I’ll admit that chalking it up to defeatism is a stretch, but it’s not too far in my opinion. It’s the admission that the “machines” (though it’s really just big tech companies with a vested interest in as much data as possible so that they can sell it one way or another for profit) have already won and there’s not only no point in struggling against it, you get something out of it. I don’t necessarily agree with the gun analogy as I find it difficult to distinguish that from a threat of your life, but I see where you’re coming from: the easy path towards what most people current perceive as a modern life of tech is built in a way that pushes people into line as products, by enticing them with a “service” and taking advantage of their FOMO, and all other ways are either too much work or too technical for the common person.
When these services that people have come to rely on gets enshittified, these people would then just shrug and say “well what can you do,” maybe send some angry message somewhere into the aether and continue with the service, continuing to be a milk cow.
For myself, I see privacy as a tool towards encouraging a healthier variety in the ecosystem. It is a way to attain at least some healthy level of anonymity, as you would walking down streets in different parts of the world, so that I do not have to constantly maintain a single, outward personality everywhere I go. Supporting privacy is my way of saying I don’t like how many big tech business works, by essentially exploiting human nature and stepping all over it. That IS ideological; I simply believe that we can do good business without resorting to dirty tactics and opportunism; that humans should not be milk cows to business or capitalism.
That said, I have some vested interest in having more options: my interest and hobbies are niche and none of these services can or will sufficiently provide for what I seek. By the milk cow analogy, I do not sufficiently benefit from the blanket offers of these businesses. I also do not like the consequences of which they bring to humans and their relationships, and not fixing those consequences is out of a conflict of interest where they are motivated to exploit human nature and relationships to profiteer off us all, as is the many examples that we’re all starting to see and realize from capitalism.
I swear, these bad EULA updates that basically force users to “accept the agreement, or we’ll brick your device” needs to fucking stop and be made illegal. The price that’s set for a product, especially a damn physical product, should include the acceptance of an existing EULA, and it should be honoured even when new ones come out and the user chooses to not accept the new agreement. You’ve basically never owned the product if companies can just pull the rug underneath you, and render your hardware useless. And you can’t foresee such changes too; a predatory company can acquire one that you’ve trusted and pull this shit. It’s borderline daylight larceny.
A washer beep is like a webhook: if the recipient fails to acknowledge it, it’s gone forever. A notification is like an /events endpoint: the recipient can catch up on events at their own pace, and be reminded of and see events they haven’t processed.
Half-jokes aside though, I think what we want here is a reminder, i.e. a todo with a timed alert. Beeps can be missed and timers can be stopped (e.g. when you’re occupied), so they aren’t the most fool-proof solution here. Reminders will at least sit in the notifications list until dismissed.
Information is power. Telecommunication have changed the landscape of business, warfare, and how we live. It allows us to make “better” decisions for what we set out to do. Whoever holds more information, and has the chops to analyze it, controls the board. The closer that information is to individual people, the sharper it is as a weapon.
Having power too concentrated in one place or a few has led to disastrous consequences in human history. Privacy is simply a way to hold that power back, so that the most sensitive information are kept away from unknown hands.
Privacy also allows us to be ourselves, in the sense that we have different fronts of ourselves. We have sides we don’t necessarily want to show to our parents, but we show it to our friends or spouse. Not everyone has the best of relationships with everyone around them, and so there are sides we don’t want everyone to know, lest they get used as a weapon against us, either for others to exploit, or hold us ransom. If you’d like an example, imagine having an overly possessive religious parent, and you’re an atheist, but you don’t want to confront your parent because you’d like to avoid trouble. When thought in that way, privacy is a right that humans should have, and it is each person’s right to release what information they have about themselves to whoever they wish.
On the last point you talked about, “prove it definitely will become such a future”. You simply cannot prove that without going there. What we’re seeing is not a natural course of actions, so we cannot simply derive the consequences like we would be able in science. Even in science, often times, the best we can do is probabilistic. The best we can do is show that such a future is possible, and that given the evidences, we may be able to conclude that the chances of realizing such a future is so and so, with caveats to known unknowns and unknown unknowns.