> Presumably, if it's true, we can point towards examples of it, and try to quantify it.
I never went after concrete examples because, like I said, that's a matter for another discussion. But we do have very easy to find examples with a very prevalent topic: climate change.
Protests, complaints, endless coverage of it and yet... no real change. Companies now paying "carbon offsets" that have been multiple times proven to be complete bullshit, targets for emission reduction keep getting postponed and so much more that we can absolutely quantify if we want to. But it simply won't happen because it's not profitable.
> Except we're seeing the counter case right here, right now?
I suppose you're hopeful this will actually result in something. I'm not so sure, unfortunately. Now it's news, in a week nobody will remember. In the end, let's no forget Meta got what they wanted: the research was stifled and now other researchers know: here lie dragons.
We have another gigantic example: Snowden literally imploded his life to get all that information out. We know so much more thanks to his sacrifice and yet what has changed? Do we now not worry that we're all spied on because this was exposed? Are we convinced the tech giants don't have backdoors to the government anymore?
Information is meaningless if we cannot act on it.
> if the average person doesn't and that means nothing happens, that's not a failure of the system, that's it working as expected
If the system is designed to allow corporations and governments to control the average person, ensuring they don't care about anything meaningful, that's a very, very bad system in my book.
Socrates had issues with how democracy was built exactly because it relies on the population being educated to work. If we simply ignore that - like we do today - we end up with our current situation: the majority of people don't care and the rich and powerful get to fuck them over for profit.
You keep everyone poor and dumb, and they'll worry about surviving. Never about climate change, corruption, privacy, etc.
I simply cannot comprehend how we as a society can look at this and say: that's working as expected and I'm fine with it. [insert "this is fine" dog picture]
> No, the public has absolute control, through petitioning for legislature and holding their representatives to account for acting, or not. Failure to exercise power is not the same as lack of power, even if it appears the same.
Sorry but I have to call bullshit here. The public cannot purchase lobbyists to legally bribe legislators to do whatever they want (including introducing legislation they provide to them). I can send thousands of emails to my representatives (or whatever other legal way of pressuring them) and it won't change anything. We've seen plenty of cases where even when the public does not agree with legislature, a few companies can still get what they want because they simply have much more power.
You are right in the sense that, if we did rebel, we could actually exercise our only real power. But voting and trying to convince politicians to "do the right thing" simply does not work. The system is not designed to work for the people, it's designed to work for whoever has power. At some point, the imbalance wasn't this great and we did use our power. But it was always through bloodshed and revolt that we got real change.
How many more outrageous bills have to pass despite public outcry to convince us that the system is broken?
> There are many changes that happen all the time, but the system is also slow, which in some ways is a feature and some ways a problem.
I can partially agree here. By nature of being slow it does in fact prevent some very bad decisions from happening over night. However we've seen with COVID and other recent events how that slowness can be literally the death of us.
There has to be flexibility when we require drastic changes and there simply isn't. As a result people keep dying - and many more will die - because it's simply not profitable to do what's necessary.
Ultimately it's not really the speed that's the issue though (although it worsens crises), but a complete misalignment on the objective. The system is built to increase profits, not to improve human life. Changes that improve human life are merely coincidences in pursuit of profit. So even if the system is slowly working, it's working towards a goal that's almost always orthogonal to what society needs.
Lastly, even though we clearly have very different views, I appreciate your thoughts and keeping it civil. I've had many of these conversations here where it devolved into personal attacks or worse, so: thank you.