[jkeisling]

Governments are far harder to remove than tech firms. You may be able to ditch Google, but there's only one government in your country. And "democracy" doesn't prevent state surveillance.

Most politicians back it, so voting differently makes little difference. Labour and the Conservatives support the Online Safety Bill, the Patriot Act was bipartisan, and voters have very little control over the EU and can’t stop Chat Control. And most of “government” isn’t directly elected: you can’t vote out the NSA, and Congress has little power over them either. The government blunts corporate abuses but doesn’t stop them: revolving doors ensure authorities target small fry while big companies like Visa keep going unimpeded. And finally, most voters don’t mind surveillance that much, since government and media manufacture consent for it. Don’t count on ordinary people to “vote it out” until it’s too late.

Lobbying against government surveillance helps marginally, but it's an eternal struggle. Governments take as much power as they can get, while abuses are exponentially harder to detect and stop than refusing to grant that power in the first place. The “slippery slope” isn’t a fallacy, it’s the record of the last twenty years. Don’t let them track speech and money with a central ID and digital currency, just because you don’t like a few tech bros or online trolls.

[digging]

> Governments are far harder to remove than tech firms. You may be able to ditch Google

Ditching Google is not the same thing as removing Google from governance of your life, though. I don't use Google search, but I am sure they know who I am and sell that data to anyone who wants it, including government agencies which can't legally obtain that data on their own due (ostensibly) to citizen oversight.

[solardev]

Realistically, the average person has exactly 0 chance of "removing" either a government or a big multinational company.

However, the average person at least has some teeny tiny say in government via democratic processes and oversights. They have zero power against a big company unless they are a major shareholder.

The fundamental difference of "one person, one vote" and "one dollar, one vote" should not be lost in this discussion.

Big bureaucracies are terribly disempowering no matter who runs them, but in government at least you have some tiny amount of representation vs zero in the private sector.