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Comment by johncolanduoni | Hacker News Reader

Powerful people figured out how to make suspicion work for them long ago. You have every right to be unconditionally suspicious, but it’s not a good way of accomplishing any change. Also their feelings are not hurt by what you or I think, they don’t care.

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> Powerful people figured out how to make suspicion work for them long ago. You have every right to be unconditionally suspicious, but it’s not a good way of accomplishing any change.

How does one accomplish change? Even being a martyr doesn't get traction. As far as I can tell, you need to already be powerful. Nobody lets you into that group if you're not aligned with said group.

Protests (at least in their current form) don't work. Trying to assassinate someone doesn't move the needle (also not the play, I don't support murder), vocal grassroots leaders are no longer relevant at all, if they ever were.

How does one accomplish any change?

Not by trading the same suspicions on the internet with fellow true believers over and over again, I think the past 10 years have proven that pretty conclusively. Maybe people should try some of the things previous social movements did, seemed to work pretty well even against a much more uniform media environment and a stronger hostile social consensus.

Protests don’t immediately solve everything, but I think looking at 2026 and concluding they don’t move the needle at all is a weird take. There are recent examples of protest movements (especially long-term ones) working all over the world.

I said assassinations don’t move the needle. Protests just give people the warm fuzzies. They don’t change anything. Tell me what has changed with all of the no kings protests? How well did it go for Iran when they protested?

The onus is on you to prove your point, not me to disprove it.

I’m not asking you to prove my point, but I think you’re being myopic.

* Vikor Orban was just ousted by a popular protest movement. This took years due to structural electoral issues but it did work eventually. And it wouldn’t if the people opposing him gave up because they didn’t change anything right away.

* The US ICE protests (and the federal government’s insane overreaction to them) let to the head of DHS being fired and a quantifiable drop in ICE activity (e.g. arrests and number of people currently detained).

* Nepal’s protests last year led to the resignation of the prime minister and a resounding electoral victory this year for their opponents.

Protests aren’t magic win buttons, especially because even the people protesting don’t fully agree on exactly what “winning” looks like. But they accomplish more than acting out your emotions on the internet.

Become mighty rich too first, and then accomplish change.

> Also their feelings are not hurt by what you or I think, they don’t care.

I would have agreed with this like 15 years ago, but the very existence of Twitter (and the acquisition saga) proves this to not be true.

Dario Amodei is not Elon Musk. Most powerful people do not internalize the emotions of others (though obviously some do). If you think powerful people are disproportionately sociopaths, you either agree with me or are not using the word correctly.

> Also their feelings are not hurt by what you or I think, they don’t care.

Definitely not true, they tend to care more than most.

They generally care about what powerful/influential people think. I’m not powerful or influential, but I guess maybe the person I was talking to is. If so I apologize for the miscommunication.

They care. They are very sensitive to their public image and most cannot tolerate criticism or disapproval.

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