Yeah, IBM supplied a ton of computers to the Nazis during the war, as well as expertise on implementation/usage, from my understanding.

https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/books/first/b/black-ibm.html

The problem with that argument is that there’s value in something being not Facebook/Meta (or Twitter, or another corporate owned and run mega service), but that value isn’t as easy to demonstrate as “here’s a bunch of shiny features”, and once people are locked in, the focus shifts from improving the service to monetizing the service, making it rapidly worse for everyone.

People largely don’t think about how the services they use are structured, until any inherent structural issues come back to bite them. Twitter’s an obvious example, with people who were dependent on it for their livelihood from a networking/advertisement perspective ending up in trouble when the service went south. Reddit’s another example, although how that ends up is still TBD.

I think there’s a difference between choosing whose lives have value and choosing who to empathize with. I’m not celebrating their deaths, but aside from the teen who was on there, I can’t say I feel much about it one way or another. They knowingly chose to take the risk, signing waivers saying that they knew the trip could result in death, and it ended badly.

Looking at it from a different angle, I can also see why people would be frustrated that an incredible amount of attention and resources are being spent on people who intentionally put themselves at risk for a pleasure jaunt, while if a fraction of that (on a per capita level) was spent on everyone who was at risk of dying from issues brought on or exacerbated by poverty, we’d be saving a lot of lives.

If this marks the return of people actually picking up a newspaper (or the digital equivalent), that’d be fantastic. Not holding my breath, but one can hope.

I think before an AU like you’re suggesting could work, the US would need to get its house in order. Just from a Canadian perspective, the States already have a strong influence on us culturally/socially and economically. Tying ourselves even more closely to the US while one of the major parties is actively flirting with fascism is (I hope) pretty well out of the question.