[EA-3167]

> Sure you can refuse to use Facebook and Glassdoor and Amazon and Google account authentication, but then you might as well grow a beard, puton some rags and go live in the woods as a hermit.

This is a bizarrely extreme form of black and white thinking, and not one I understand. Most of what we do in life isn't about changing the world, it's about managing our experience of it.

Few people are deluded enough or so engaged with self-love that they think their ideas and behavior are world-changing.

[salawat]

>Few people are deluded enough or so engaged with self-love that they think their ideas and behavior are world-changing.

...And everyone walking around with an attitude like that is exactly why the world is as shitty as it is. The world is the sum of all of us. Think better of yourself and your time, and do everything you can to make life harder for those that would try to sell you on cheapening it, and you just might make the world a better place for everyone.

[EA-3167]

That's a remarkably moralistic and simplistic view that ignores the realities and mechanics of large-scale power. Simply LARPing as though we're world-changing with our banal existence isn't helpful, it's pure self-indulgence.

Unless you're very wealthy, very violent, or very committed to a cause (often to the point of entering politics or raising/moving money) your individual contribution is negligible.

[Mizoguchi]

Individual contributions may be negligible at a large scale in the short term but they have the potential for global impact if you give them enough time, not talking about a few years but generations.

An uneducated mechanic and his wife decide to give an unwanted child a home, dad builds a workbench for his son and teaches him how to use tools to break, fix and build things, inadvertently setting in motion the beginning of Apple.

Sure, there were other events Jobs parents had absolutely no control over, like those that led Bill Fernandez to the same school as Jobs.

But it is undeniable that without Paul and Clara Jobs adopting Steve there would be no Apple and the world would look completely different today.

So through our small, individual contributions we can definitely nudge the world to follow a particular direction, and if enough people do it, it is expected that once in a while one of us actually ends up changing the world.

[Yujf]

You don't have to change the world, but if no one tries to change things that are bad, they will not change.

So don't have a defeatist attitude all the time, but once in a while try to actually have an impact. We will all be much better for it.

[EA-3167]

There's a difference between being defeatist and going around thinking that your malicious compliance is somehow fixing broken things.

[bheadmaster]

There is power in avoiding services when many people do it.