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birdsongs • today at 8:00 PM • 1 reply • view on HN

> it is a product of the nature of consumers to eagerly suffer limitless abuse

Ah, there's the victim blaming.

> Freedom from everything you enumerated already exists for anyone who cares enough to pursue it

Do you have any idea how daily life is for non-technical people? It isn't reasonable in our society to expect everyone to switch to FOSS, and blaming 60 year olds for getting their identity stolen because they weren't using a Linux phone or rolling their own self hosted matrix chat server is such a cruel and unbelievably out of touch take.


Replies

anonym29 • today at 8:17 PM

Hey, if the option is on the table for states to fight back, up and including enacting the corporate death penalty (forced dissolution) against Microsoft, Alphabet, Meta, Apple, etc, I'm all for that.

That would never happen though, the victims would plea and fight too vigorously in defense of their own abusers.

Who should be blamed for the actions of corporations ultimately subject to the society-scale approval of their consumers? No amount of misbehavior, malice, negligence, or abuse from the company can alienate the modal user of their products, they've thoroughly demonstrated this too many times to count.

It's not the doddering elderly folks I blame the most, it's everyone younger than them, the folks who grew up with the technology, aware of every abuse by these companies, who refuse to change their behavior. The ones who know better. The ones who can explain to you in great detail all about the surveillance, the dark patterns, the emotional manipulation, the extractive commercial angle, and who all refuse to adjust their behavior anyway. It's a choice, and it's one they make on a continual basis.

And to answer your question, no, I don't have much of an idea how daily life is for non-technical people besides them voluntarily suffering abuse like theft of their time (advertisements), or voluntarily paying a bribe to avoid the abuse, for no real reason other than that they don't care enough about the abuse or the bribe to spend 5 minutes learning how avoid both for free for the rest of their life.

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