@tinker @jerry THANK YOU! The amount of techno-solutionism I've seen half-genuinely proposed by people is ridiculous.

"Okay so the solution to Flock cameras is to set up complex technical applications that render the cameras impotent" No, the solution is to force your city to stop working with Flock. All methods of disarming them are only useful as a means of protest.

"Okay well if [nation state] is going to do Age Verification, I'll just get a VPN, heh, gotcha Big Brother!" What are we going to do when they ban VPNs for this very reason, or when they require VPNs to perform Age Verification, or when all the countries worth pointing your VPN endpoint into *also* enact Age Verification?

Tech solutions can be useful for bootstrapping some level of resistance against an authority, but in time, all advantages dissolve away if we don't address the root, political problem. That's because the oppressor has access to the same tech as you do, but with 1000x the budget as you -- as well as the ability to actually fuck with the infrastructure.

Political solutions to political problems. Tech is a means to resist in the short term, but it's not insulated from reality.