cecilkorik

I don’t think their hand is really that strong, as much as they’ve been trying to convince people it is. Their media is powerful, the image they project is powerful. They have convinced us to fear of a massively powerful military-backed surveillance state, as we should, but is that really something they can achieve? Only with a lot more apathy and cowing to authority than they’re actually going to get, I think. Americans (and even the military is made up of Americans) are an unruly bunch at the best of times, and the powers that be might think they have enough money and enough security in place to protect them as their popular support dwindles and the MAGA wave they rode to power begins to realize that these authoritarians are not giving them back “muh freedumbs” like they promised but are in fact taking more of them away. As the famous quote goes, “First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win.” The regime has been ignoring and laughing at protests like 50501 and No Kings. They will have to fight eventually. Would the current regime survive more LA riots? Vietnam war protests? Another million man march? Probably. That’s obviously what they’re preparing for, as they should. But how far are they actually going to be able to go? And how far will the resistance go? I agree, we’ll see once the cards are all on the table. But I think there’s still plenty of room for hope that the actual future isn’t going to be as bleak as it may seem right now.

Interesting analogy, and a great point. I think it’s a lot like poker. They place their bets, we place our bets. They raise the stakes, we raise the stakes. Eventually one of us is either going to fold or we’re both going to end up going all in, and then we’ll finally end up seeing what our hands end up being once that happens. Are any of us prepared to fold on this? I’m not. Are they prepared to fold? I don’t know. Are they bluffing or are they holding all the right cards? I don’t know. If it comes to that, I guess we’ll find out.

So double down right back at them. What are you doing to stop what’s happening? How else should we disrupt the regime’s efforts? What do you recommend? Or do you think shitting on people’s efforts is helpful somehow and will lead to a good outcome?

They should fear us. We outnumber the powers that be (governments, billionaires) thousands to one if not millions to one, and though they do everything they can to make us believe otherwise, we are their equals in every way except organization and motivation. Those may not be trivial things to change but they are not that hard to change either. Money and laws and ownership are only meaningful constructs as long as we continue to consent to their current implementation. When we stop giving our consent, they will have nothing to maintain their power base except force, and being so vastly outnumbered, they will quickly find the forces they (and we) imagine they can bring to bear are actually quite limited. How are they going to keep paying for their citadels and bunkers and servants and bodyguards and personal armies when nobody wants their money on their predatory services anymore? Money, and our collective desire for it and the things they sell to us with it, is their only real weapon, and if we stop playing the game the way they expect us to, they’ve actually got nothing.

The black power movement understood this. The hippies understood this. We need to start to understand it. The power of these people is a myth, it’s something we give them and it requires mutual consent even if we don’t understand that we’re giving it. The power that has been given can be taken back when we withdraw our consent.

This also has big implications for consumer rights and society as a whole in other areas of digital technology and right to repair, it is a foot in the door to start actually holding manufacturers responsible for the full lifecycle of their products (digital and real) that requires them to actually relinquish their control when their product reaches end-of-commercial-life, instead of turning everything into digital garbage out of what basically amounts to apathy and compulsive rights hoarding.