[j1vms]

> It feels like there's no real goal or direction of the protest except to exist

Reading this makes me think a very little bit of the Paris Commune [0], well in its early days perhaps.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paris_Commune

[HNcantBtrustd]

In the last 2000 years, much of human progress came in the form of freedom.

In recent times it seems there is a pushback towards less.

[gnulinux]

This is absolutely not true, only this decade we've been in a momentum for worldwide progress for LGBT rights, many states now have more liberal drug laws. Moreover, I cannot think of one thing that we were free to do a few decades ago and we're restricted to do now. There is an alarmist rhetoric in libertarian community (especially r/libertarian et al) that the West is keep getting more authoritarian, whereas the fact is it's always getting more and more liberal. Do you have an concrete examples maybe?

[coldtea]

>Moreover, I cannot think of one thing that we were free to do a few decades ago and we're restricted to do now.

Fly abroad without getting our crotches checked?

Walk around the city without companies/governments tracking our location?

Less surveillance in everything?

Don't have corporations police what we can and cannot say on this era's popular platforms (doesn't matter if we can still open a personal blog in 2019, since those are not where the discussion is today - whereas they were in the early 00s, and they did matter back then).

Have a mainstream without moral panics? We used to have the easily triggered persons of the right back in the day, now we have the same of the left, but there was a point (late 60s/early 70s) where people could be more radical than today.

Buy a program without a subscription and use it for the next 10 years or so the same price you know pay for 1 to 3 years of use! (Like people are still using ancient Photoshop in Windows today, or how people like RR Martin still use something like Wordstar 20+ years after its last release -- with subscriptions it would be impossible).

Widespread free sharing of commercial music, films etc like in late 90s/early 00s without all major outlets being crushed like they are being now?

Tons of government regulations (from building codes, to "food safety" BS meant to crush smaller producers) that affect every aspect of business and everyday life, for things that people could freely do 20-30-50 years ago...

[lostlogin]

Here are some that I think are getting worse.

Tracking of your data and recording of what you have done. It seems many governments have access to this data.

Recording of biometric data by governments

Common methods of communication are less private now than previously and a a record is kept. Obviously communication is now way easier, but that has had a price.

Media is more concentrated in the hands of fewer companies and their independence is questionable. There are dark patterns here with state actors involved.

The perverse way adverts are tracking and recording. This isn’t fitting with a traditional definition of ‘authoritarian’, but it’s somewhere bad on that continuum.

A larger portion of money is held by a very small controlling group.

National firewalls and restriction of access to certain data is becoming increasingly acceptable.

[whatshisface]

Airports are one great example. So are government regulations, which with a few exceptions tend to get more expansive over time.