Yuuuup. The state and capitalists collude against the working class. Neither one nor the other can ever be trusted to put the interests of workers first, though they will each make empty promises to do so. Then they will privilege the ruling class every time.

I despise that I have to use this OS at work. I would never run windows on my own computer again. Its just insanity. Next they’ll require a credit card to make a Microsoft account.

Makes sense. Crazy what they can get away with.

Not directly related to post but. The steam sale prices are honestly ridiculous. Barely even discounted. Like 30% off games that are over 5 years old.

I agree that collective action is our strongest pressure against them and it does work.

I do not think a boycott itself is likely to reverse Apple’s removal of the app. I also think it makes more sense for the app to become available from a web browser, or some other avenue that circumvents the need for Apple’s approval in the first place.

I also believe that collective action in this circumstance is better spent on ICE itself, which would be more effective (its the reason the US government wants Apple to remove the app in the first place) and more direct to fascist power.

I’m not sure why you’re taking such an aggressive / dismissive tone towards me. Did your comment really warrant a breakdown of possible forms of collective action? It never really seemed you were interested in a nuanced discussion in the first place.

I think collective action in this circumstance is better spent on directly obstructing ICE operations. The developers of the app would be better served by making their project accessible in browser, and self hosted so as to prevent further attempts to make it inaccessible. Group collective action should be focused on demonstration and obstruction of the root of the problem, ICE itself. How you go about the depends a lot on when/where but there are a lot of ways to obstruct their operations.

Ive never personally spent money on any kind of Apple device. I would certainly encourage others not to as well, a thing I was already doing. But I think focusing on Apple as the root problem here is a mistake in the first place.

There are a lot of other ways to apply pressure besides boycotts.

?

I dont understand why recommending other forms of collective action makes me cynical.

I wasnt gatekeeping it. Just pointing out how ultimately ineffective it is in creating meaningful change.

Can you show me where I said to do nothing? Or is boycotting the only form of collective action you’re aware of?

Yes, as opposed to spending money at another capitalist institution that will inevitably do the same thing, which is somehow not a subservient take.

There are a lot of other ways to apply pressure besides boycotts. I dont think a boycott would ever work against Apple over this.

Jimmy Kimmel made Disney a lot of money. They had to choose between pressure from the US government, and losing a popular source of revenue along with the vast amount of liberals who swore them off. Jimmy Kimmel was not a real institutional threat to the US government. So the US government did not have a very strong incentive to continuously push for him being taken down, and Disney had a lot of incentive to keep him around.

An app that targets fascists makes Apple no money. The US government faces the loss (or rendering ineffective) of their fascist police force. Both sides therefore face a huge amount of pressure to have the app taken down. It would have to be a gigantic part of their profit margin to warrant any pushback from Apple. I’d be very, very surprised to hear that this change is ever overturned through a boycott.

Do you really think this situation is comparable in any way to Jimmy Kimmel? I really don’t. Even if it were, nowhere near that many Apple customers care whether or not the app that targets fascist militias is on the app store or not.

Oh we are way passed the point where “voting with your dollar” means literally anything. These billionaires are making more money than they ever have in human history. They have literally turned all of society across large swaths of the world into a gigantic personal capital generator. It makes literally not a single difference if all of us here boycotted them or not. It’s meaningless.

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Switching to Linux made me like computers again. Switching to Hyprland made me love computers again.

I think it’s more like a response to the way one of these things is given a disproportionate amount of time and attention. We’re all expected to micromanage every aspect of our lives to diminish our comparatively miniscule impact of personal choice while the state and the ruling class just do whatever the fuck they want actively slaughtering the environment for fun.

You know what would help me minimize my carbon footprint a lot? Public transportation. A renewable energy grid. Affordable food created along sustainable and environmentally conscious supply chains. Electronics and clothing that is manufactured with long term use, maintenance, and recyclability in mind.

Those things are all out of my reach to implement. Me properly sorting my recyclables (which i do) is such a minor impact compared with those other things. Any offsetting done by proper recycling is immediately undone the moment i step into a grocery store, having driven there in my car for lack of public transportation, and buy food that was wastefully produced and transported to my grocery store via fossil fuel based energy.

The majority of our time and energy should be going into fighting back against the state and the ruling class who refuse to structure society around environmental impact, not on almost the almost irrelevant impact of individual workers. We can and should promote recycling, but we can hammer home that point when our whole society isn’t top down engineered with total indifference to the environment.

I think we live in a time period where seizing/searching phones doesn’t need the physical device to be present. They just have to ask Google and Meta to do it for them. Different than literally combing through the memory on the device, but not much. It’s why FOSS and selfhosting matters so much. What Google and Meta don’t have, they can’t just take.

That being said I would bring a burner if I went to the US. Lord knows I have said more than my fair share of critical things about the US government lol

And you said it on a post about China spying on its citizens. I didn’t bring up an unrelated fact or something.

I struggle to think how any nation that conducts mass surveillance on that level is not authoritarian, nor how like. A country could conduct mass surveillance and just do nothing with that information? Like its not like the UK, for example, is just spying on its citizens just for fun. Mass surveillance has an intention of manipulation behind it. If it was of no consequence they wouldn’t do it.

That’s why the example of the JD Vance meme, while absolutely horrifying, just seems like a strange place to draw the line and not like. Drawing it at mass surveillance in the first place. America should already have been included in “Don’t go to authoritarian countries” once it came out they were conducting surveillance in this way, which was long before we both were born (most likely, idk how old you are).

Thats a very strange place to draw a line in the sand when they were literally exposed wire tapping essentially the entire population of the country and mass harvesting private data.