> Until they've been burned

Or as someone put it: "You can't make people care".

Most western countries are democracies because people in the past got burned by dictatorships (including monarchies). Many of them died because of the dictators (whether they were forced to fight a war of conquest or imprisoned for saying the wrong thing). Many of them died to remove (kill, execute, make flee) the dictators.

There are 2 domains remaining where we still have dictatorships:

- Corporations. Not only do workers usually not have any way make decisions but they produce much more wealth than they actually capture. Cory Doctorow said that an average programmer makes $1M in profits for the company - how much does actually go into his pocket and to whom does the rest go? This is the core of rising economic inequality.

- Technology. This is what OP's article is about. There's not a clean hierarchical power structure you can point to but it's obvious companies have a huge power advantage over users.