The version that’s stuck in my head is Japanese so this is a translation.

Watch. See how they’ve lived their lives with pride, and with their lives they’ve sang the ode to civilization. This is the story of those whom people called heroes, the unfinished journey of the 13 who chased the flame. But traveller, your journey continues on, isn’t that right? Then, follow your heart and move on. Follow the footsteps and witness that flame chasing journey to the end. And finally… walk across the graves of those who have fallen. And for that future which “we” could not create… GO CREATE IT!

On the last point you talked about, “prove it definitely will become such a future”. You simply cannot prove that without going there. What we’re seeing is not a natural course of actions, so we cannot simply derive the consequences like we would be able in science. Even in science, often times, the best we can do is probabilistic. The best we can do is show that such a future is possible, and that given the evidences, we may be able to conclude that the chances of realizing such a future is so and so, with caveats to known unknowns and unknown unknowns.

I’ll admit that chalking it up to defeatism is a stretch, but it’s not too far in my opinion. It’s the admission that the “machines” (though it’s really just big tech companies with a vested interest in as much data as possible so that they can sell it one way or another for profit) have already won and there’s not only no point in struggling against it, you get something out of it. I don’t necessarily agree with the gun analogy as I find it difficult to distinguish that from a threat of your life, but I see where you’re coming from: the easy path towards what most people current perceive as a modern life of tech is built in a way that pushes people into line as products, by enticing them with a “service” and taking advantage of their FOMO, and all other ways are either too much work or too technical for the common person.

When these services that people have come to rely on gets enshittified, these people would then just shrug and say “well what can you do,” maybe send some angry message somewhere into the aether and continue with the service, continuing to be a milk cow.

For myself, I see privacy as a tool towards encouraging a healthier variety in the ecosystem. It is a way to attain at least some healthy level of anonymity, as you would walking down streets in different parts of the world, so that I do not have to constantly maintain a single, outward personality everywhere I go. Supporting privacy is my way of saying I don’t like how many big tech business works, by essentially exploiting human nature and stepping all over it. That IS ideological; I simply believe that we can do good business without resorting to dirty tactics and opportunism; that humans should not be milk cows to business or capitalism.

That said, I have some vested interest in having more options: my interest and hobbies are niche and none of these services can or will sufficiently provide for what I seek. By the milk cow analogy, I do not sufficiently benefit from the blanket offers of these businesses. I also do not like the consequences of which they bring to humans and their relationships, and not fixing those consequences is out of a conflict of interest where they are motivated to exploit human nature and relationships to profiteer off us all, as is the many examples that we’re all starting to see and realize from capitalism.

Those three sound completely different to me, as far as how I’ve been pronouncing them goes. “Their” doesn’t have the extra lagging e sound (as in the e in err) in “there” where I curl my tongue upward at the end. “They’re” preserves the ey sound in “they”, just concatenated with an r as in err sound.

When I say, “They’re there,” people can make out what I’m saying, though as more people seem to tell me that these are just homophones, maybe they’ve just been relying on context.

True.

And they’ll follow that up with a somewhat snarky comment that “You’ll be eliminated by the machines first.”

There’s the “this is too woke” gang, and then there’s the “this doesn’t have enough representation” gang. You can’t win.

There’s worse.

They already know everything about me anyways. If I can exchange my data for some free and easy to use service, I’m more than happy to give.

I hate defeatism.

Lots of moments in Honkai Impact 3.

There’s literally a YT channel that collects tears from streamers playing the game.

https://youtube.com/@Ollyt_

There’s a lot of context needed to understand why anyone would cry playing through HI3 though. I’ll give a high level summary here, but I highly encourage people to play it, even if it’s a gacha game. You can really ignore the gacha and just play the game for the main story. Do be warned that the story isn’t something suitable for kids — it can be quite a bit too heavy for them.

The theme of self-sacrifice is covered quite extensively, with the main character being the centrepiece of the theme. There’s also deep self-loathe, with an eventual self-acceptance, also from the MC. Mix that all in with some sense of duty.

There’s also a tragedy, but from the tragedy, a narrow path to hope was born. The people in the tragedy mostly hoped only for a simple life, or to live their lives atoning for their sins, but circumstances forced them to become warriors against a great, unstoppable force of destruction. As if to make things harder to swallow, their digital clones that survived into the future have to experience yet another tragedy that would eventually destroy all of them, and the player will see this through. Yet, in the second tragedy, these clones further sowed the seeds of hope for the future.

Chinese company or not, HoYo has pumped out a lot of very human stories that I think deserves attention and praise. Genshin Impact has also started to go down a similar path.