advocate for each other
For individuals
One of the major challenges we face in dealing with computer use is a persistent fixation on the supply-side of the equation: what is the technology, how does it work, who is making it, what is their intent, what are their politics, etc. All good questions, but far from the only ones.
A balance to this focus on the supply-side, on its personalities and the armchair psychologizing about them, is a shift in attention to the demand-side of the equation. This can also be thought of as thinking more about each other. What options do we have to respond to the advent and incursion of new technologies in our lives? One of the simplest ways to think about this shift is to stop trying to do politics "in" any technology, but to focus on the politics "around" its use - the people, the impacts, our choices there, and other sources of leverage and power. Taking the macro high-level narratives about new technologies and engaging with them in the specifics of our lives. Advocating for more power and influence in decision-making about the use of computers in our governments, in our institutions, in our places of membership is empowering. Trying to be an external product manager to a multi-billion dollar computer undertaking is less so.
Of particular note here is the idea of democratization in relation to computer use. In many cases, the state itself does not direct its power (or does not want to use it) to intervene in how computer products are produced and maintained. See the long arc of death and disability tied to the use of cars, and the immense regulatory machinery that sits around it. Regulation has failed to meet the climate challenge. It does not mean that regulation cannot be powerful, but history says that the state is reluctant to interfere with the successful uptake of a product or status quo that it sees as beneficial to the economy.
The point here is that you cannot exert democratic power over decisions that aren't yours in the first place. The companies that are testing their products on the public or are open to their feedback are doing R&D, not democracy.
So what can you do? You can refocus attention on the power we have to respond to the use of these tools in many different contexts - as members of a professional community, as unionized workers, as leaders of small businesses and non-profit organizations. This is not an approach to be done in the absence of pushing for regulation, it's an approach that acknowledges the gaps there. And more importantly, many of the impacts of the use of computer are not law-shaped - they are about preference and relationships and cultural norms and etiquette - all places where our agency is unconstrained by the mechanics of the development and implementation of law, and the widespread issues with access to justice. Here the saying is that your rights are only as good as your access to them. In the context of computer-based harms, we're well off the rails already. Writing the laws is the easy part, upholding them is an entirely different and separate undertaking with well-known existing points of failure.
Focusing attention on the people around the computers and the choices we can make - rather than the computers themselves - helps open more ground for engagement and interaction.