I’ve had the same thought. It’s defeatism. I was told that protests help bring like minded people together to organize, share ideas and implement plans to change things. A person can’t change things but many people can.
What if just being there helps you feel hope again?
I’ve posted this elsewhere (skip to paragraph 21 for the meaty parts). The short version is that the US demanded that trade partners implement protections for US companies in exchange for trade deals. Those trade deals are no longer present, so why don’t the governments reverse the protections since the US isn’t holding up their end of the bargain anymore?
For comments, I read that the upvote indicates that you feel that the comment is adding to the conversation and a downvote indicates that it detracts. I don’t know how this applies to the articles.
Americans get really upset when people go to the US and do things like they do in their home country, but also expect to be able to act like Americans in other countries. It’s a little arrogant or ignorant. Some people who who were even invited to study in the US have been deported for doing things that Americans do themselves, like protesting.
Whittle this story down to its core and you have, “guest in country breaks law and gets punished”. Is that really surprising? How about, “guest in country exercises rights of citizens and gets punished?”
I had to read way too far to get to the reason:
Trump has spoken about how he believes the US is being “ripped off” on global trade. He believes Trump genuinely wants to restructure global trade, which, however, has turned into a “revenge thing.”
“The problem with it is he really only has one metric, which is the bilateral trade deficit, and he really only has one tool, which is tariffs,”
I feel like Trump wants these countries to do something and he can’t control it, so he is using tariffs to apply pressure. Being who he is, he can’t back down until he gets what he wants despite anything else. Never show weakness. I worry that we’re all feeling the hurt from this narrow mindset.
I can’t speak to the quality outlook, but from what I understand about enshittification, it typically requires a self-serving entity like a corporation whose interests are not in alignment with its customers/consumers/userbase. In some of Mr. Doctrow’s writings, he indicates that federating cans be a “circuit breaker” for enshittification.
In a well federated platform, when one node begins to act counter to its users, the users can easily move nodes/instances. This is one of the reasons why there needed to be a law to allow phone number portability. Email is similar, but only if you own your own domain. Look for Cory Doctrow’s writings on BlueSky for more examples.
While this has been historically true, it’s not working this time.
As with most things happening under this US administration, he pushes things to the breaking point to see how it reacts. He’s stress testing the global economy. From there, I would guess that he’d back off just before the breaking point and move on to something else.