They don't have to play the game. It would lead to less profits, sure. But we're talking about companies already sitting on tens of billions of unused cash.

> I don't blame them as such.

I do! Have you read Timothy Snyder yet? He warns that most of the dictator's power is granted willingly. That's what this is, so to the extent you believe they are blameless, their acquiescence is in real terms making it so much worse:

  "Do not obey in advance. Most of the power of authoritarianism is freely given. In times like these, individuals think ahead about what a more repressive government will want, and then offer themselves without being asked. A citizen who adapts in this way is teaching power what it can do." -- Timothy Snyder, On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century

With great power comes great responsibility. Yet somehow we've created a society in America where power comes with no responsibility at all except to enrich one's self and shareholders. Zero responsibility to the Constitution and to the country which gave them the necessary workforce, marketplace, rule of law, military, courts, patent protection, police, schools, universities, research funding, land, roads, shipping lanes, trade deals, political stability, etc. to come to fruition. Once you're rich enough, apparently it's fine to cast all our institutions into the sea, because if not you might have a rough quarter, or maybe you won't get that merger approved. It's just playing the game, who can blame them?

Meanwhile, just to be clear about the game being played, food stamps are set to expire for 40 million people this week, and healthcare premiums are set to double in just a few months. I don't believe tech corporations have any plans to help Americans with their food and healthcare needs, despite being keen to chip in for the ballroom gilding.

I'm watching videos of ICE kidnapping a woman and her kids while shes in their school, to be brought to god knows where, that would not look out of place in the 1930s.

When you have a full time secret police that wanders the streets kidnapping people, yeah that has a chilling effect, people want to keep their heads down.

And its tricky, because they will ignore the huge protests, and they want some sort of armed or civil disobedience when it comes to their secret police because they are looking for excuses to label them Antifa terrorists and escalate.

I don't see the obvious play here for Americans looking to fight this. Maybe the Midterms could help, maybe if enough local action, maybe the US to too big to cow like that, maybe the blue states have enough independence to survive the federal overreach, maybe Trump dies and MAGA dies with him.

> you have to play the game and I don't blame them as such.

Not to Godwin the thread, but that is exactly what the executives at IBM thought about their European subsidiary Dehomag in the 1930s. Soon they were custom building machines that organized the logistics of the Holocaust.

They got away with it and kept all the profits and were exempted at Nuremberg, for the same reason as all the rocket scientists: America needed the tech.

Kind of like how we're building surveillance software and social media analytics. The future is starting to look like being hung with your social media posts and hunted using everyone's Ring cameras.