This is a sensible, appropriate response a thread talking about the impact of network effects and systemic barriers. Literally the thing I was just explaining was how individual action can and will not fix the issue. Withdrawing from the social fabric will not fix it. https://twitter.com/v3ritas1337/status/1199453323461574656

It's not just the suggestion that clearly if this mattered, you'd accept any degree of loss to social ties as an acceptable cost, nor is it the failure to understand that this loss is actually real and meaningful and very close to unavoidable in many contexts.

The biggest problem here is the notion that individual responsibility, rather than collective, societal action, is the answer. This is the same argument the oil companies make around climate change — stop using plastic straws. Personal choice cannot fix infrastructural failure.

It's just as disingenuous here as with Big Oil, because in both cases, the goal is to undermine the idea of coercive collective action. Big Oil doesn't like it because profits. Libertarians don't like it because they don't want to be part of society.

The California Ideology — the mindset that to this day is core to the way the Internet as infrastructure (and much of hacker culture) thinks — does not accept the idea of social responsibility, nor of any meaningful collective constraint on individual action, regardless of cost.

We can talk about what "coercion" is and who's doing it — I'm not particularly a statist — but the idea that you can have planetary social infrastructure where change agency over that infrastructure is in the hands of a few folks without coercive accountability on how it's used..

...well, it's a fantasy, basically. A utopian dream. The California Ideology is great when you're on top — get in, fucker, we're making the future here, and you'd better like it.

This, as much as capitalism, is the cancer, and the problem with these folks is they can't imagine not being on top.