The zillion dollar question. The control freaks do their job and have lots of power, but on the other hand the diversity of responses is immense. Things change: it’s evolution. Be smart, adapt, and don’t forget that a better tomorrow for each and all is possible, day after day.

But seriously, boss—I’m tired

Unfortunately, that’s their game plan: be an unrelenting bureaucracy that grinds you down so you eventually just give in and finally accept it as it is now then passively accept what they come up with next.

Of course we can win against politicians who we pay but don’t listen to us. At some point, this is not democracy anymore, and if this is not democracy anymore, then the people is going to express itself through non-democratic measures. Just saying.

Until then, we have work to do: convince friends, family, politicians. Expose lobbyist, corporations. Support education, spread knowledge.

We dont got good stories. We aint winning the masses. So Id say no.

I’m already tempted to resort to wild violence, since we are being pushed out of the last bit of freedom we have. I’m about to get diagnosed and the business has a good chance of succeeding, at which point I can push peaceful measures. I hope I’m not forced to do what I have to, because if I die, my father is infamous for some things, and I’m fairly sure he will leave far more bodies than I ever could.

He has an actual squad of ex-special force buddies.

Overall, someone is getting fucked, one way or another. We can’t just let them push extralegal bullshit on us with no resistance.

I’m trying to actuate the peaceful plan rn, but I’m squeezed so badly already. No one can do you in as much as your own family, I got into so much debt bailing them, and looking for a second job.

Yes, because “The EU” is not a hive mind. There’s politicians on both sides of this. We just need to make sure we back the right ones.

Find what and where you can fight best, and throw your weight behind it. Don’t fall into dispair, that’s what they are counting on.

Some fight for better laws, some fight for better politicians, some hack, some donate, some build, some propagandize, some host and archive, some preach and philosophize.

The best often do several of these things. Find what you’re inclined towards and do it. We need every last drop of effort to defeat the corpos and their corrupt political allies.

You can’t stop the signal.

Yes.

We have to keep fighting, and it isn’t easy but we have been building great things! Look at the growth of the fediverse with projects like mastodon, Lemmy, pixelfed, etc. More and more, people want alternatives to surveillance-capitalist social media platforms. They see the value in privacy as the stakes get higher for activists. Keep fighting, keep sharing.

Now, I also believe that ultimately we cannot solve political problems with technical solutions. We need to organize online and offline to effect real change. This organization must be multifaceted (“diversity of tactics”). A recent success of this type has been rolling back flock surveillance in municipalities around the US. Go to city council meetings with your neighbors. If the council won’t listen, then go out later with a comrade and smash those fucking things.

We will always be able to keep our own provacy. Linux phones are getting better, motorola is working with grapheneos. Even if all new phones suddenly become locked down we will still have our own phones. They cant stop us from building and using our own private services. The main issue I see is friends and damily not willing to use private messages.

Had similar thoughts this morning. I think it’s clear that many countries are going to head down the Great Firewall route; which is now very effective. It’s so hard to bypass and risky that most people don’t attempt to. As more countries implement these measures, and the list of countries/datacenters where people can set up XRay proxies (for example) shrinks, it will be easier to detect and block. I imagine if ad-hoc meshes became popular, then they’d be shutdown too. The problem is more political than technological.

I think moving away to decentealised means of connecting is the way. We already have things like Reticulum. If we invent a powerful and robust decentralised way of physical connection (like LoRa or HaLow but better) then we won’t need any corps - neither ISPe nor those that create web services for the ISP based network

The EU isnt trying to push chat control. If it was then the EU wouldn’t have shot it down multiple times like it has been.

Lobbyists are the ones trying to push chat control on the EU.

Just do your part and don’t get discouraged. You don’t have to do everything. Walk the walk, talk the talk. If things don’t work out, at least you tried; that’s more than the majority did.

Do what you do no because of some expected local or global outcome, but because it’s right.

All things that go up must come down. Icarus’ wings will melt from the sun’s heat. The web will crumble under the weight of llm bots. Markets will crash due to llm’s not living up to their hype. Big tech will be broken up. Billionaires and the trillionaire will be taxed to death. Regulators will lose interest. Let’s have hope.