And yet we praise the engineers and architects of mass digital surveillance under the guise of social media as the elite of the tech industry

No, they are traitors.

Most people are suffering needlessly and asking for help. What comes if we critique the artfulness of their ask and do not help?

What comes if we help those who ask (artfully or not) rather than those most in need?

How do we find out who is most in need, by subjecting them to invasive tests and forcing them to jump through increasingly complicated hoops just to prove they are truly in need?

By looking around us -- making the effort to understand the lives of ordinary acquaintances. People worse off than ourselves are never hard to find.

Lying about having bills to pay?

People lie about having kids, for compassion.

I don’t have kids, neither do I participate in fraud activities, but it always depresses me when someone thinks that they can dismiss someones requirements for not having a family. Of course that will be abused, because most people don’t give a single fuck about our life. If a family guy needs X to feed a family, it doesn’t mean that I’m okay with X/2 and should just shut up and work harder to achieve the same amount. It is yet another wrong cycle, of which our root comment talks.