I understand the frustration. I've been in this industry for over a quarter century myself. The proliferation of advanced computing in the palm of your hand with a fancy touchscreen slapped onto it in 2007 seemed like Star Trek magic at the time, but it quickly turned into dystopian tracking before anyone knew it. Now that compute was out of the realm of the enthusiast with the general public okay with locked down devices; with have access to your own hardware now called "jailbreaking," things quickly spiraled to a technocratic state we're moving towards.

LLMs should actually be the level to oppose such things allowing for rapid reverse engineering of closed systems and custom bespoke software, but it's all dependent on "cloud" architecture, and OpenAI/Anthropic could ban you at any time for any reason. Independent models like Kimi 3 and GLM-5 should hedge that situation, but compute hardware required to run such models (e.g. 4x DGX units) use to sell for <$20k, but have now been pushed to nearly $40k. Enthusiasts can no long affordably buy the hardware that was so prevalent that made the modern compute era possible.

I feel your frustration with your "strike" which is an unplanned vacation. It's won't amount to much and hopefully you won't lose your job. Organizing anything at scale will be impossible, because every large at-scale protest you see is organized by the state or massive private interests. They're all psychological operations, yes even the famous 9 minute clip. When you really dig into all of it, the vast majority of people in this world are in the global control net of the new technocratic religion, and they believe everything they see from a major news site on social media, Google or the TV screen.