I disagree completely. Protesting against these things (i.e participating in the latest outrage on HN and elsewhere) without sacrificing your entire livelihood is exactly the right thing to do.
Being cynical about these things is what changes nothing, or rather it changes things for the worse. In countries where everyone is resigned into the idea that every government official is always going to be corrupt and every company will always be criminal are usually very poor.
This isn't a war that is won or lost in the short term. We're all in this for long haul, we have to live with it and still try to move the balance in the right direction.
> Protesting against these things [..] without sacrificing your entire livelihood
If you invest your time and money into say, an iPhone application, you're heavily supporting the Apple store.
Once you've done that, the fact that you've expressed your disagreement with Apple policies on online forums is more or less irrelevant.
Look at Facebook: there is a rather large number of people complaining about their privacy policies, yet they keep making them worst every year. That's because people complain, but don't quit.
I don't have an app in the App Store (partly for these reasons) and I have actually cancelled my Facebook account in protest. I can afford to do that.
But what I'm saying is that depending on your field of work, you may not have much of a choice other than to support the dominant players in the industry. No one should feel under any moral obligation to forego 50% of their income every time NastBigCorp X does something nasty.
It's useful to protest and still keep doing what you do. Maybe down the road there's an opportunity to hurt them without hurting yourself even more. Protesting shows there is a desire for something different.
Being cynical about these things is what changes nothing, or rather it changes things for the worse. In countries where everyone is resigned into the idea that every government official is always going to be corrupt and every company will always be criminal are usually very poor.
This isn't a war that is won or lost in the short term. We're all in this for long haul, we have to live with it and still try to move the balance in the right direction.