@librarysquirrel

I think that's a straw man.

The people who say those things are not the people who do those things.

I celebrate the genuine efforts to step up and solve this new problem via forks and freezes, and I include efforts to make new OSes, often depending on prior art cherry-picked from good projects. They take a lot of time and effort and will not be consumer grade (or "social infrastructure" grade) any time soon if ever. But many of us who care about this new problem will be happy with less complex, less complete software long before it runs the phones and the TVs and the websites, as we were when we became enthusiasts in the 80s and 90s and beyond.

I see this new problem (slop etc) as a catalyst. The re-shaping of tech as a tool of hegemony has always been bad, but this new problem has radicalized a new generation of people. Some will never make the connection, but others already see this as an extension, albeit a fairly huge one, of capital attempting to discipline us and assert ever more decisive hegemony. It's always good to oppose that, and to work to create alternatives. Dual power is the only way any of this ends well - no mass movement can successfully overturn the status quo using imagination alone.

So yes, many noisy fools underestimate the work, or attempt to rabble rouse based on essentially nothing of substance. But others do the work, and yet more pull it into recognizable, usable shapes. Eventually enough normal people demonstrate that you can actually live that way, and for everything valuable you lose, you also gain something you lacked previously.