Only competition can provide a solution. We have lost sight of this principle even though all Western democracies are built on the idea of separation of powers, and making it hard for any one faction of elites to gain full control and ruin things for everyone else. Make them fight with each other, let them get a piece of the pie, but never all of it. That's why we have multiple branches of government, multiple parties etc. That's why we have markets with many firms instead of monopolies.

There has never been a utopian past and there will never be a utopian future. The past was riddled with despotism and many things that the average man or woman today would consider horrific. The basic principle of democratic society is to prevent those things from recurring by pitting elite factions against each other. Similarly business elites who wield high technology to gain their wealth must also compete and if there is any sign of them cooperating too closely for too long, we need to break them up or shut them down.

When Apple and Google agree, cooperate, and adopt the same policies - we are all doomed. It must never happen and we must furthermore break them up if they try, which they are now doing.

> A handful of tech-savvy users with rooted devices and open-source software will not make a difference to the giant crushing machine that is the system.

Agreed, although I don't think that's entirely true, its just that post-smartphones we no longer have any political agency over a significant volume of the new traffic. Much of the new traffic represents that faction of people who initially mocked the internet as "nerd shit". But we don't have to get discouraged by our smallness here.

Rather we can offer a sub-system that satisifes our demands and is an open door to those willing to find it. We could try to fight our corner, but unless we're incredibly organised, its unlikely they'll listen due to how less relevant we are, now that all the normies transitioned online.

So we either jump ship to other, more permissive platforms and help make them good by developing software that closes the gap, or we counter by attacking the systems that prevent people from installing software on the device they have bought.

We just shouldn't expect the general population to care about our problems en-masse because they never have and never will. We will make a difference by creating an alternative sub-system that is poised to grow when the giant crushing machine stumbles at some point in the future.

We can't hate people for picking the parental wing of Apple because for most normies they don't enjoy the freedoms of technology, its the choice and difficulty that they conversely find oppressive.

The problem is that tech-savvy users are like bikers, most of us are law-abiding and want the best for society.

Then there's the 1%'ers, people causing trouble, be it by being biker thugs or malware authors or toplevel pirates, actually disrupting the system but often not in a way that's good for the masses and when clashing authoritans the authoritans win due to the masses good.

And yes, the "good" for the masses is more about malware whilst DRM is more of powergrab by media industries that were unwilling to adapt.

I am looking forward for the day I remote ssh into a <insert kvm solution> controlling my iPhone/Android so I can login to my bank app because they stopped allowing web access, and I don't want to compromise on privacy. Shit is nuts.

> What I like about your comment is that it points out that all technical work-arounds are moot if people as a whole are not willing to stand up with pitchforks and torches to defend their freedoms.

If your system requires extraordinary political efforts from large numbers of people, your system will fail. We are the elites, we have to oppose this. If Netflix asks us to implement this kind of DRM, we have to resign. If Facebook asks us to implement sophisticated surveillance, we have to resign. Etc. etc. We can't keep cashing the checks and then point to the body politic like "I beg you to stop me".

Telling people how they have to design their systems is the opposite of freedom.

Most people don't want to have to learn multiple operating systems or ways of doing things.