This kind of apathic statement is not very useful.
By your logic, we should not care about climate change either.
"People don't care about privacy" doesn't mean that regulators and the tech community should not lead a charge.
By your logic, we should not care about climate change either.
"People don't care about privacy" doesn't mean that regulators and the tech community should not lead a charge.
Same can be said about climate change. Sure they worry and complain, but when pointing out concrete measures they can take, basically nobody does.
Complaining is easy.
Except for corporations who want to exploit us to no end. I’m sure they love this type of defeatist attitude. There’s no one easier to take advantage of than someone who confirms they have given up and won’t fight back.
More importantly though, those that do care should do as much as they're willing to do to help avoid making it worse.
For some that means choosing to only buy products made with natural materials, growing/raising their own food, drinking rain water, etc. For others that means not using plastic straws.
There's no perfect answer and no one really knows what will happen in the future or how to best change it. Regulators fall into this camp too, they don't know the future and they can't accurately predict precisely what must be don't. Expecting this of them is a fools errand and demanding everyone do what they say is oppressive at best.
It will always work. The opportunity to blame your neighbor for climate change for not being as conscientious as you is the archetype of a liberal wedge issue. You can yell at them on social media. But regulate my company? Akshualy you're killing jobs?
It sounds like you may take more issue with the busy work we're all given. Is the problem really that the government isn't regulating problems away, or that people are kept so busy and distracted that they can't make their own decisions?
We didn't clean up our water by asking people to stop buying lightbulbs from the factory that dumped mercury directly into the river - we made it illegal for the company to do so, and we were successful.
What are we even doing here with capitalism, democracy, etc if we don't generally trust people to make their own decisions?
With regards specifically to lightbulb factories dumping mercury - the problem is often that the people in the area have no power to legally handle it themselves. Companies get to hide behind expensive lawyers, lobbyists, and often regulations themselves to avoid repercussions.
We often can get just as far by removing legal protections for companies rather than further centralizing power and authority to a few people we trust to do the right thing.
Laws are the primary mechanism by which democracy safeguards threatened community resources. You may be longing for an anarcho-capitalist society, but don't expect negative externalities to ever be priced in.