My theory is "shallow thinking" and "busy-ness". We are prone to mental and expedient shortcuts which seem benign at the small scale in which we interact, but when aggregated become something terrible... and on the exceedingly rare chance that we might hear an actual solution, it either sounds so foreign to us that we cannot consider it, or so hopeless a fight that the super-majority of people do not push back.
Consider how slippery the slope is for even one aspect (diffuse responsibility):
Alice needs help
Bob sees that Alice needs help
Bob excuses himself from being the one to help (not prepared, wasn't expecting, other obligations, could be a trap, others are better suited to help, the government ought to help)
Bob excuses himself from being the one to get help (I don't have the number handy, someone else will call, she probably already called someone for help)
Conceptually, this is fine if it is ONLY "Bob", but the deceptive part is how finite the procedural gap is between Bob being one person and it literally being everyone.... thus Alice gets no help.
dalle3: A human male in a jacket walks down the staires from the second floor of a parking garage. There is nobody else in the brutalist super-structure or anywhere else, he is completely alone.
I realized that every time I composed a post, i was less thinking about what i have to say to my friends, and more thinking about things like "what censor will see this", or "will this get me banned", or any other number of unfun and agency-draining things.
Maybe it's just me, but I don't see much pressure to install open source apps. I would estimate that for every thousand call-to-actions involving software that comes my way, zero are open source.
My theory is "shallow thinking" and "busy-ness". We are prone to mental and expedient shortcuts which seem benign at the small scale in which we interact, but when aggregated become something terrible... and on the exceedingly rare chance that we might hear an actual solution, it either sounds so foreign to us that we cannot consider it, or so hopeless a fight that the super-majority of people do not push back.
Consider how slippery the slope is for even one aspect (diffuse responsibility):
Conceptually, this is fine if it is ONLY "Bob", but the deceptive part is how finite the procedural gap is between Bob being one person and it literally being everyone.... thus Alice gets no help.