What is the most reasonable way that "we" and people like us on HN could do to prevent Dark Patterns as they are right now? Maybe the FTC will prevent some in t

What is the most reasonable way that "we" and people like us on HN could do to prevent Dark Patterns as they are right now? Maybe the FTC will prevent some in the future, maybe they won't, I don't put much hope into it. Lawmaking on the internet right now is a mess, and GDPR whilst it might have had good intents ended up being a big mistake imo. (Certainly the whole consent-cookie thing is a mistake) We can all promise not to implement Dark Patterns in the software we write. But the good old "personal boycott" isn't really working, and hasn't really been working since forever. If for example Youtube won't allow you to turn off your screen on a mobile device, unless you buy premium (turning off the screen is a hardware feature, not a website feature), then the solution isn't really to stop using Youtube. There isn't an alternative. Man, when I think about this stuff I can get kinda jaded. Antidotes like youtube-dl, or ublock origin work, but they only work for "us", and not everyone else who has to live in the Dark Pattern hellhole that the internet is turning into. I meet people who have never heard of an adblocker, still in 2021. And even if "we" all stop implementing Dark Patterns, there will be plenty of other cheap hires who will gladly implement the same features when we refuse to do that kind of stuff. And if you're in a bad enough spot it would leave you out of work even. What if there was some kind of union? Like say something called "union of ethical software", which may more technically be a international non-profit rather than a union, which does a few different things: 1) Establishes open standards for how things should work, in regards to "ethical software", rather than say technical standards. 2) Has a donation fund which funds A) A small team of lawyers/tech-people, who will on a strategic basis defend cases where an employee might end up in trouble refusing to implement features which are in conflict with 1). Not to primarily save employees, but to primarily scare tech-giants from going for the "do it or ill fire you stick immediately". B) A small team of educators and speakers, who would spend time creating educational content and essentially political content as to garner public opinion in favor of all this, the types of people to appear on say TV during a big case against for example Google. I'm just throwing ideas at the wall here though. Saw another comment here about living in a off-grid cabin. That sounds very nice, and better each day. ...The ESITF, Ethical Standards for Information Technology Foundation. Did it have a ring?