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.

      • Murdoc
        4·
        1 year ago

        I’d recommend doing some reading up on this because I can’t explain it all in one comment, but the shorthand is that neither the USSR nor China (or even Cuba) are countries that “use” communism, as in that is the system that they are running. They are “communist” because that is what they believe in (or at least some people did, or claim to), just in the same way that a person can be a “capitalist” living in a non-capitalist country. It was what they were trying to achieve, not what they were/are. The USSR was a socialist dictatorship, and they never claimed to be anything else, because Marx prescribed that system as the transition between capitalism and communism. So anything these parties did that we disagree with (not accounting for propaganda) was due to them being dictatorships, not communism, which by definition is a stateless country, i.e. no political government, the exact opposite of a dictatorship.