I think you're missing the fundamental-intent:
learned-helplessness.
A population which has been beaten & brainwashed into learned-helplessness, is a population who can be mere-carrion, fed-upon long-term.
All the battering we're getting from apparently-intentionally-wrong-design, UI & UX, and all the endless-battering from AI's displacing reality from our world, well, if the point is to make certain that we don't resist having our worth "appropriated" from us by the corporations which feed on our lives .. then it's working, isn't it?
It isn't us using as tools the good stuff, it is us not-having-any-say-anymore, & just aquiescing to anything that is decided on our behalf, re continual-machiavellian-licensing-alterations, re UI & UX, re everything!
The point is that we stop having any say, & get used to being used/abused.
Globally.
In all contexts.
Battered into all-pervading helpless aquiescence.
That is the intent which matches the implimentation we're being subjected to.
"the benefit of the doubt" expired years ago, now.
This is DarkTriad war against our meaning, & validity, enforcing its totalitarian dominion through the tech our infrastructure is.
Because not-for-profits are as machiavellian as the for-profits ( as sickening as that is ), then there is NOBODY competing against the machiavellianism, displacing that malicious infrastructure with good infrastructure.
Marginal-competition isn't counting in the world's economy ( PieFed.social, Lemmy.World, etc, do NOT compete against Reddit at the economics-scale, & the "journalism" of the world is helping to enforce non-competition, too. )
Our gov'ts have gone full-in backing that rigging of our world: no alternative, in their policy's eyes.
Ideally, some not-for-profits would begin competing against machiavellianism, & would begin simultaneously competing against the machiavellian infrastructure, but they'd have to do it against ALL the required-infrastructure, all the big-platforms..
What establishment would tolerate that?
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