There was a golden age when computers were something you owned, not like before when they were big machines your employer or university would give out access to, nor like after when they went to the cloud, you bought what was essentially a thin client and every software became a service.
At least in the olden days the computers weren’t forced into every single damn part of society!
Now in order to talk with most of your friends and family, you have to sell your soul to every one of the thousand ToS’s. It’s impossible to meaningfully use your personal device you bought with your own money without the internet, as every app and their mom needs to call home for some reason. For some reason, it is morally acceptable for a company to prevent you from being able to have someone you pay to replace parts of your device with third-party components you bought with your own money!
Now, of course, you can simply install some Libre operating system and use Lemmy, or Mastodon or whatever. But computers are so embedded into society that it is simply impossible to go without these services unless you want to get yourself isolated (and potentially in trouble with the authorities).
Besides, from prior experience, most people are unwilling to use technologies unless it is physically placed in front of them, whether through social influences, advertising or word of mouth, which generally corporate services do better than Libre alternatives.
It used to be that computers and programs were made for the end user. Now they are simply tools for ad and data-collection companies to extract every byte of personal data and force every second of advertising on others.
I’ve been seriously considering to remove computers from most aspects of my life, but as paper slowly disappears from our lives, this becomes harder and harder. Now you would likely be fired if you refused to use Teams or Slack or whatever your company uses. No one uses fax or writes mail or watches live TV anymore.
The only other alternative is to take back computers and make them personal again.
I hear what you are saying, but I’m not sure why you aren’t doing what you want to do.
If you have a computer not provided by work, why do you have Slack or Teams?
Use ad blockers and/or Pi-Hole to avoid pesky ads.
Watch live TV.
Write a letter.
Stay away or use sparingly, data hungry services.
I know I feel better for it and I don’t feel as if I’m missing much.
I’m mostly concerned about the general public as many are either ignorant or lack the knowledge on how to use these.
Ads have become the new normal
Ads have become the new normal
I haven’t seen an ad in ages on the internet. Also, ducks in the park are free.
They are slowly creeping back in. Once ad blockers became mainstream (I blame Apple), the war on them began in earnest. I already see them reappearing on YouTube and Reddit.
You can scoff and declare that no one should use these platforms, but both have captured whole swaths of discourse and content online. And they will just keep chipping away at making sure the ads appear. Cat/mouse, all that.
The general public is ignorant and has the lack of interest in their privacy or in general in the internet. They just want to know whats the weather or funny cat videos.
The companies make their software so bloated because they want to sell you the “ad free”/deluxe experience for extra money.
They dont have the morales of you buy it you own it. See the gaming industry, the movie industry even the car industry all subscriptions, ads, data hoarding and telemetry all of what it is not necessary for any industry, if they did a good job and a good product. But as they just make a “warranty” hopping hardware/software, that just gets you over the warranty/refund period and then spontaneous dies because of some electronic that was especially not there just to destroy the product after x years. See “The Crew” from ubisoft, users “bought” the game after few years a sequel came out and ubisoft just did most terrible thing you could do and just unplugged “The Crew” and made it unplayable, and even had the audacity to remove evidence by removing them from players playstation libraries and no refund possible.
They deliberately made that game a online only game (even this could and should have run perfectly offline) and then kill it after few years to force users to play newer games. Imagine this in the N64 era, the publishers would have gotten sued and defamed for this crap they would have done.
Then they ask themselves why is piracy back and even stronger than before, they just need to open their eyes and do their job.
In short: Dont be afraid to live in a futuristic dystopia, we are living in one already.
The internet, in particular social networking, needs to become personal.
I fleshed out an idea for building a personal social infrastructure system that will hopefully accomplish just that, but haven’t put “code to disk” yet.
As time passes it’s becoming more clear that this is ultimately the right way forward, but it’s a big project.
Check out freetheinter.net and send me some feedback :)
Waitwaitwait what am I looking at here? It seems to be fairly similar to the concept of the Fediverse. Could you explain it?
It’s intended to be much more local and decentralized than the fediverse, under the assumption that over time large fedi instances will exhibit the same issues as large centralized social networks (profit seeking, manipulation, etc)
- Instead of many people connecting to the same server, people only connect to people’s devices that they know
- It uses the resources of users “daily driver” devices for hosting
- It leverages “real life” personal connections and trust to deny access to large centralized entities
Sounds really cool! So it’s essentially “serverless” in the sense that it runs on users’ devices right?
Eh, I think it’s totally feasible to quarantine the problematic parts of tech and retain control. For example:
- GrapheneOS - I have a profile for my personal stuff w/o any Google services running, and then I have a “work” profile for things like Slack
- Linux - no software company or hardware company is going to restrict me from maintaining my own machine; I’ve replaced parts, uninstalled default software, etc; I currently use a Lenovo laptop and a DIY desktop, and I’ll probably replace my laptop w/ a Framework
“impossible to go without these services”
Have you tried? I stopped using Facebook over a decade ago, and I refuse to use anything else Meta has touched. I still keep in contact with those I care about. It turns out that if people value a relationship with you, they’ll work with what you’re comfortable with, provided you’re willing to compromise a bit too. For me, that means SMS and email is my main form of communication, though I’d prefer more private alternatives like Matrix and Signal. Maybe I’ll push my loved ones to switch eventually, idk.
No one uses fax
Nor should they, it’s absolutely insecure and shouldn’t be used by anyone. Period.
Mail is great, many of my friends have old-school watches, and while I don’t understand it, I have friends who watch live TV. None of that really interests me (though I’ll watch the Olympics OTA sometimes).
take back computers
What’s stopping you? Do it one step at a time, and make adjustments as you go. I switched to Linux full-time something like 15 years ago, and it’s all I use today. Since then, I have:
- switched from gmail to my own domain (hosted w/ Tuta)
- ripped all our DVDs and Blurays to a local Jellyfin server and cancelled most of our streaming services (SO convinced me to keep Netflix)
- switched to GrapheneOS after a few years of slowly cutting out Google crap
- self-host all kinds of stuff (I’m really close to eliminating Google Drive)
- eliminated all commercial social media, and only Lemmy is left
Do the easiest stuff first, and keep going until you feel like you’re in control. Your direction will probably look different than mine, and that’s great! But waiting for someone else to solve your problems is what got us into this mess, so do something, and ideally do it today.
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I’ve been surprised by how effective it’s been to say, respectfully, “this is important to me,” maybe adding “here’s why.” Got all my siblings, mom, SO, and best friend on Signal, that’s a vast majority of my online conversations.
reddit is orders of magnitude bigger then lemmy, but I find lemmy high quality and has more people with similar values- more than i could ever keep up with.
Back when Adobe went subscription-only, I stopped using it on my personal work and devices even though a lot of my previous work depended on it. Had to switch to different tools, but now there are better options. Not only has Adobe stagnated, but they caused an even bigger exodus when they messed with the ToS to train ai on user data.
I switch to linux a few years ago and now when I have jobs that use windows I realize how clunky it actually is, and it’s only getting worse while linux has been getting better.
I’m fully degoogled (also a graphineOS user). It took me years to eliminate each service, but I was sick of these giant companies that could never give me the things I wanted because in interferes with what they want (ad revenue). The only thing you can do is take it all back. Participate as little as possible. These companies will not stop getting worse while people continue to use them.
It can be inconvenient, time-consuming, and hard, but there are options, and it is a lot easier now than it was a decade ago. I see no reason why it wont continue to get easier and more accessible. That’s why it’s important for tech savvy folks to do what they can, now, and make it easier for those who come after them. Personally, I’ve done a lot for myself, but need to learn more about hosting securely so I can offer close friends and family better alternatives that they can easily access.
Be the change you want to see.
Since people won’t (for example) switch to privacy-respecting comm apps just because I ask them too, I’m building my own self-hosted box that I can duplicate for my family and friends.
My goal is to provide them with a single box solution for DNS filtering (PiHole), media server (including auto disc conversion and sharing between boxes), local backup (which will replicate encrypted backups to the other boxes similar to what Crashplan Personal did), phone backup and management (MDM and file management from PC), image and file sharing (something like Facebook for family only), instant messaging (most likely XMPP), etc, etc.
Yes, it’s a pretty bold plan, but my family and friends are tech illiterate, so if I want to see an improvement in privacy for myself and them, it’s on me to do it, and make it attractive for them.
I don’t know, maybe there’s a healthy medium? My home computing is still very personal.
I will hang out on IRC with friends, while I hack away on my low-tech coding projects in the background.
My smart phone is primarily used for comms and navigation, and I’m not stuck to it out in public.
I refuse a smart home, and the only mindless automation I take part in is dedicated to movies and TV.
Circling back around, I do feel like not all hope is currently lost.
Circling back around, I do feel like not all hope is currently lost.
My own contradiction: I feel pretty cynical about it, and yet I’m working on my own solutions for my family and friends. Part of me thinks it’s pointless, but I refuse to give in completely.
I already try to use better comms, minimize the data my phone shares (setting up a de-googled pixel now), and have always avoided most social media (never been on FB/Twitter, etc, as in never even gone to the websites).
