> Enacting large change involves things like journalism, activism, starting social movements, starting political clubs and parties...things that we think of anachronistic now.

I think it's more accurate to say that these are things that people in power are actively hostile to, and spend an enormous amount of time, effort, and cash to disrupt. The only way to do these things is to be financed and protected by wealthy people who see you as a tool to upset their competitors.

This is not new and is the natural order of things, but in the age of consolidation and massive wealth inequality, there's no hope. You can't attract people to your organization without using a medium operated by people who are hostile to you, if you find a platform that isn't hostile to you, they'll be attacked by a government that is hostile to you, and if you meet face to face, they'll track your cellphone or use facial recognition to flag you and associate you permanently with the people you're meeting with. Even if you try to educate yourself by reading the works of people who were in this situation in the past, the fact that you have purchased or downloaded a questionable book or visited a particular webpage will be recorded. And now AI is going to make it cheap to monitor all of this stuff simultaneously and intelligently. Self-driving spies.

I agree with everything you say, but it's not so simple right now. East Germans and Romanians had it easier. I'm starting to think that the only hope is in cult-like groups who live/work together and share data (in the same way corporations do.) Laws and practices haven't been updated to penetrate them, because laws that would allow that would also allow penetration into corporations, and they have the power to fight. Even, this chance is disappearing with the expansion of thoughtcrime and "hate" laws, where even anonymously accusing people of having an opinion becomes justification for escalating official action.

I saw a guy in a documentary explaining how an environmentally abusive or labor abusive business moves into an area and survives. They first identify all of the effective activists. They then offer them extremely well-paying jobs, either internal (head of environmental stewardship or something), or external by financing an e.g. people for sustainable development of the Bingbong Valley. Any effective activists left are destroyed by any means necessary; dig through their entire history, especially any divorces, criminal records, or possible tax difficulties. If you find anything that can get them caught up in a legal battle, tip the government off. Even if you can't, sue them for slander and libel in eight different ways. Subvert the local media by spending a ton on advertising, and make sure that they print nothing from the activist point of view and give them a press release every day to print from you. If people at the papers are defiant, consider them activists and launch the same process against them. Send them anonymous letters encouraging them to kill themselves. Attack their children, spouses and parents in the same ways. Offer them a huge payoff.

This is what always could be done. Now, there's not even a local media. Intelligence agencies will jump in and help with the slightest excuse. You can accuse them of being Nazis. Hire a transwoman of color as your spokesperson, and accuse anyone who asks your company a hard question as being a transphobic racist. You can create a thousand online sockpuppets. You can get them banned from every medium. Pretty sure that if you're Boeing, you can just shoot them, but we'll never know for certain what happened there, because the media is now owned by a dozen people and hires people to be completely incurious.