Standing in the wind won't stop the storm. You only get blown over.
"If everyone just" stood in front of the storm, they'd all get blown over, and the storm would go on.
No one wants to hear that individual heroics aren't the answer, but they aren't. Our moral intuition fails on problems bigger than it's meant for.
One person, out of hundreds, working in a factory that makes a slightly cheaper widget, that changes a BOM, that drives a different industry to swap one process for another, that forces other factories to move, that changes water use and heat flow in a region, that nudges weather systems out of a regime that favors storms, is doing more to stop the storm than any hundred people standing in the wind.
The person washing windows at a lab that figures out how any of those steps might be connected doesn't get to be a hero, and doesn't feel righteous for fighting, but they're fighting, while the people who choose feeling righteous aren't.
Or, 30% of the society could build up distrust in tech, AI, and scraping on the Internet, and quietly start sabotaging flow of data and/or cash. They're not going to disclose decision criteria that implement that behavior, even when imprinting it to people around.
I think such "immune response" of human society will be more realistic modeling of the storm blowing. The Leviathan won't listen to few of scales screaming data abuse is technically legal or whatever, if it deem that unreasonable.
I'm confused by your analogy-
In the case of user-hostile software, what is an example of an action that would lead to a change in overall climate
People want to think in terms of people and their actions, not in terms of systems and their structures. That's the problem.
Show a programmer a system that requires constant on-call burning out the team—they'll tell you (if they've been around) heroics are a sign it's broken, not to find more heroes. Definitely not to pull the person working on systemic issues off that nonsense and get them a shift.
Show them an equivalently structured broken system in a different field and they'll demand heroics.
I can't give you an example of an action, because I don't know, and I'm not talking about actions. I'm saying the approach itself is wrong and any action it suggests won't be effective.
Moralizing has a brutal, self-perpetuating metaproblem that makes people more and more convinced it works the more it doesn't. Actions based on moralizing will be chosen if suggested and they will not work, so any moralizing framing needs to be rejected right away, even if you can't suggest a better action.
The liberal attitude is that the moral character of individuals does not matter for social order so long as the right rules and institutions are in place. Part of Confucius’s point, and that of any conservatism worthy of the name, is that rules and institutions are ineffectual without individuals willing to subordinate their desires to them. And individuals who do not seek the good (so as to “rectify their hearts”) and the true (thus pursuing the “investigation of things”) can neither curb bad desires nor cultivate good ones. The brute force of legal coercion cannot substitute for this missing moral fiber.
Moral fiber is important. Choosing ineffective, superficial actions that feel righteous over unrewarding slog that leads to moral good seems like the opposite of that.