Public protests/rallies/marches do bring about change in government/government policies. Many politicians do care about their public image, and are susceptible to manipulation based on public pressure.
>Compare that with private sector. Even for entities like Google, we've got huge latitude to vote with our feet. We can use DuckDuckGo, etc. Our choices as consumers provides a comparatively enormous bandwidth.
Okay, so agreeing with you for the sake of argument - they provide a bandwidth, in theory, but what is the pointif nobody actually uses it? It is "effectively" zero accountability. No mass exodus from Google/Apple/Microsoft/Facebook/Twitter/Whatsapp/TikTok/insert bad company/...
A) I must vote for the Democrat candidate because the Republicans are evil and they'll subjugate women and minorities.
B) I must vote for the Republicans because the Democrats are evil and they'll turn us into a bunch of commies.
There is no room in today's political debate for even mention of finer points of free speech philosophy, when all we can do is scare people into voting for the lesser evil.
Many politicians do care about their public image, and are susceptible to manipulation based on public pressure.
And this is no less true in the private sector.
Well, of course there are nuances to anything, but CEOs are not elected by the public. They don't have "opponent" CEOs trying to milk their scandals in public ads for getting a job. Its different. Anyway, this conversation has totally gone off topic ! We'll just have to agree to disagree on some things, although I suspect we have more points that we agree on than not.
Great, that's two options. Maybe there's half of another.
Our bandwidth for holding government accountable is so limited as to be useless. Consider the federal gov't, since I think it's what you're mostly talking about anyway. We get to vote for
* 1x Presidential primary every 4 years, from a field of, let's say, 8 to be generous: 3 bits
* 1x President every 4 years, from a field of 4 at best: 2 bits
* 2x Senator primary every 6 years. Let's again say a field of 8: 3 bits
* 2x Senator every 6 years. Let's again say a field of 4: 2 bits
* 1x Representative primary every 2 years. Again, very generous field of 8: 3 bits
* 1x Representative every 2 years, field of 4: 2 bits
That gives us 5.4 bits/year of bandwidth to actually hold our elected officials accountable. Yes, we can write letters and stuff, but that doesn't really allow us to hold them accountable. 5.4 bits in a year is nowhere near enough to express our feelings on the myriad of topics that the government is fiddling with, so we have effectively zero control over those things.
Compare that with private sector. Even for entities like Google, we've got huge latitude to vote with our feet. We can use DuckDuckGo, etc. Our choices as consumers provides a comparatively enormous bandwidth.