[somenameforme]

Amish 2.0?

I realize this sounds out there, but I'm not entirely joking. I feel there is a significant subset of all people that are not particularly happy with the direction of society at large. And the great thing about places like the US is that you're free to develop your own little sub-societies. There's no reason a group of like-minded people could not work to develop a technologically embracing society, but one that aims to focus more on decentralization, and utilizing digitization as a convenience rather than a necessity.

Think about something like a 'Google Smart City' except from an entirely different ideological foundation, such that the entire project doesn't sound like something out of Black Mirror. The reason this would be beneficial as a social project, instead of the vastly more viable independent one, is that a lot of tech is generally seen as undesirable, certainly in certain contexts (like smartphones at school), yet it spreads virally making its adoption a defacto necessity. Get rid of the virality and you could create a better life, and a better situation, for many people.

[AnthonyMouse]

That actually seems like an interesting project.

Get a bunch of hackers and DIY small farm folks etc. to move to the same place with the goal of disentangling themselves from megacorps. To begin with it increases the local concentration of people who want that and then causes local businesses and agencies to start serving their needs better because they're a higher proportion of the local population. And it puts the people so inclined in closer proximity to each other which improves coordination.

If you got enough of them you could even affect local ordinances and then e.g. pass strong right to repair laws or laws against businesses requiring you to use one of the major phone platforms. How many localities would need a law against remote attestation before companies would have to stop using it against people?