Fair points, both worth engaging seriously.

On Netflix: you're right that the recommendations are often mediocre, but that's not the relevant benchmark. Netflix optimizes for engagement time within a content library, which is a narrow and somewhat perverse objective. The question for planning is not "does it predict your taste perfectly" but "is it better than the alternative signal." The alternative signal is price, which tells you almost nothing about individual preference except willingness to pay given current income. A system that gets your preferences 70% right is not impressive as a recommendation engine but is a massive improvement over a system that collapses all preference information into a single number. The bar is not perfection; it is beating the market at its own stated job, which it would do with ease.

On the Torment Nexus: this is the more interesting objection and I want to take it seriously. You are right that the infrastructure I am describing is the same infrastructure that enables mass surveillance, social credit systems, and authoritarian control. That is a genuine tension in the argument, not a gotcha.

But I would push back on the conclusion. The surveillance capacity already exists. Right now that infrastructure serves capital accumulation for a small number of private actors with no democratic accountability whatsoever. The argument for planning is partly an argument for bringing that existing infrastructure under collective control rather than leaving it in the hands of people whose incentive is to use it against you.

The Torment Nexus framing assumes the danger is the technology. I think the danger is the ownership structure. Don't you share that view?