No.
Oligarchy has waxed and waned throughout US history. It's latest rise has only been over the last 50 years or so. They were kept thoroughly in check for 40ish years before that. It was after Nixon's pardon that they realized they might be able to get away with it again.
It's kind of a given that people are going to try to get patents for stupid things they obviously shouldn't. It's the whole job of the patent office to decline such requests. If people only ever applied for good and reasonable patents, then approval could be automatic. It's not, only because they need to filter out the bad ones.
The real problem here is that the patent was granted. It seems dumb to apply for it. But how dumb is it, if applications like this actually get approved?
In the US we have two viable political parties.
One is ultra right wing fascist authoritarian.
The second is conservative neoliberal corpo-cratic.
No wonder I've been more or less depressed my entire adult life.
Why do we advocate for, and pour hours of development into, ActivityPub rather than building clients which add a social layer to existing content distribution and communication protocols?
If clients built their own social layer, those would be limited to users of that client. If they opened up the social layer with an interoperable protocol, now you just made ActivityPub again.
Right now, it looks like the only way users on my instance will get to see content from other instances is if I manually search for just about everything they'll get to see.
They can do that themselves.
Agreed.
Until people started following hashtags. Then they were trying to be about more than just people, and doing it poorly. Kind of like wanting to subscribe to people on Lemmy. That's not what it's for, and just shouldn't be an option, so people know that.
Not at all.
They may be weaker, but we still have unions. Social security is still in place. We still have 5 day 40 hour workweeks as standard. Overtime is still paid at 1.5x. We still have OSHA ensuring safe working conditions. The list is long.
Each cycle the public makes many gains. Most of them are carried through to the next cycle, where more gains are made. I have hope that Gen z or Gen Alpha will gain ground on universal healthcare, mandatory vacation and sick leave, mandatory family leave, voting rights and methods. Hell with AI coming for everyone's jobs, maybe even a form of universal basic income.