Season 1. Episode 9. Unscripted with Eric Forst

Eric Forst spent the first half of his career building the foundational technology of the surveillance economy: pixel tracking at one of the largest third-party cookie networks, then AI-driven sentiment analysis used by the Obama campaign in 2012, the same techniques Cambridge Analytica would later turn on Brexit and Trump.

 

In this episode he tells Jeff Pedowitz what actually made him walk away, and lays out what he's building instead: an open source Consenti Protocol that forces AI agents to have real legal terms in place before they can transact on a person's behalf, a case for the crypto wallet as the successor to the cookie, and a bill-of-rights argument for why the Fourth Amendment hasn't caught up to data brokers.

 

The conversation moves from HubSpot's recent data-sharing reversal to Palantir's federal contracts to a harder question underneath all of it: if AI agents end up doing most of the labor, does the entire relationship between capital and labor, the thing capitalism runs on, survive that?