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Sunbird is somewhat suspicious to me because of the “we won’t open source because it’s less secure”. Makes me wonder what godawful nightmare their app is if they don’t want to let people look. Oh and if they’re doing it as a business decision I don’t want anything to do with them either as it’s still vendor lock in.
While there were issues with the way things were done with vaccination, you have to understand why it even got there. We had a situation where people were unreasonably made scared of vaccines which were by every metric substantially safer for the general population than the side effects. If right wingers convinced the population that they should do 150mph in a school zone and this is fine behavior because speed limits are a conspiracy and crashing into someone else doesn’t actually hurt them, how would you deal with this? I don’t think there are any good answers here, but the vaccines were better than not, and you need herd immunity for things to get better. And again, forcing people who can get vaccinated to get vaccinated, with overwhelming evidence that this was safer for everyone involved, is not the same as exile or imprisonment based on political beliefs.
It’s definitely going to be the far right who will throw people into camps if we get there. The most far left politicians in the US rarely if ever advocate targeting individual right wingers, but I can name a few far right politicians with substantial followings that suggested punishing people who disagree with them. I don’t have a lot of love for democratic politicians in the US but they don’t seem like a possible near term threat to people’s safety, they just won’t stand in the way of the people who are.
My opinion on that is that someone would’ve done what musk have money for at some point as well. All of those companies were mostly rehashed concepts that became viable due to faster computers, better materials, and better battery technology. I usually don’t say this about actual inventions made by scientists and engineers, but most of the time billionaires just provide a concept and daddy’s money and that really doesn’t take a lot of skills that I think are worth anything.
I realize it sounds utopic but it’s not nearly as insane as people think it is, especially when compared to mass boycott proposals.
To illustrate this point I will use meat because it’s probably the easiest to ditch of all major environmentally irresponsible behaviors. You first need to have a public where ~40-70% of the population is passionate about ditching meat, with most of the rest not caring and so falling into line. You then need to make sure that people who depend on the meat industry one way or another(which includes farmers/ranchers, fast food workers, people who cannot easily access vegetables, etc) are taken care of or understand that the overall social benefit to them outweighs the individual cost of ditching meat. You also need to have some way to coordinate this action to happen reasonably synchronously so that societal ideas about meat aren’t reinforced. This level of public organization and power is more than enough for things like general strikes or even regime changes.
You’re right, individuals can do a lot. We can take all of our politicians, CEOs, and corporate shareholders, and throw them out to one of their private islands that they love so much. Then, build a society where you aren’t pressured or even forced to drive, to replace tech every 3 years, or have a logistics system reliant on fossil fuels. Oh was that not the kind of public action you were talking about?
I was actually thinking about what it would take to have a truly peer to peer video site. Have clients simultaneously consume, serve and transcode content. It would obviously be concentrated in the hands of big enthusiasts and small video companies, but presumably it would be similar to the fediverse where you can choose from many instances.