I think we should instead blame consumers and voters. It is our job to hold CEOs and other bad public figures accountable, but we never do

This is a case where I believe history has shown us the answer. A system reliant on humans doing the right thing is not sustainable nor viable, fullstop. Even if we were to corral this together in 10 years it would just break 10 years later (see 1960s-1980s) - which is not worth investing in.

Black Wall Street is a particularly bad example because of how it was both physically and systematically destroyed. They acted in good faith to capitalism and were destroyed by bad faith actors - something that capitalism has no answer for (as stated previously). The Amish are a not a great example either considering their population is reliant on the ebb&flow of large scale capitalism too; they use toiletries, washing machines, etc while still being technologically behind.

There is no “right incentive” in any system not focused on community. That means there currently exists no established economic system that will help us. This is why I said we need smart and practical people working on it; because if not we’re going to be in really big trouble this century.

Bringing it back to privacy and tech, we are too poor and weak to afford creating new cornerstones every year. When Proton (and most recently Mozilla) rots, we have no recourse. Shifting chairs on the Titanic (moving from Proton to Tuta) is not a real solution, we need real structural changes.

First off, I am happy that your community is functional and that (at least for now) the capitalist structure works for you.

The core of this issue lies in human-nature and incentive-structure. The thing is, majority of people never act as the ideal in any system. In fact most of the time, due to the often strict guidelines of systems, people act in bad faith. What this means is that any system, at all times, will have significant resistance to existing and will need sufficient guardrails to not fall apart. Why bring this up? Because capitalism has no guardrails.

The “start another business” argument is not viable because (unfortunately) most people do not have the capital nor expertise to compete. An extremely high number of people on Earth do not own businesses, and there is a reason for this.

The “rinse wash and repeat” argument also quickly falls apart because:

1. The very very small population that has capital and expertise shrinks every time we do this
2. The new businesses born are not likely to survive (based on startup failure rates)
3. The more businesses, the harder it is to compete

A significant amount of industries around the world are effective monopolies, there is a reason for this. Low capital pool, low talent pool, high failure rates, and high competition - means that once you make it out of development hell, you are almost always unrivaled and can easily destroy/outlast your competitors.

Since we’re here, lets talk about incentive structure. Most people do not have disposable income, those that do are investors. In a system where money is the “goal”, the natural result is that the investors will be prioritized. This generally means that the end-user (me and you) are being exploited. Mom and Pop will not save you from the physics of money.

The only thing I’ve seen “work” is when there is a community of strong moral fiber that refuses to sell out their neighbor. This is why I said I am happy for you, because this is extremely rare.

As for the solution, any answer I give will be bad. This is a complex (not complicated!) issue and requires influential, smart, and rich people to work towards a goal for many years.

That said, I am giving a bad answer anyway. We need a way to “miniaturize” infrastructure, with the end goal being distributed (decentralized) infrastructure. The reason being that we need to decouple the government and monopolies from the market. This is obviously extremely difficult to do, but I think it can be done. We actually have a lot of the tools for this (3d printers, foss, internet, etc) but the direction, knowledge, and polish aren’t there.

Proton is a bandage solution to email being hijacked by Google and Microsoft - they used their infrastructure to turn an open protocol (email) into a closed implementation (you cant send email to your buddy without gmail). Proton is a middle ground where they respect us, but are also “in the club”. We wouldn’t need them if emails could simply be sent from my router to your router (tor has something like this).

The thing confusing me most is why Ukraine would trust any US’ “guarantee”, when they’ve been nothing but untrustworthy.

And people’s lives are not toys. I get the sentiment behind wanting less people to die. But Trump and Putin do think people’s lives are toys, so I can’t imagine the outcome of this being beneficial in any way to Ukraine.

At face value this is true, but I challenge you to consider the knock-on effects of having a decentralized platform. One of which being that it become increasingly difficult to coerce someone into giving PII (i.e phone number) to signup - they’ll just go elsewhere

This effectively makes it more private for everyone.

I’ve said this before and I’ll say this a million times again, capitalism is simply not viable. The main mechanism to punish bad business practice (using a different business) also hurts the significantly weaker consumer; meaning it will almost never be used properly.

I point this out here because I agree with your stance and cannot stand the “vote with your wallet” nonsense people pretends works.

This makes it really difficult to navigate the privacy space because eventually a cornerstone like Proton is “corrupted” and we have no way to correct it. We seriously need people thinking about solutions to this problem, or we’ll be going nowhere fast.