Agree with RMS on this point, but I think that battle is nearly lost. Opting out ("cancel culture") seems to be the only powerful choice left for your average c

Agree with RMS on this point, but I think that battle is nearly lost. Opting out ("cancel culture") seems to be the only powerful choice left for your average citizen in the shambles of democracy we have left. It could just be the orchestration problem that a large population can't self organize well enough to create a healthy democracy whereas a smaller ruling class is at a scale it can orchestrate and holds the upper hand. We currently have a system that not only enables exploitation of people but celebrates it. If you can get someone to do something for you for nothing, you're rewarded and regarded as brilliant. Exploitation (essentially optimization) is fine when it's applied to a mechanical technique or process to gain efficiency (general technological growth), but not so fine when it's exploiting people and their lives to reach these growths. We seem to have lost the technological growth rate options that satisfy the appetites of the most greed driven (where US capitalism has historically been fantastic and deserves celebration, back when labor rights were strong and the industrial revolution was steaming ahead with no end in sight for technological growth) and moved on to exploiting people to eek out these never-ending appetites for growth (where US capitalism, I believe, has more recently begun to fail).