[jgalecki]

This post rhymes with a great quote from Joseph Weizenbaum:

"The myth of technological and political and social inevitability is a powerful tranquilizer of the conscience. Its service is to remove responsibility from the shoulders of everyone who truly believes in it. But, in fact, there are actors!"

[ericmcer]

That reminds me of water use in California. We frequently have droughts, and the messaging is always to reduce water usage. I have friends who turn the shower off while soaping up just to save a few gallons out of civic duty. Meanwhile a few companies are using more water than every residential user combined to grow alfalfa, half of which gets shipped overseas. Like ban one company from selling livestock feed to Asia/Saudi Arabia and the drought for 40 million people is solved.

but people just throw their hands up "looks like another drought this year! Thats California!".

[mason_mpls]

Perhaps we need more collective action & coordination?

I don’t see how we could politically undermine these systems, but we could all do more to contribute to open source workarounds.

We could contribute more to smart tv/e-reader/phone & tablet jailbreak ecosystems. We could contribute more to the fediverse projects. We could all contribute more to make Linux more user friendly.

[__MatrixMan__]

I admire volunteer work, but I don't think we should focus too hard on paths forward that summarize to "the volunteers need to work harder". If we like what they're doing we show find ways to make it more likely to happen.

For instance, we could forbid taxpayer money from being spent on proprietary software and on hardware that is insufficiently respectful of its user, and we could require that 50% of the money not spent on the now forbidden software instead be spent on sponsorships of open source contributors whose work is likely to improve the quality of whatever open alternatives are relevant.

Getting Microsoft and Google out of education would be huge re: denormalizing the practice of accepting eulas and letting strangers host things you rely on without understanding how they're leveraging that position against your interests.

France and Germany are investing in open source (https://chipp.in/news/france-and-germany-launch-docs-an-open...), though perhaps not as aggressively as I've proposed. Let's join them.