"If the architecture of my code doesn't enforce privacy"
This is still techno-optimism. The architecture of your code will not to that. We are long past the limits of what you can fix with code.
The only action that matters is political and I don't think voting cuts it.
Soatok Dreamseeker is working on an xkcd-538-proof system: https://soatok.blog/2025/08/09/improving-geographical-resili... https://github.com/soatok/freeon. Fundamentally, though, it's built on the assumption that geographical resilience is possible – that a group can be distributed such that no one organisation can perform $5-wrench attacks against enough of them to break the cryptography. (Since the attack's impossible, a sensible attacker will avoid tipping their hand by attempting it, thus sparing contributors from violence.)
Hardware? The real world? Pretty much everything?
Power. Real power. The power to kill you, take your property, harm your family, tell lies about you on the news, etc.
I've always been surprised by the naivety of tech people with respect to this question. The only possible solution to power is power itself. Software can be a small part of that, but the main part of it is human organization: credible power to be used against other organized holders of power. No amount of technology will let you go it alone safely. At best, you may hope to hide away from power with the expectation that its abuse will just skip over you. That is the best you could hope for if all you want are software solutions.
The threat of the state tossing you in jail until you divulge your password/permit backdooring/etc.
Yeah, reminds me of the "Security" xkcd (https://xkcd.com/538/) - a threat from a good ol' 5-dollar wrench defeating state-of-the-art encryption.
Never estimate how state actors can use violence (or merely the threat of it) to force people to do things. The only way to respond to that is not through code or algorithms or protocols, but through political action (whether it be violent or non-violent)