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That brand of "hacktivism" was based on embarrassment. Embarrassment went away. Internet security got so bad, and leaks so common, that the impact evaporated. When Barrett Brown went down for Stratfor it was because he embarrassed the wrong people. Today that kind of breach happens every other month without the help of any hostile hackers.

Also companies became brazen [0]. It became okay to run a company like NSO (Pegasus) or simply publish your grotesquely immoral and very illegal hacker manifesto... as a "product", so long as you're doing it for money (ideological ends are still frowned upon).

Hacktivists can't compete with that.

Indeed, exposure of wrongdoing became a useless tool in everyone's hands. Before the wave of regulation, when Ian Levy, was the CTO at NCSC he gave a talk saying how we could "shame" hopeless BigTech companies into better security. Though I admired his attitude it was clear to me that would not work. Heavy regulation was gonna come because BigTech has no shame.

At the same time enshitification happened. That meant that the consequences of leaks and outages became much less. Where else are you gonna go? Microsoft can go down for days and despite the harms there is no reckoning. Everyone is simply stuck in a dead-end dependency on monopoly services. We just take an early lunch, call it "internet weather" and to hell with the economy. If "hactivists" took out half the internet tomorrow it would be "business as usual" for most people.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42382815




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