I hear you, but there’s a material difference between
if I protest, I could lose my job, family healthcare, and roof over my head
I don’t want to protest because it’s inconvenient/discomforting.
There’s also a matter of critical mass. We’ve had it drilled in our head that unions are bad precisely to discourage group action. If I protest our use of AI at work, or if I want to raise a complaint against the local government, and I’m alone? That will 100% end with severe personal repercussions. If my team of 5 walk out, that’s harder to fire all of us, but absolutely doable.
If the entire division walks out, then we have some change leverage.
Now scale this out to the ~340M Americans, and you can see the problem.
Also, critical mass affects the area of effect - if utah loses their shit over something, how does that impact New York? Missouri? Answer, not really at all.
So you need something that will get a critical mass of 340M people, across 3.1M sq miles (8M square kilometers). Can that happen? Sure.
I hear you, but there’s a material difference between
There’s also a matter of critical mass. We’ve had it drilled in our head that unions are bad precisely to discourage group action. If I protest our use of AI at work, or if I want to raise a complaint against the local government, and I’m alone? That will 100% end with severe personal repercussions. If my team of 5 walk out, that’s harder to fire all of us, but absolutely doable.
If the entire division walks out, then we have some change leverage.
Now scale this out to the ~340M Americans, and you can see the problem.
Also, critical mass affects the area of effect - if utah loses their shit over something, how does that impact New York? Missouri? Answer, not really at all.
So you need something that will get a critical mass of 340M people, across 3.1M sq miles (8M square kilometers). Can that happen? Sure.
Sure it can.