<p>Outlook certificate errors be like:</p><p>❌ The certificate is not signed by an authority you trust, and in fact is signed by the Alien Alliance for Human Destruction.<br />❌ The certificate uses an algorithm deprecated in 1876 due to being solvable on paper by bright kindergarteners. <br />❌ The expiration date is notated in a calendar unknown to our science.<br />✅ The certificate has a valid name</p>

<p>But the irony of any successful resistance is that the perfection of its leadership doesn&#39;t actually matter. It is the power and unity of purpose they manage to infuse followers with that counts. The reality of any effective resistance is that it is a cohesive mass movement in a specified direction. Resistances require good structural engineering. They require coherence. They require agreement on a very large scale. How do you do that without leadership? 6/</p>

<p>Thank you to whoever on the <span class="h-card" translate="no"><a href="https://mastodon.social/@Mastodon" class="u-url mention" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">@<span>Mastodon</span></a></span> team unbroke opening posts in a new tab! Minor code change (I hope), massive usability improvement.</p>

<p>Meanwhile, I do not want to downplay the appalling betrayal among the leadership in the mainstream political class and the media who very effectively warned us of the death of democracy in the US, and who have gone back to business as usual. Having tea in the Whitehouse with a convicted felon and the author of the attempted coup of Jan 6. Dining at Mar a Lago.</p><p>These people either can&#39;t recognize the threat or don&#39;t care to. They cannot serve as the leaders of a pushback. 5/</p>

<p>It enables us to find every objectionable flaw and amplify it into the unforgivable. I simply don&#39;t see how, with our great appetite for unmasking the faults in any given leader, we will ever allow ourselves to coalesce, with the passion and energy required, behind any person or people who can act as directors of our efforts to stop this viscous tide of authoritarian, overtly cruel, state sponsored acts of inhumanity. </p><p>I don&#39;t see how real, concrete pushback can be organized at the moment. 4/</p>

<p>These two themes: lack of leadership and the dominance of the virtual are frustratingly woven together. </p><p>One thing that really does work well on social media is character assassination, fault-finding and airing and ideological purity demands. While this medium works beautifully to rally authoritarian minds to a personality cult, it does almost the exact opposite to people who are not natural authoritarians... it breeds a cynicism in us. 3/</p>

<p><span class="h-card" translate="no"><a href="https://mastodon.social/@whitequark" class="u-url mention">@<span>whitequark</span></a></span> 🫡</p>

<p>I am not very optimistic about the success of a pushback against Trumpism and the very public blossoming of this tech billionaire oligarchy. </p><p>While the anarchic quality of social media protest may feel empowering and positive and wavelike, I don&#39;t have high hopes for its effectiveness for two reasons:</p><p>1. I can think of no historical examples of leaderless revolutions that have been lastingly successful. </p><p>2. The virtuality of the present erodes concrete and embodied pushback in the real.<br />2/</p>

<p>i am writing a new, simpler compiler</p>