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> Sure you can, by petitioning your government to draft laws and so on.

Ask the government to do something about it? They're allies, they're in it together.

There is no scenario where they don't take out encryption this decade. It's a top priority and big tech is going to very happily assist them. Big tech will give them what they want, they will act as an arm of tyranny assisting the government in smashing human rights, and in return they'll get to continue to expand (they'll get a light touch regulatory treatment). It now has a lot in common with how China handles their giant corporations (so long as you do what we tell you to, you get to exist and thrive), and big tech in the US looks more like a CCP apparatus by the passing day.

All forms of expression and speech will continue to be restricted more by the passing year. The government won't need to do it themselves, big tech will do the dirty work with a wink and nod. That includes all app stores, all online content and forums, all software.

So, when you can't petition your government any longer because it's hell bent on taking your liberty away, what does that leave? The War on Domestic Terrorism of course. They'll create it, spur it, and then have an excuse to crack down on their own invention (not terribly different from how they ran the war on drugs). The US will be a horrible place to live in the near future. The foreign war on terrorism, in which the US did such unbelievable vicious things to other nations, will now turn inward, and the monster will come home, rolling over human rights as it goes.



>Ask the government to do something about it? They're allies, they're in it together.

If that's how it is where you live, and you live in a democracy, you can change that.


A democracy isn't a democracy categorically, it's a democracy only if it behaves as a democracy. If elected representatives are behaving in the way they are with respect to encryption and tech anti-trust, then either it is an ineffectual, degenerate case of a democracy – and if the representatives are failing now, as they have been for at least a decade on this issue, when would throwing new ones be as effective as it needs to be? – or it is not fully a democracy.

If you want to reason from labels as if they are tautologies, here's a word for you: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anocracy

The alternative interpretation to what you propose is running for office. That's not out of the question but it's a decades-long pipeline with a lot of protections built in by convention. Outsiders are going to have difficulty until the current gen of representatives fades with age, and making headway is feasible only with the hope that the growing sphere of elite replacements are less competent behind the reigns if they decide to maintain their predecessors' policies.




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