The time to fight is now!! We are careening toward a bleak future of mobile computing.
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Unfortunately the fight seems to be enormous. It's not just this little slice of computing freedom, it's all the random bullshit that various world governments get up to that I keep seeing in EFF newsletters: big tech enforcing government censorship or ratting you out to your government that's having a play at fascism, or making you verify your identity to access services, or trying to get access to your encrypted communications, but on top of that it's also: weaponizing copyright law to get you in trouble for repairing things you bought, choking out small businesses that might compete with regulatory capture or copyright shenanigans, shadowbanning your content if it doesn't look nice next to coca-cola ads (everyone putting little stars on sui*ide or whatever other nonsense), adding fees on all your payments or completely un-humaning you if you don't pay to play (credit card companies; UK allowing "CC only" shops).
Not to be the strings on the pegboard guy, but, it's all looking to be connected, and it's all looking to be the natural outcome of organizing our societal value systems around profit motive and letting gigantic inhuman profit-seeking algorithms (corporations) run rampant and allowing capital to be transferable to political power.
Walkaway by Cory Doctorow seems the most feasible path forward for people that are tired of this sort of society. Modern society seems too prepared to be able to overcome with widespread revolution, and in any case such an overthrow seems too vulnerable to co-opting by bad, authoritarian actors.
It is connected, but not in the "man behind the mirror" sense. It just happens to be the result of important governments across the world shifting politically right simultaneously and pushing/tolerating agendas that value government-enforced security over personal freedom.
A duck just happens to be the result of the way it looks, walks, swims and quacks.
What use is this decomposition in case of the undeniable enfascistification of the world, other than giving a set of bullet point excuses for the devil's advocates?
> Unfortunately the fight seems to be enormous.
It is, but the longer the general public plays ostrich in the sand and prefers losing their tail feathers one by one to unburying their eyes and admitting where all this has been going, the more enormous it will be.
Don't I know it. The problem is as soon as we truck out the big words - anti-fascism, anti-capitalism, the statist propaganda kicks in and our uphill battle just turned into a upcliff battle.
The time to fight back was when Microsoft got a slap on the wrist 25 years ago from the Justice Department.