There is this common narrative I see all the time, implying that we as individuals are empowered to choose and manifest our own destiny, and this comes up often in privacy discussions.
Don’t like Facebook’s privacy nightmares? Just don’t use Facebook!
Don’t like personalized ads? I remember a popular post on reddit saying “if your ad interrupts my YouTube video, I will hate your product”.
Don’t like Google chrome hegemony? Just use Firefox!
And while I agree that we should strive to do that, the battle doesn’t end here. Facebook has shadow accounts for people who never signed up. Google chrome keeps it’s hegemony despite people on the Internet advocating Firefox day and night. And ads continue to be extremely profitable despite you “hating the product” because it interrupted your YouTube video.
Even worse: even if you “hate the product”, you now already know it. You now know they product exists, and possibly whatever they wanted you to know about it. The reality is that these companies own your eyes. They control what shows up on your screen. And even if you hate it, they control what you end up learning.
the reality is that our individual resistance is very far from enough
I am not saying it is completely futile. It is a step in the right direction. But the only effective solution is organized action. We, alone, cannot achieve much. Unless we organize our resistance against privacy violations, we will continue to live through this privacy nightmare.
So go vote, be in unions, call your representative about these matters.
This should be how the message ends.
Not only this. Just by existing and living like this around your friends, family, and coworkers and they’ll notice and get interested. In the span of a year of just using Linux, firefox, adblockers, password managers, and email aliases I’ve unintentionally gotten the attention of two of my friends and they’ve now started on their privacy and security journey. I share privacy articles around to my friends because I think they should be aware that stuff like 23andme can leak your entire genome and could be targeted for a racially motivated attack. Just exist and share it around with people around you and some may catch on.
Unions, sure.
Voting and calling representatives is a futile approach. They’re a distraction at best. Unions are an example of what I mean by uniting our efforts and taking action.
Voting and calling representatives is a futile approach. They’re a distraction at best.
That’s conservative, pro-corporation propaganda.
Quite the opposite, actually. Corporations love for you to be distracted with the methods that are futile. Don’t you ever think about unionizing, striking, protesting, blocking traffic to our stores, boycotting, or any of that. Just do the things that don’t hurt our profits!
“Go vote” and “call your representative” presupposes you both believe there’s a genuine, believably electable option out there that’s gonna really fight for you on this subject, and that the electoral system you live in is legitimately going to represent your vote. There’s an argument to be made against both points, depending on where you live.
It doesn’t presuppose that at all. The only way to get that option is shift the overton window to the left, and the only way to do that is to vote for the candidate on the left, even if they’re not as far left as we’d like.
It absolutely presupposes that you give some level of legitimacy to an electoral system to partake in it. Otherwise, how does one have any internal consistency?
