Very true, and I often do.

What I find so troubling is why more people don't complain more often, we need sufficient complainers to reach critical mass and so often that's not the case. Take another such matter - the unreasonableness and unfairness of current international copyright law. It is this way and will likely remain so for a long time simply—as Cory Doctorow who regularly writes on such matters says 'the whingers and complainers are far too few in number to make any difference, they're just irrelevant noise in the political debate [note: that's my phraseology of his actual quote]. The fact is the average person couldn't give a damn about copyright law.

Same goes for many other important issues, especially surveillance capitalism! Yes, here many are aware of the fact and they actually care about it but in the yin and yang battle between surveillance capitalism and users' worry that they're under surveillance and the 'good feelings' generated by Google's and Facebook's 'free' apps then every time those apps win out by miles!

Correct, these surveillance capitalism bastards use their sophisticated knowledge of human psychology to ensure that the balance is always in their favor. (Remember, this is an age-old trick, the emperor Vespasian built the Colosseum to distract the minds of Roman citizens from local troubles.)

Tragically, our governments have done precious little to correct the problem - and again much of that can be put down to the millions of dollars Big Tech spends on lobbying governments. We citizens are seemingly always on the the losing end when big money is involved.

...But as an individual you can do something about it. Your efforts may be small and they might only benefit you but they're not nought. Only yesterday in reply to the HN story Making Quieter Technology I wrote a badly-written long-winded reply† to show how one could tackle the problem of surveillance capitalism: https://news.ycombinator.com/context?id=32383493. Bad it may be but my efforts count for something more than just zero.

...the pile with the various environmental apocalypses and global resurgence of authoritarianism.

Can't agree more. For me, the resurgence of authoritarianism is the more important of the two, for without citizen autonomy we've little or no control over environmental apocalypses let alone the many other existing worldwide problems; in effect authoritarianism neuters us.

Depressing yes, but every little tweak helps (especially so if everyone's doing it).

D:< & >:(

__

† Yes, my reply was long because it included specific actions but it was not long enough to do a good job, a blog would have been a better approach. Unfortunately, as good as 'HN comments' is, it isn't an ideal place to do this.