If all people who share your opinions think like you then that institution will be left to your opponents.

Joining would be praxis. You don’t have to be a double agent or anything, just be a sympathetic voice in meetings and such. Simply making the institution politically diverse and preventing it from being an echo chamber of like-minded people is already making a change in the world.

As an example, in 1923 Hitler attempted a coup, but got off with an amazingly light eight months of prison. The reason is the judiciary at the time were quite sympathetic to him; they didn’t do anything illegal, yet had they been SPD supporters instead Hitler might have gotten a life sentence for his high treason.

My (probably incomplete) understanding is: phones have a GNSS chip (such as GPS, Galileo, or Glonass), but getting location from that takes a long time and a lot of battery. So they estimate location based on other information such as what cell tower they are connected to and the list of available wi-fi networks. This requires a database with all that info, which Google built through its Street View cars.

So the location provider is a service to which your phone sends all the info it has and which replies with an estimate of your location; which means it handles a lot of sensitive data.

I wonder the same, my theory is that this gesture is used both as a loyalty test and a way to further polarize society.

Making this gesture draws clear lines in society: those who say it was fine, those who say it wasn’t, those who don’t take a stance (ie the media calling it a “controversial gesture” or similar). So Musk & al now have a clearer idea of who stand where. It also cleaves those “for” and those “against” further away, solidifying their base.

Another explanation is this is part of the normalization of extreme rethoric and symbols. I doubt he could have gotten away with it ten years ago; who knows what they’ll be able to do and say in 2035?

Yet another possibility, he did it on a whim and the neo-nazis like Bannon are now seizing the opportunity. It’s unclear how planned this was and how intentional the consequences were.

(And all might be true at once)

it’s France of 1794. A bloodbath that ended, as it always has in history, with a conservative backlash and a dictatorship.

It didn’t “end” with a dictatorship. Social change continued for a century, in which the people gained more and more power to the detriment of autocrats, until the establishment of today’s strong liberal democracy. The millennia-old institutions that opposed this change couldn’t be replaced in a day.