UK showed how to deal with civil disobedience (fast tracked judicial process). Hardware attestation will deal with the hacker spirit.

Above all, the LLM panopticon will watch us all.

Technology will not save us. Nothing will save us but ourselves and we're busy making rent and doomscrolling.

While I agree with you, my worry is that younger generations have been conditioned to just expect privacy invasions, and I hear the same "Well I have nothing to hide" more and more with my younger family at least.

This. Fatigue and despair are by far the most effective way to control a population. You don’t need to convince people you’re doing the right thing, you just have to convince them that it’s too late.

Absolutely, but this can only happen if we refuse to run nonfree software on our machines. Even if the maintainers of a Linux distro decided to somehow implement some anti user feature like age attestation, it would be trivial to patch that out from the source or to remove it from a running system with root access. The real danger here is devices that are not fully owned by the user, such as iPhones.

I do underestimate the hacker spirit. HN's response to Client Side Scanning was disheartening, barely anyone could condemn Apple despite the obvious red-line being crossed: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28068741

And once you step outside HN, forget it. You can save yourself, but there are thousands of people that do respond to the "think of the children!" nonsense and will call you a creep for objecting to it. It's game over now, you will fight against this for the rest of your life.