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As a relatively privileged person, nobody is making me do anything. I'm passively benefiting from completely evil systems of exploitation around the planet. There is nothing to refuse except my own comfort which every human deserves.
I think it's more important to actively resist but resistance will be violently suppressed as always. It's not a risk that many privileged people are willing to take.
They're close, but not quite there. Any government(democratic or otherwise) requires participation for it's legitimacy. If enough folks decide to stop participating in a critical mass, the government falls. That's why mass protests and general strikes are so effective and why governments really don't want people to understand they have that nuclear option and will do anything to prevent people from organizing for it.
A great deal of the modernization of finance and policy enforcement has been about pre-enforcement. You get your IRS money taken out before it hits your paycheck. You don't speed in a neighborhood with speed bumps because it immediately fucks up your car. Your ability to access your office space or bank account or the electricity/water that goes into your home even the ability to turn on newer models of car is predicated on a permission slip that a third party can disable with a button click.
On the flip side, so much of our daily life is alienated from the other people that make our standard of living possible. I don't know who works at my grocery store, much less who actually picks my fruit or bakes my bread or slaughters my beef. I don't know who provides me with electricity or water. I don't know who is on the other side of the teller window when it comes time to cash a check or pull out cash.
Participation is mandatory because the interfaces that allow us to interact with one another are gate-kept by remote and indifferent agents. Opting out of these systems is difficult and expensive. Reaching out to people to engage in collective action is onerous and awkward.
governments really don’t want people to understand they have that nuclear option and will do anything to prevent people from organizing for it.
Government administrators keep a short lease on their direct reports and underlings. Private sector administrators do, too. Organizing the people with their hands closest to the levers of power is incredibly difficult, while administrative replacement of these higher ranking bureaucrats is trivially easy.
At some level, what the Trump Admin is currently doing cuts so deep that he may actually sever his ability to impose his will on remote offices and local bureaucracies. If enough high ranking FBI admins or DOJ lawyers walk off the job, it just becomes impossible to command branches in far-flung states and territories.
But when he's got guys like Peter Thiel and Jamie Damion in his back pocket, it may not matter. The ability to instantly fire, bankrupt, or imprison people anywhere in the country has a powerful chilling effect. The only people it doesn't immediately threaten are the folks who have already lost too much and the folks who have managed to remove themselves from the domestic system entirely.
None of this is to say we shouldn't organize and oppose this shit. But go in with eyes wide open. Don't naively assume raw numbers matter in the face of a heavily automated administrative state.
Taxes due soon, think I may just forget that shit until a legitimate government is assembled.
That’s pretty much how the talibangelicals operate. They disobey subpoenas and refuse to comply in various other ways, both petty and legal.
It’s effective at showing how powerless and spineless our authorities are, so fair enough to turn the tables.
Make me do what, exactly
Depending on the context, acquiescing and then not following orders can be quite effective as well, especially if you're in a position of direct contact.
E.g., your supervisor instructs you to do something like take down the company DEI site? Say no, get fired... Or say yes, and just don't do it. You forgot, it's a cached version, etc. Eventually you have to take it down and then a month later when the site updates it's back. Someone must've left it in the update package.
Be creative, be active. Anyone who wants to gaslight the world is owed nothing but deception and disrespect.
Not only that: They rely on people pre-emptively obeying them before even being threatened. Zuckerberg, Tim Cook, all those guys, they know better. They're also doing fine money-wise. They had every option to just tell Trump to get fucked, and mess up their company if he wanted to make that decision. They wouldn't have been out on the street, whatever happened, and they would have had a chance to do something noble instead of just optimizing for the money function like a malfunctioning AI superintelligence.
One of the critical factors in fascists taking power is "obeying in advance." Because, yes, they can't be everywhere. Fuck that. I fully support this message.
Edit: Typo
Zuckerberg, Tim Cook, all those guys, they know better. They’re also doing fine money-wise. They had every option to just tell Trump to get fucked, and mess up their company if he wanted to make that decision
You say that as if they're complying reluctantly instead of enthusiastically.
All the billionaire plutocrats are fucking GLEEFUL at what's happening. Every. Single. Fucking. One. is the enemy of the People.
"On Tyranny" covers that in the first chapter.
2 hour audiobook.
Well, you don't become a billionaire by doing the morally right thing, so it would have been a miracle.
I take one issue with this, just one.
"They can't be everywhere"
See, that may have held up in the 1930s and 40s, but we live in the country with the most robust surveillance apparatus on the globe. And almost every one of us carries around a fun little brick full of privacy violations with us, everywhere we go, absorbing everything we do and say and buy, and packages it neatly into a form ad agencies and the government can use how they like. And one of those little bricks we call smartphones, why, not only do we carry them around willingly, they're almost a necessity to get anything done in the modern era. We have surveillance that the Gestapo would've had wet dreams about. And, more, all of the largest tech corporations and their techbro CEOs -- Google, Microsoft, Facebook, Apple, etc. -- are only too happy to kiss the ring and give them unfettered access. To say nothing of the countless other devices spying on you -- Ring doorbells selling your data to police departments comes to mind. License plate scanners -- even if your car doesn't spy on you (which, if it was made in the last decade, it almost certainly does to some extent). Your desktop computer has been backdoored by Intel's management engine or AMD's PSP for well over a decade -- if you don't think they've built in backdoors for the government, I've got a bridge to sell you. They can strongarm any company in the world they want, especially ones owned and operated in the US, do you really think they haven't quietly taken them aside and demanded hardware-level access to every computer made in the last 20 years? With how much the people at the NSA would have wet dreams about that? Yeah, no.
I'm not saying it's necessarily hopeless. But there will be no Anne Franks hiding in the attic if it comes to that point. They can, in fact, be everywhere, and if the hammer falls it's going to fall hard and fast, there will be no long continuous search for undesirables across the countryside.
If you want my advice? do as much sketchy-looking shit as possible while not actually doing anything illegal. Use a VPN. Look up Kali and Tails and download them to a Ventoy flash drive. Run I2P (even Tor -- but preferably I2P) on your computer. Get Signal. Download the simple sabotage manual, expedient homemade firearms, etc. Do everything in your power to make them look as closely at a complete nothing as possible, and destroy their signal to noise ratio -- and tell your friends to, as well. They can collect mountains of data on everyone, certainly, and we can't really stop that now; but it still takes humans to sift through (AI cannot, yet, do that for them with any meaningful accuracy) -- make them look for their needle in an ever-increasing haystack.
Maybe it's better phrased as "There's not enough of them to get all of us"
A good example of this is the Rosenstraße Protest. Nazi Germany was unable to deal with popular pushback at height of Hitler's totalitarian power at the literal center of repression.
Good luck with that attitude in 1930/40s Germany or similar states. Fascist states have always dealt with this kind of people.
That always depend on how many (and to some extent which) people have that attitude.
The attitude is the product of material conditions. This isn't some question of individualist choice but of systematic control.
Fight back.
I’ve heard of three other words that all start with a D
14 words defeated by 3 words.
I suspect we’ll have another Rosa Parks moment for the history books sometime in the next four years or so.
Pretty sure there are many Rosa Parks every day. They're either dead or encaged.
If they don't burn or ban them.
They cannot be everywhere, but they're certainly trying with ever-increasing surveillance and AI to go through all that data.
Good thing Democrats voted for that every step of the way, despite people telling them what this was going to lead to.
AoC says strap up
I can't even fight back in self-defense because I'm not white and typically the other person is.
The system is stacked against me and the only possible approach is secret vigilante justice.
Not a meme
that's just your opinion, man.