I love this essay because it challenges us[1] about things most are too polite to mention. If you feel outrage at the following, then try recognizing that as a

I love this essay because it challenges us[1] about things most are too polite to mention. If you feel outrage at the following, then try recognizing that as a challenge to your beliefs.[2] 1) The third problem is that it accepts capitalism’s redefinition of us from citizens to consumers. By accepting this redefinition, we reduce our potential forms of resistance to consuming and not consuming. Citizens have a much wider range of available resistance tactics, including voting, not voting, running for office, pamphleting, boycotting, organizing, lobbying, protesting ... Two things we[1] generally promote contribute to this: * 'Free market' economic policy: By reducing citizens' control over the economy and businesses, and by reducing their bargaining power (i.e., via the dominance of money in elections, reduced organized labor, click-wrap agreements, etc.), we reduce people's roles to that of consumers: If you like or dislike something, all you can do is consume or not consume. * Reduction of end-user control in technology: From hosted applications to automatic updates to eliminating confidentiality to mobile devices built for consumption and not content creation to closed systems and data, we train users to passively consume rather than to control and create. Information technology, to some significant degree, establishes the Zeitgeist of our time. 2) So how, then, and especially with all the world at stake, have we come to accept these utterly insufficient responses? Climate change is putting the world at stake. How can you accept your utterly insufficient response? Whatever you are doing, it's probably utterly insufficient.[3] It's nothing new to humanity to walk open-eyed into catastrophe. To borrow the author's analogy, now you know how people in Germany could watch Hitler rise to power and people in the West could watch him start marching across Europe, all knowing the very likely result, and do nothing about it. [1] By "us" and "we", I mean what I imagine to be most HN readers. [2] For the record, I like the author's questions but don't at all agree with his solution of ending modern 'industrial' society; things weren't so great before it [3] Me too