In the time of Plato, only the most educated could read and write. So if you could do both, I think your odds of being remembered had almost as much to do with writing good quality as it did with being lucky enough for your writing to survive centuries.
I’m afraid I disagree here. This line of thinking might lead some people to targeting Google engineers for harassment, doxxing, etc. We’re better than that, I hope. Instead, we need to call on governments to hit Google harder than they hit Microsoft over Internet Explorer. Back then, there were talks of forcing Microsoft to split off IE as a separate company, we need to make Google do the same with Chrome, and find some way to compel them to stop all browser development altogether. We have antitrust laws, we just aren’t using them.
I am by no means saying we should passively hope that things will work out. What I am saying is that we have no reason to be defeatist. In the same time that we’ve seen aggressive pushes for a more locked down internet, we’ve seen dozens of open source projects to fight back.
They do. The majority of Mozilla’s funding is from Google. That said, they’re still our best hope. I’m sure Firefox has constant internal conversations about how to handle their relationship with Google, and they probably have standing offers from many others to switch to a different search engine.
Better yet, if everyone is wearing these, then everyone can see and hear everyone else as the people they approve of. You could hold a conversation with someone thinking they’re a Democrat while they think you’re a Republican, and both would walk away glad to have found a like-minded person.