Government might have a stranglehold on physical infrastructure and gate keep our human needs like food and shelter, but in their hubris and obsession with wealth extraction they forgot that all of us have knowledge, skills and capacity that they do not. This is the spirit that worker and union movements were based on in the late 20th century and I believe we are headed for something similar in tech and perhaps other expertise led jobs like law, medicine and science.

Corporations are getting increasingly incompetent, it’s easy to foresee down the line large corporations having to broker deals with the equivalent of guilds and to apply for licensing in order to use technology, i.e. if you are a sociopath you don’t get to use social media automation technology. Kinda like the principle that people on drugs aren’t allowed to operate heavy machinery. Perhaps the open source community will even ban large tech from using open source unless certain conditions are met, beyond just “don’t slam our servers” but into making sure there’s a match on values and legal compliances.

Happy to hear your thoughts on the matter. I’ve been mulling how to fight back for a while and this is what I’ve come up with. I highly doubt it will “get done” in my lifetime, but I also believe any real meaningful change does take an eternity and I’m happy to be one of the many metaphorical birds striking the diamond mountain of capitalism.

Australian here. It’s hard to say how anyone feels because the media and major social media have been astro turfed so hard. But it’s plain to see to everyone that neither side of politics down under is interested in changing the status quo.

I get the sense people are disillusioned and seeing through all the smoke and mirrors from all sides of politics, but it’s just leading to cynicism and disengagement rather than alternative options.

I have been wondering if maybe the path to a Star Trek future lies in peacefully tolerating and co-operating with these “authorities” as they fade into irrelevance. We can build new systems of governance peacefully, slowly and meaningfully.

I’ve submitted PRs and patches to well known projects like Drupal, three.js and Wordpress. Some of them even get merged lol… Also if I experience a problem and find an open issue I’ll add my 2c if I think it’s useful. To be honest I think in open source participating in issue comments and lodging quality tickets is as important as writing the code side of things. I have my own open source projects and thoroughly document information I think could be useful for others.

I promote FOSS in my personal and professional life where I can, and try my best to practise what I preach. Recently managed to convinced my financial counsellor from local government to look into LibreOffice which I’m quite chuffed with. They didn’t even know free software existed and are excited to tell others small businesses about using it to save money.

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I think the issue isn’t with “Digital ID” per se, but rather with another issue the article touches on which is how people end up lost as data in a vast system.

In Australia, we’ve had ongoing class action lawsuits and scandals relating to our welfare system because past governments implemented aggressive (and illegal) rules that cut payments early and even made up enormous fake debts which drove some people to suicide.

So far no criminal charges have been laid on the people who came up with these cruel ideas.