[delusional]

the "Naivety" of Geeks has less to do with "trusting the marketing" and more to do with having to navigate a society increasingly indifferent to the issues brought up.

A decade ago I ranted about Facebook to my technical friends. They all agreed that it was a terrible privacy nightmare, that eventually it would start selling that data to generate a profit, that we really ought to use something else, but in the end I had no alternative. As one of them said "If you don't have anything to hide, you have nothing to fear". I was ready with the counter, but before I could even get to the counter point he retorted "Yeah that's obviously not true, but it is the argument". At the time I didn't understand, but now I do. Fighting against these systems is meaningless for the individual. I can't stop Facebook from gobbling up all my data any more than I can dictate that the petrol in my car must be ethically sourced from Sweden.

You can't distrust your way out of Google, Amazon, and Apple storing your voice.

It was a lot easier to be a counterculture rebel when what you were counter cultural about was the driver for the printer at your research institution. When I want to pay my taxes (which I can do electronically, imagine that) I need my phone and browser and weird authentication app to work. I need them to be the ones that everybody else uses, because if I'm using some niche application, nobody is going to help me when it breaks. When an important email doesn't arrive in my mailbox, the sender isn't going to be understanding that I want my mail on protonmail that for some reason has a technical problem that day. He's going to ask me why I'm being difficult.