Hacker News Reader

Comment by bigyabai | Hacker News Reader

I think it is futile, and platform-owners know that. Unless you are willing to abandon iPhones, Macs, Windows PCs and Android devices, the United States and it's technocracy can still leverage the full extent of their surveillance, censorship and suppression mechanisms.

Your consent towards using certain services is really just virtue signalling. In a lot of ways you're contributing to the monoculture problem by relying on Substack (or HN, for that matter) to propagate your opinion.

View on HN

As much as I appreciate the difficulty this

> Unless you are willing to abandon iPhones, Macs, Windows PCs and Android devices

might pose for some, in my particular case to abandon these things I'd first have to take them up.

* To clarify, I do have Windows OS images in VM's that are either isolated or remote and I do have Android OS in two dumbed down smart TV's that are network isolated to either live TV signal from air or local network digital media.

bigyabai: "You must be absolutely pure in every respect of your life, or it's all in vain. Don't you see it's pointless? Give up, now."

Yay, I guess?

That, but unironically. You're not "fighting the man" in this arena. You are a gladiator fighting for the man. Threatening to leave by joining progressively less-popular centralized social media is a war of escalation you literally cannot win. It is wholly zero-sum.

It's as true for Twitter as it is for Bluesky as it is for Substack as it is for Hacker News. If you've invested your identity into any of these sites, you ought to realize that there is no light at the end of the tunnel. Negotiation is all for naught, you either own your words or you don't.

I appreciate this argument, and where are the limits of it? Where can we feel empowered to remove the equity we bring to the most harmful digital ecosystems until they make changes? Meta is a leader and standard setter and hides behind PR, smoke and mirrors, while they harm kids and bank billions.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com