leaving struggling artisans to compete with each other for fractions of what they made even 10 years ago.
+- Data stores in centralized locations has been breached time and time again in the form of government and criminal hacking, exposing the data of millions of people per attack. TODO Link all of these with real-world examples
+- The Internet-of-Things has linked your behavioral and usage data directly to the headquarters of large corporations; corporations, like Amazon, Apple, and Microsoft, that are so large that they are able to directly influence politics on the global scale, and are unlike anything that our society has before. This linking has in turn lead to personalization, manipulation, and exploitation to an alarming degree.
+- Artists, musicians, performers, and writers alike are now able to use platforms like Spotify and Amazon to publish their work to a larger audience, but the devaluation of art and music is dire, leaving struggling artisans to compete with each other for fractions of what they made even 10 years ago.
 - Historical data is now being mined and repurposed for algorithms, leading to practices such as real estate pricing and predictive policing. Only very recently has any attention been paid to the bias inherent in these data sets.
-- Facebook's true innovation - monetizing **attention** by way of harvesting and processing user data - has wreaked its fair share of havok in terms of society and politics.
+- The trend of tracking user hits has lead to many large corporations monetizing **attention** by way of harvesting and processing user data. This, when done both by major media companies (Fox News, MSNBC) and social web sites (Facebook) has wreaked its fair share of havoc in terms of society and politics.
 
-The central problem in all these cases comes from a simple asymmetry: the people that _generate_ the data do not end up _owning_ the data. This can and will be used against you: in a court of law, in your bank account balance, in your social stature and in your overall life outcome.
-
-While recent legislation has fired back against these megacorporations.
+These individual points are connected. The central problem in all these cases comes from a simple asymmetry: the people that _generate_ the data do not end up _owning_ the data. This can (and has, and will) be used against you: in a court of law, in your bank account balance, in your social structure, and in your digital and physical life.
 
 ## How did we get here? A Historical Context
 
-Distributed systems are nothing new, yet somehow advances in this space tend to "disrupt" more thoughougly than any VC-funded startup can ever hope to, with results that are often as tragic as they are profound.
+Distributed systems are nothing new, yet somehow advances in this space tend to "disrupt" more thoroughly than any VC-funded startup can ever hope to, with results that are often as tragic as they are profound.
 
 ### The Birth of the Internet
 
 In the late 1960s, The Internet itself was developed as a decentralized system of computers capable of sustaining a nuclear attack. Individual computers became linked together via underground wire and a process known as "packet switching" was implemented to send data in disparate chunks which were expected to be re-assembled in order on the receiving end.
 
-By the late 1980s, academic works involving distributed consensus algorithms such as Paxos were introduced. TODO: flesh out
+By the late 1980s, academic works involving distributed consensus algorithms such as [Paxos](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paxos_(computer_science)) were introduced. TODO: flesh out
 
 in 1991, the first World Wide Website went live, and what is now the most popular content and user interface layer for the internet was born. The web allowed anybody with the means to publish a website and link to other sites using their location-based addresses.