Comment Re:cooked number and still falling (Score 1) 74
Years ago Republican pollster Frank Luntz, when asked how bad things might get, deadpanned "France. 1793."
We're not there yet, but you can faintly hear the thunk of falling guillotine blades, if you listen closely
I hear that "thunk" in my fantasies; but for all my mentions here on Slashdot of torches and pitchforks, I don't believe I'll ever hear it in real life. Between the public-facing tech giants such as Google, Microsoft, and Meta; and companies such as Palantir with lower public profiles; the surveillance apparatus is so pervasive that the secret planning required to bring down the overlords is no longer possible.
Now, bringing back the era of blades hissing through aristocrats' necks might become possible if the makers, hackers, and FOSS software developers started working together on large-scale circumvention of the infrastructure which spies on us all. Sadly, I'm not seeing much of that.
Yes, we have "hacktivism" - but as far as I can tell it's nowhere near to being sufficiently vigorous, vicious, and bloody-minded to counter the likes of Thiel, Andreesen, Musk, and the rest of that soulless lot. Lacking in the public at large is an awareness of the existential threat these fuckers pose to us.