this post was submitted on 16 Sep 2026
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Privacy
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We need to collectively abandon tech that insists on any of this. I post about this often, but I'll say it again: this will come with discomfort; you need to be okay with that temporarily.
These ghouls cannot withstand weeks / months of boycott. They simply can't, daddy earning reports and the shareholders won't allow it.
ID required for computer use in general has to be my line in the sand and that scares the fuck outta me. I have no idea how to make ends meet for the people who depend on me, if I have to walk away from computers, but there has to be a line somewhere.
The problem is that they made people addicted first. This is like saying "Everyone, we need to boycott heroin until they stop cutting it with fentanyl!"
What we need is to take over the government and enact and enforce laws against this. Hopefully by voting.
Its like the first thing in my post "this will cause discomfort"
I didn't say it was going to be easy at all, its going to be hard, but with some conviction in the values / morals informing your reason for protest its actually easy after that initial week is over.
Edit: its also infinitely easier to enact change like this in your own life than to smash a grand slam with a "government takeover.". Not saying that wouldn't be great, but let's start with the things we have control over.
Also, you can just do both; vote and boycott...
Hopefully not by voting. I absolutely loath peoples misplaced trust in bureaucratic mechanisms. If you want something done you do it, I'm not going to vote for someone in one of the pre-approved parties, just for them to give 40 reasons why it's unreasonable. You are never allowed to vote when it could actually create change, remember that.
Run for office, then. And if that isn't possible, then it's time for more radical measures.
Voting won't fix everything, but there is a good reason voter suppression exists and why most people had to have their right to vote fought for.
Run for office and do what exactly? Okay, I guess i could potentially win something at a county or city level. Great. Then I propose things, and shucks all my proposals get turned down because more bureaucracy. "We can't do that, what with the state laws and such" I've literally watched this song and dance at many a city council meeting, often involving someone that I personally campaigned for!
What an absolute fucking waste of time it was for me to have even tried. I did everything the way I was supposed to, but I'm now almost 10 years into this, and I've got exactly nothing to show for it. Some of you might be happy doing this charade until you're 80 years old, but not me. Take your pragmatism, utilitarianism, whatever word of the day you decide to use to justify opportunism and shove it where the sun don't shine.
Sheeeit, I live in a state where we directly voted for a particular thing, like overwhelmingly the public said "yeah, do things this way for fuck's sake!"
And the legislators? They said "we don't think that's in your best interest, actually, so no, don't think we will". And that was the end of that. (Actually not really, they did similar stuff with a couple other things too, including screwing our teachers enough to get them to organize a bit despite how heavy their workloads already are, damn was I eager to help with that!).
Voting to solve problems. Lol!!
spoiler
Dear reader, if this is you, you don't have to begin anew the tired recapitulation of the arguments - I do vote, like a chump, every chance I get, while also knowing we simply cannot vote our way out of this, that has been engineered (and continually is!) to never happen.Bingo. Voting does absolutely nothing & has never solved anything. All you’re doing is replacing corrupt politicians with more corrupt politicians in which the majority of them are bought & paid for & are handpicked by their wealthy donors.
It’s one of the reasons why I left the Democrat party in late 2022 & became politically homeless & turned to Anarchy.
The real answer, is something like grassroots. Civil disobedience. General strikes. A riot. A revolution. Those are what will spark real change. Voting is an illusion of choice. A sham. A fool’s errand.
Pick up fpv drone flying as a hobby. Try out fiber optic drones.
We've been voting all this time while they dreamed this up in some island. It's unanimous and worldwide. Get real.
Fuck off with your defeatist bullshit. Get in the streets and help protest
You could read that again without assuming I was being defeatist. Not much more I can say.
So abandon everything then?
No, just tech that demands age
which is going to be all tech legally required to :(
I grew up in a time of technology being a liberating force that helped us live in a society more firmly based on individual rights.
I no longer live in that world.
No it won't be all tech, that's just giving into FUD. People run servers out of their house, people write software. People used to use websites Joe Shmoe wrote and ran in his basement. If you choose to use things like meta and google it is exactly that, a choice. Tor network, I2P network, Gnutella, freenet, usenet, torrenting, these are and always will be options unless the entire internet infrastructure is burned to the ground.
All tech?
Not doubting, just hoping for a little more sanity.