UltraMagnus

One of the factors in whether a nonviolent resistance movement can succeed or not is whether any state forces end up shifting loyalty. "Appealing to the moral sense of the people oppressing them" may be false if you're just talking about whoever's at the top, but it absolutely is a factor for the day-to-day bureaucrats and security forces. Nonviolent campaigns are more likely to cause these sorts of changes (particularly when violent crackdowns against nonviolent resistance backfires).

Consider the success of the following movements:

• Peoples Power Revolution (First one in 1986) - several military leaders defected from the Marcos regime
• Velvet Revolution (1989) - had several government officials defect
• Malagasy Political Crisis (2002) - Defense minister resigned, generals and military officers were split on who to support (source for this one, since the article is hard to find). In fairness, although this one would largely be classified as nonviolent, at the time, it was hard to say whether or not there would be any armed conflict (aside from some incidents with police attacking protesters early in the movement)

There's several other cases of this happening over the past century, but I hope you get my point - nobody's appealing to the guy on the throne, they're appealing to all the other cogs in the machine.

Yeah, the tricky thing about the "analog" Renaissance is the folks going for film cameras, typewrites, vinyl, and so on are looking for higher-quality equipment, rather than "mass market" stuff. Kodak could plausibly rebrand itself to appeal to this crowd.

Part of me wonders if the way our brains humanize chat bots is similar to how our brains humanize characters in a story. Though I suppose the difference there would be that characters in a story could be seen as the author's form of communicating with people, so in many stories there is genuine emotion behind them.