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The final defense is always to change the government (one way or another). When we need to resort to technical mean we have lost.

True, I always wonder how that would actually play out.

The geeks would likely be the elite class force to tumble it if it ever became necassary I reckon.

>That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.

The opposite is true.

By this you mean that the first line of defense should be to change the government, correct? If so, I'm pretty sure you're right. Technical solutions to social/governmental problems seem like they're making those problems worse due to actively rechanneling energy that could be used for awareness/activism into technical workarounds.

voting is just a suggestion from a slave to the master

I completely agree with you, and it's strange to see you downvoted on a technical forum

Technology is what has always precipitated political change

Which technology caused the French revolution?

The printing press and the guillotine.

Before that they didn't know how to kill people?

Yes. Before that they didn't know how to kill people.

So the guillotine (15th century [1]) and printing press (invented in 1440) [2] precipitated the French Revolution (1789)[3]?

It’s a theory for sure.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guillotine

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Printing_press

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/French_Revolution

Would-be revolutionaries need secure, reliable comms even more than the average person.

PGP

Good for protecting the message itself, but it does nothing for metadata. These days the metadata is what kills you. (Who talks to whom, when, and how often reveals enough to press the drone missile button, apparently.)

OpenPGP + SMTP as a starting point as email can reach many and Thunderbird makes OpenPGP happy clicky simple. The body includes instructions for the E2EE chat servers to use. Metadata trail ends there. Other circles of friends are joined in by other means. E2EE ejabberd (OTR+PGP+OMEMO) servers switched up after everyone is on the first outer layer of chat servers. Old servers are wiped. Of course all of this assumes nobody is silly enough to use a cell phone or all of this is futile. Everyone is using a laptop they paid cash for and a clean install of a generic minimal install of Linux and Coreboot running a script to make everything ephemeral and the OS nearly immutable. No security distros as they have all been infiltrated, just a vanilla simple Linux and a script.

what...?

PGP is not a very effective software suite for encrypting actual messages people want to send to other people, because it's a decades-old tool designed for email workflows that arguably never worked particularly well and is not well-suited to how people want to communicate today. Chat apps like Signal and WhatsApp that include end to end encryption as a matter of course are encrypting far more messages between humans than PGP for emails ever did.

that would be illegal in this hypothetical future

comms, travel, banking. Exactly why all the privatization of this stuff has top priority for the current administration. They're making their own government.

Change the governance. Both red, blue and the corporate sides are supportive of this.

I think everyone (especially young gen) should absolutely master the offensive hacking skills.

I will certainly teach my kids everything I know about exploiting and destroying enemy computer systems.

This is the equivalent of the 2nd Amendment, but for the Internet space. You should absolutely be able to inspect, disassemble, debug, everything you can in a computer system and have the knowledge to knock it down, if it (or its owner) starts misbehaving.

Literally every single problem with computer system can be solved if the entire population, armed with simple Kali Linux, decides to strike back against the tyranny of the government

Out of the kids (tweens+) I know because of my kids NONE is interested in anything even remotely adjacent to it. They wouldn't be able to troubleshoot a dns issue.

Or even, say, AI. They know about "chatbots" and "generating images" or "adding effects". Herein ends the story.

You can't teach someone this sort of skills if they like staying ignorant.

You can already do this, it’s called reticulum.

Essentially it’s encrypted internet/networking over any type of network including LoRa.

Issue is the size of the community and linking up to actually serve internet or surface public services there.

I expect the government will require ISPs to only allow connection from approved operating systems that only allow installation of approved apps so we can't do this. Not in the short term, but eventually.

I don't think there's some magical technical trick that lets you do an end run around politics.

Oh, there is.

It was invented by China in the 10th century.

Violence is a form of politics and always has been. Whether that be violence from the state to the people or vice versa.

What was that?

gunpowder.

"War is politics by other means" is the one line of Clausewitz everyone can quote.

Trusted IPSec tunnels to form your own trusted internet of peers/friends within the internet. It's all just 'a LAN' then. I dunno how well that scales, but it's a lot easier than trying to sort out radio shenanigans (which in my experience are actually regularly enforced by FCC/your local equivalents).

That's been done a few times with Tinc (open source VPN) [1][2]. It's great until the group includes one bad apple. All it takes is one person with low impulse control, low opsec to bring the whole thing down. Some hacker groups did this some time ago.

[1] - https://www.tinc-vpn.org/

[2] - https://www.linode.com/docs/guides/how-to-set-up-tinc-peer-t...

That's just the technical problem. It can be solved.

Including an untrustworthy person is a political problem actually

> because for once in the history of civilization, we'd be fighting for our own right and not some elite group's right. I hope I am not alone in this line of thinking

They depoliticized people to this degree that they fantasize of joining the a-political resistance movement, its kind of sad. This isn't meant as an insult, you should be angry that you live in a society that left you politically oblivious. Like no dude, people fought against power all the time, the people who you listen to just told you that all that do are dangerous politicized radicals or terrorists. Find who is punching UP, then get a political education in that direction.

No revolution in history has ever succeeded without the support of an alternate group of elites who replace the current elites if the revolution succeeds...

and if these elites are better aligned with you, siding with them is better than doing nothing

As suggested by a sibling comment, more often than not, those punching up are planning to replace the current elites with themselves, or a worse system. Thankfully, the opposition is not a homogeneous group, so use critical thinking to discard terrible options.

100% with you, I don't understand that people feel they have privacy in their house but not on the internet. Those people just don't understand how humans work and how we get better as a species.

I will forever keep trying to communicate without anyone else being able to read it. You can't ban my ability to use math to encrypt things. Still, the thought police keeps popping up. They can drag me to jail. I am a good person, a father, but my thoughts are my own. (just kidding, I'll give up all my s* when they actually drag me away from my family, but maybe I'll let them drag me for some meters for the show, to make a point, and hope people are filming it.)

There are things like Ham radio and meshtastic (uses lora). It's all slow of course (atm).

If at any point your counter-governmental action actually threatens to take some share of power away from the government, they will swiftly and quietly deal with you (they have about 1000 ways to track you, and AI reduces the cost of tracking greatly). If you are irrelevant you will mostly be ignored.

By the way, I'm sure that they are aware of all this privacy-first counter-tracking sentiment from certain communities, and are actively working to subvert it.

If and only if you give up, you forfeit and oouse.

Self-destruct drones with mesh node transmitters? Radiowave reflectors placed at strategic spots blended with the surroundings? IR multicast transmitters?

Or... use a protocol that hides packets in Minecraft traffic with out-of-band control through steganographic Discord audio.

It's really slow, but its private.

How do you run that program if it's not on the app store and you can only run programs from the app store?

Compliance is much easier though.

You want access to Fable? Show us your ID.

As much as I am completely against this in spirit, all that is needed is restricted access to frontier models and then it just a question of how do you want to see my papers sir?

You would be breaking numerous laws, your transmitters would be removed quickly, you would be out thousands of dollars in equipment, and no one would be on your network anyway. You would almost certainly go to jail if you tried this.

Not that quickly. Tracking down a low-power transmitter in an urban core is technically feasible but a lot of work. Police don't like doing work.

The police? Wouldn't that be the FCC?

Yes the FCC. Here [1] were their recent enforcement actions in April 2026 and in May 2026 [2].

[1] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QeMjMlHpus8

[2] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xFutq5wyYcI

This one happens quickly.

Have you ever actually read all the laws? It's functionally impossible to survive without breaking laws.

There’s a difference between violating a dozen obscure laws on a daily basis that never get enforced and operating an unlicensed radio broadcast. See what happens if you try it. The FCC does not mess around.

The final defense is to stop having children. Then there's no one to think of.

Then we are the last generation and nothing matters. Sad, isn't it? I'm trying not to cry.

You know, there's an argument that if your soul/consciousness is occupying a randomly selected body (whatever that means - don't take it too literally) you'd expect to be occupying a body during the time when there are the most human bodies to occupy. 6% of all humans who were ever alive so far are alive right now.

It's not really rigorous because some consciousness has to occupy this body and that consciousness would make the same argument, but it's a weak inkling of an argument that the future probably has less humans than the present.

It doesn't imply we're the last generation. The last generation to live like this maybe, but not the last. It seems somewhat clear that modern society is incompatible with humanity to a degree. I think in the all it means humanity regresses to the mean, the population drastically shrinks and people live much simpler lives.

People are already doing that lmao and the general population is so apathetic that they simply don't care cheap flights and buying crap from Temu will cook us to death, they don't care that late stage capitalism has made it harder and harder for people to have families. Even if the replacement rate is magically fixed tomorrow there's still gonna be a long gap and hard times ahead.

It's still far off but I wouldn't be surprised if these were the earliest signs of societal collapse. It does seem impossible to avoid, going in cycles.

Collapse happens slowly, and then all at once. I assume humanity will eventually go through a "regression to the mean" and the collapsed birth rate is the pendulum gearing up to swing in that direction at full force.

… and over time you find you have become an ISP for child p*rn distributors, and that your only choice is whether you want to know it or not (Auschwitz guards recommend the second option, however that’s not available for unbroken human beings).

Yes, Mr. Market will pay you handsomely for helping someone anonymously stream a torture of kidnapped child.

No, as a society, we decided we don't want that to happen even though it is technically possible.

There are horrible people, and they are drawn as moths to any oblivious operator willing to close his eyes (sorry, wanted to say "use e2e encryption" of course).