It feels like all the joy I used to feel from being an enthusiast has been completely voided as computing has become the modern vector for fascism and surveillance. I find myself recoiling from all online spaces, even independent and open source ones that I’d loved and supported in the past.
It’s been an exceptionally strange impulse to go from having an elaborate online presence to now feeling like the only acceptable way to engage with the network is to have as minimal of an online footprint as possible.
This especially hurts when it feels like an issue of skilling, where I know how to do certain tasks with computers, but have to teach myself for the first time the analogue alternatives that my parents and their parents likely already knew well.
How have you chosen to deal with it? Do you find yourself moving away from computing and the internet, despite formerly loving it as a hobby? Have you replaced things that computers used to do for you with analogue replacements?
I’m curious how other people are experiencing this.
My parents got a new car and they thought I’d be impressed that it has an iPad for a dashboard and knows who’s driving by using your phone.
And 20 years ago that would have been cool. But now? Now all I see is data harvesting, bad UI, and expensive repairs that must be done at the stealership.
Tech used to be something fun and new, that gave you freedoms and abilities you never thought were possible. But now it’s just another way for companies to ship expensive crap and exploit us. I’d much rather have my dumb car that makes fart noises and won’t even shift without my help.
One thing I did like is that the interior door handles are well-made and easily accessible.
“Stealership”
Ima be… uhh… leasing that. Thanks.
For 36 months with no money down at our spring savings event!
36 month loans are rookie numbers. They’re selling the big expensive trucks on 72month loans.
More than 1/3 of auto loans are over 6 years and they end up paying more that 80% more interest.
Honestly, working on and around the infotainment systems in modern cars is not as bad as I thought it would be. It just takes a different set of skills and knowledge than car guys are used to. I recently added android auto to my 10 year old car, which involved adding a circuit board that goes between the existing screen and it’s OEM circuit board.
Retrofitting infotainment on your terms is entirely different from dealing with it preinstalled in a new car. For example, I’m betting yours doesn’t have an unskippable popup warning about paying attention to the road that you have to dismiss every time you turn on the car. Or telemetry that rats out your driving behavior to the manufacturer and/or the insurance company and/or law enforcement. Or other sorts of adware or malware.
And considering that you had to add it to begin with, it definitely doesn’t disable the entire car if you try to remove it or otherwise neuter the hostile misfeatures.
Especially when the software required to reprogram the modules costs thousands of dollars, if it’s even available at all.
Oh we have a Volvo S60 and it has a screen but the map app is so bad that we put our phone there while driving, but every time you go into reverse you can’t see the back driving camera. How does your retrofitted system teal with stuff like that?
Perfectly. The setup retains all stock functions.
I got it from these guys: https://www.gtacarkits.com/
I really want to gut my car’s infotainment system. I’m just worried about the resale value and whether or not part of this shit is somehow critical to the vehicle now.
Not like there’s any useful manuals on this shit out there. And the manufacturer is incentivized to actively thwart my efforts.
“bad UI”
Especially that one!!!
There are certain things that should be buttons that don’t move. The hazard flashers, for instance.
They should not be an icon on the “dashboard” that goes away when you’re trying to change the temperature.
Capitalism: how much can you improve a fork? Let’s build society around that and see!
ditch the marxist leninism and you’ll have a whole new view on everything in the world
it’s a cult and it’s broken your brain
computers are still just computers and still do vast amounts of good
heard of linux?
Oh yeah Linux you know that technology built with Marxist Leninism principles is really great.
It is tech built by and for the people at no cost to them simply to make the computing world better for everyone.
Perhaps you should examine your own brain since you can’t comprehend the words you’re trying to use.
Make your shit work for you again. Learn to self-host and embrace open source.
This is exactly what I did. Part of it is reminding ourselves the old Net didn’t update just by scrolling and every website wasn’t filled with infinite people engaging. It’s slow.
this…this is what did it for me.
Got any advice on how to start doing that, for someone who considers themselves tech-savvy, but not enough to know how to self host, or to know the open source alternatives yet?
For self hosting stuff, you can follow this https://youtu.be/jFrGhodqC08 its a tutorial on how you can host your own website and teaches knowledge you can transfer onto self-hosting dockerized services.
Thank you!
BTW, dont feel bad if it seems like it takes a lot of time to move forward through steps, its a very condensed 10 min video. Each step when done for the first time can take a while to grasp and learn
That’s fair. At least I got an starting point now even if it’s hard at first.
Definitely try things out on a little single board computer (SBC) like a Pi, or a VM (virtual machine), or even an old laptop. It’s harder to break things than you might think, especially when using containers and stuff, but it does happen.
Rolling back or reinstalling a VM is sometimes way less hassle than trying to decipher cryptic issues.
It’ll feel easier to play around if you can always just start over, as opposed to risking “I hope this works” with your precious data.
Oh yeah, whatever you do (and I know this is hard advice given the price of storage now, UGH), figure out what a 3-2-1 backup strategy looks like to you, for your most important things.
Most importantly: Have fun! Sounds cheesy, but having an exciting goal in mind will definitely encourage you to keep learning and enjoying the process. :)
+1
Partial solution to a partial problem. But necessary step for a first step.
Cut it down, your computer is not a source of evil. Especially if its a second or third hand buy. People think life is about control, its not. Life is full of things that we cannot control, can only influence, or can only really observe on an individual scale. Now what really helps is activism. Get out with a group of people to affect change. Put more good into the world than evil and your hobbies matter a little less (given they are benign)
What’s interesting and I think is tied into that “people think life is about control” is that I am deeply convinced that the tech barons learned to hate democracy because administering computers and networks is not democratic in nature at all. An admin always has access and controls for everything, nobody votes an admin into position. Hell, we’ve seen numerous Fediverse sites come and go because being an admin is actually a huge task, especially if you’re handling it on your own. Even with that power diffused among multiple administrators, it can often be difficult escape the hierarchical nature of how computers are designed at their core.
As you point out, this isn’t evil, this is a type of tool. Like all tools, it can be used for good or ill, to build or to destroy. Currently we are being overrun with people who want to use it to control everyone else. They certainly think life is about control, and it’s part of why they are so deeply unhappy.
It’s also why the open source world is so fucking precious. The Cathedral versus the Bazaar. The bazaar style of development is such a massive deal because we could extrapolate this kind of governance to other parts of society. I worry deeply for a potential schism in the open source community when Linus Torvalds stops developing from old age or disease or just dying randomly in a car crash.
Open Source is that good that computers are being used for. Outside the corporate funded open source, there’s so many tiny little open source projects for almost anything imaginable, all shared freely so others can bear the fruits as well.
Tech barons have never administered computer.
I feel the same way sometimes. Here’s what I’ve been up to:
- Self hosting as much of my digital footprint as possible, with federated technologies and Foss at the forefront
- Focusing my computer time on my own hobbies and curiosities, just tinkering with the computer, or contributing to open source projects
- Volunteering to help with conferences where I can, and attending hacker and hardware conferences. I have a nice little international group of friends and confidants thanks to that. It helps me to connect with people in person.
This.
If something is a vector for evil, it’s crucial that we invest good in it. And with tech it’s doable and quite enjoyable i’d say.
Same here. I have been moving everything I can to self hosted FOSS, contributing to FOSS projects, and rehabbing old hardware. It’s been fun, I’ve met people from around the world and I’m getting tools I like to be even better.
Locally, I’m working with the library to start Linux days, where we help fix old computers and move them to Linux. There’s been a lot of interest due to Win11.
Compute to battle the evils.
Make open source tools to remove dependency on corporate spyware.
Create smaller low power AI assistants to make the giants redundant.
Create websites that inform rather than misdirect and out-market the evil ones.
Not proposing it’s easy or even realistic, but it’s the same battle that always was.
A friend of mine asked me why I put forth so much work into protecting my privacy when my best efforts still amount to a leaky seive. I’ll never forget my reply - “Just because I’m losing doesn’t mean the fight isn’t worthwhile … if we give up, the open internet dies with [my generation]. For me, success is keeping the idea alive to be rediscovered by the next generation. If I don’t do it, what hope do they have?”
I wasn’t super into DC comics, but the cartoons were what was on when I would stay with my grandmother, and a certain episode of Superman with Dr Fate really moved me.
There was some terrible magical threat, and Superman had tried to get Dr Fate to help, but he refused with something like, “I’ve banished this threat countless times, yet every time it returns stronger. No matter how hard I fight, mankind continues to torment one another. Evil continues to rear its ugly head. I don’t know if I can still triumph, and I’m so very tired.” And Superman was like “F U I’ll do it myself,”
While Superman was fighting, Dr Fate suddenly showed up with the assist and managed to seal away the bad dude. Superman said something like, “I thought you were done with this fight,” and Dr Fate’s response has stuck with me all these decades:
“You made me realize evil isn’t the only force that keeps coming back.”
Any tool can be used for good or for evil. Try not to get sucked into the doom spiral, there are plenty of FOSS and adjacent projects making the world a better place.
This. Use as much ethical open source software as possible for you, while supporting and advocating for important projects in that space. And don’t let yourself get sucked into some closed platform or ecosystem you don’t like. For communication and social media, use only open and decentralized servers/protocols. Use as much end to end and strong encryption as possible. Minimize your data footprint. Buy from local and ethical shops. Be the change you want to see in the world.
How have you chosen to deal with it?
Moving back to analog wherever I could, re-learn and re-use the old ways as much as possible. And also taking back control, and ownership, over my tech.
I’ve been using a computer since the early 80s and have been online regularly probably somewhere around the late 80s, first through BBS. Luckily for me, while I was self-learning that new computer and digital stuff, I was also taught the classic ‘analog’ ways of doing things. Things like writing longhand, or using snail mail. So, the moment I realized I could not trust nor agree with techs, I started:
- Using physical and/or low-tech objects wherever and whenever I can.
- I got rid of all streaming and subs, an always growing, always less privacy friendly (and more expensive) list of services and apps.
- After years mostly reading ebooks, I moved back to reading actual print books, and using physical media for music and movies (discs).
- Relying less on a computer on my everyday life. Doing math in my head instead of needing that high-tech crutch that is a calculator. Using an actual dictionary to lookup for a definition (a paper dictionary does not track what word I’m checking, like no print book is reporting back what I’m actually reading), Stopped relying on a spellchecker (aka, improve my writing skills and also learn to be fine with doing as few mistakes as I can even more so in foreign languages like English). Small things like that.
- Use older tech (more repairable, sustainable, less connected) wherever I can. See, I recently purchased a 90s digital voice recorder that uses good old AA batteries (that last for months, plural), that requires no Internet connection to operate and no subscription either (so there is no tracking going on, no constant updates or security threats, and there is no ads). Sure, it doesn’t have the latest and greatest AI summarizing tool but… I don’t care. And I certainly don’t want AI to feast on my own voice, nor on my most personal notes, doing god knows what with them.
- Use Free Libre software instead of the most widely known proprietary ones. Apps and tools that respect my privacy and my rights as a user.
After 40+ years being an Apple user, a few years ago I fully switched to GNU/LInux and to Libre software. My only regret? I should have switched years earlier. - Last but certainly not least, I barely use my phone at all. On mine, there is only a handful of apps I need to have access to (finance/security/pro stuff). There is nothing personal, not even ebooks or music, and certainly no social or games. The phone is the least trustworthy of all the ‘digital’ device I own, so it’s the one I use the less.
I use to love playing video games. When MMOS hit I was all for it. It would be like play D&D all the time with your friends. I just wanted to hang with my friends but the min/maxers hit and then the constant grind. I quit caring.
This is exactly how I feel right now.
I turned my hobby into a career and now I fucking hate it. Soulless evil billionaires turned it into a fucking dystopia machine. I really can’t see any exit from this other than changing my entire field. But, no other field I could work into would pay my mortgage and enable me to afford food.
You’d have to start at the bottom as well and that presents its own set of problems beyond financial ones. They trap us on these ladders and laugh at us.
I’m getting more involved in that I’m discovering more open source projects that I can support.
Open source really gives me hope. Instead of a profit motive, communities form and work together out of passion and dedication to a project or idea.
That’s really invigorating to me. And, in many ways, can often be a big fuck you to our capitalist overlords. I’m working on presentations and such to teach my friends and spread the word about various projects and better op sec to make it all the harder to harvest our data.
I’m dealing with it by spending my time around you fellows. It feels like the old days of the internet over here, back when it was just us nerds. Honestly though? I feel like I’m going to end up one of those Amish like hermits, living in the woods and swearing off technology. Especially when the surveillance becomes suffocating.
Self hosting, trying to get progressively more serious about privacy and security.
I’ve gotten into Amateur Radio, you need a license to transmit but you gain access to a lot of cool stuff. The Ham bands are a non-commercalized space where experimentation and the sharing of technical knowledge are highly esteemed. There’s no ISP or hidden tech bro to moderate the experience, your limits are your skill, equipment, and the privileges of your license. On High Frequencies there are propagation effects that cause your signal to travel thousands of miles enabling the potential for worldwide communications given proper conditions.
Not OP, but, thank you for this, I will take a look at Amateur Radio.Got any advice (or more like pointers) for self hosting, privacy and security? To me, it seems like a huge effort, both to learn and to keep it up.
My biggest pointer would be to look at it as a journey rather than a destination. You’ll never be a ghost online or self-host everything. But you can mitigate a lot more than you might imagine. Get an old pc to use as a server and experiment with a few services. Start with Jellyfin in a Podman container and then maybe try Pihole. It can take a lot of time to setup initially when you dont know what you’re doing but it gets easier.
Okay, thank you, will try to get an old pc when I can afford one to experiment with these and some others things
We should built our own internet, with blackjack and hookers!
I have thought about this also. Especially when it comes to mobile technology. For most of my career I have been an advocate of mobile technology like smartphones, I have recommended it, I have set it up for people, and now I look at the world and honestly wonder if we wouldn’t be a better place without smartphones.
Thing is, we are iron mongers. We build tools. We give people tools. “It is not the tool that determines its work, it is the mind mind of the man who holds the tool that does.” (-Brannon LaBoeuf).
Does that absolve me of all responsibility? No not a chance. But it does offer s or a suggested path forward.
The harm that comes from computing for the most part, IMHO, doesn’t come from users. It comes from people who exploit the users and users who don’t realize they are being exploited. Meta, TikTok, Snap, Google, etc. these are the guys causing the problem.
So as technologists, we have an opportunity to change course. To show those who rely on us ways to use technology without being exploited. Yeah I realized to some degree it’s a drop in the ocean, trying to piss up a rope but there are little victories to be had.
In short, be the change.
Yeah, for ages I thought pocket computers were the coolest idea. I loved my Palm devices, for instance!
The iPhone turned everything into a direct brain-line to exploitative commercial interests and that became the norm. I think that’s where things went wrong.
The economy of attention has been one of the most destructive forces of our modern culture.
“Smartphones” would look a lot different if they were designed as tools for users, instead of profit farming equipment for tech giants. I don’t think we would be seeing nearly as much harmful addiction and spying and de-educating if these stupid things weren’t designed primarily for “maximum engagement at all costs.”
Some of these little victories I’m seeing are Linux phones and people designing cyberdecks!
I think you’re on the right track, but I wouldn’t blame the iphone. The iphone was just a natural evolution of what came before it- Windows Mobile, PalmOS, etc. Even on those platforms we were starting to see things like gestural navigation. Iphone was just one of the first to trade a single-touch resistive touchscreen for a multi-touch capacitive touchscreen and go all in on gestural.
No, the problem is engagement algorithms. I blame Facebook for this most of all.
Go back quite a ways and Facebook wasn’t the mess it was today- you’d go there and see a simple time-ordered list of posts by your friends (and that’s it). I believe people still want that. But the problem is you can ‘catch up’ on that-- hit the end of new content, to what you’ve already seen last visit, and then you leave. Thus it’s generally no longer an option on any social site, you instead get a ‘feed’ of some friends’ content mixed with random crap the system thinks you’ll engage with (and it learns quickly). That was starting to be a thing on desktop- I’m reminded of this video from when Facebook started pushing ‘timeline’ feeds on people rather than just simple posts. Original iphone was only 2007.
THAT is the problem IMHO. Smartphones just happened to show up at the same time, so instead of being a time-suck on your desktop those algorithms became a central line IV to time-suck your brain all the time. Algorithms were the problem, smartphones were the force multiplier.
With that said- I don’t think smartphones are the problem today, but I do think that the overall ecosystem favors the time-suckers too much. For example I think every smartphone should have the option to deny Internet access to every app (BlackBerry had that back in the day). And if that screws up your ad supported business model too fucking bad, just make the app refuse to work without Internet and enjoy your 1 star reviews.
I think half the problem is platforms that entrap people. My partner for example (much less tech savvy than myself) has 1000s of photos in Facebook, because that used to be where it’s easiest to make and share albums. Getting those out of Facebook while keeping the album structure or the comments from others would be very difficult, and Meta wants it that way.
Same thing with Google- they make it real easy to upload all your photos (which has the fun side effect of giving Google a location graph of your entire travel history, and a social graph of everyone you know).The other half is as you say, attention suckers. I don’t think the phone is itself designed for attention sucking (it’s just a little computer with a touchscreen and a wireless modem), but the apps sure as hell are.
Fixing the first is at least possible for technologists. Self-host, show people alternatives.
Fixing the attention problem is much, much, much harder. It starts with kids- kids grow up with ‘digital babysitter’ ipads, and if you see any of the kids ipad and video programming it might as well be brain-frying crack for kids (bright colors, playful music, quick scene changes). So kiddo’s brain is fried from 2-3yo on up. I know a few teachers and I can say parents DGAF about education anymore, when a kid does badly the teacher is more likely to get yelled at for giving a bad grade to their perfect little schnookums who tried as hard as he could. It’s now policy that kids who don’t pass will just be rubber stamped to the next grade- again and again. I read an article a few months ago that college professors are having to rework their curriculums because many of the college students can’t read (or are scoring at middle school level for reading comprehension).
You can pass a law banning phones in schools but what the hell difference does that make if the kid goes back on TikTok the second the bell rings and never cracks a book?
I don’t know what the answer there is. But I know it requires some serious societal-level rethinking, including accepting that it’s okay to be bored.
Right there with you! The “attention economy” has absolutely wreaked havoc on humankind. They’re at the core of all of this.
I suppose the reason I put so much blame on the devices is because of all these little design choices with both the hardware and the OS.
For example: Not having access to the file system, the radios always being on, being very anti-repairable, and like you said, apps not being sandboxed by default.
kids grow up with ‘digital babysitter’ ipads, and if you see any of the kids ipad and video programming it might as well be brain-frying crack for kids
THIS so much! We’re gonna be an iPadless household, and I’m telling everyone: If they gift anything cocomelon or equivalent, it’s gonna go right back, thanks but no thanks.
Yeah, education has also been seriously screwed up, I could write entire paragraphs about that too. From “no child left behind” to “whole-word reading” dropping phonics (someone shared an excellent podcast series called “Sold a Story” about that disaster. Basically it taught kids to read like your phone keyboard predicts words. Exactly as insane as it sounds.)
A lot of education has to happen in the home, and we’re several generations into practically unparented kids, whether just plain negligent and broken households or mom and/or dad both slaving their lives away at careers, unable to do any actual parenting and expecting the abused employees of the sabotaged barely-limping school system to do it for them.
But I know it requires some serious societal-level rethinking, including accepting that it’s okay to be bored.
I know we often don’t see it, but there are a lot of bright young people out there, and they inspire others to be bright. I remain optimistic.
And I agree…I think people need to learn to sit with boredom and channel that, without a thousand expensive keys jangling in their faces the whole time. :)
I appreciate the thoughtful reply!
I also appreciate the thoughtful conversation. It’s sadly rare these days. I was on Reddit since before the Digg migration, I fell in love with the place becuase there was always good conversations happening. Sadly now it’s mostly just noise. Lemmy seems a little better.
I disagree about your analysis of hardware though. Some of that applies to Apple perhaps, but not Android. I have filesystem access on my phone. Radios can be turned off if I want. There’s full service manuals available, as well as spare parts and tools/jigs so I can fix it myself if I want. And apps ARE sandboxed, although I wish there was more control on the sandboxing (IE firewall for internet disable).
Problem with that last one is it largely kills ad supported apps as a business model. If the app doesn’t inherently need Internet to work, user will shut it off and then it can’t serve ads. I’m not sure that’d be a bad thing, but it’d require some rethinks.
THIS so much! We’re gonna be an iPadless household, and I’m telling everyone: If they gift anything cocomelon or equivalent, it’s gonna go right back, thanks but no thanks.
Hope your kids know how lucky they are.
A lot of education has to happen in the home
That’s true, but it’s largely not happening. I know some people who work in education. It’s now official policy to rubber stamp kids into the next grade if they aren’t passing- someone decided that it’s more socially damaging to hold a kid back than it’s worth. So kids get behind and never catch up but they keep getting rubber stamped through the system.
I think people need to learn to sit with boredom and channel that
Quite true. I struggle with this. It’s so easy to just fire up instagram or something. But you’re right, bordem leads to creativity.
This reminds me of a book I read many many years ago, it was a scifi book of some kind. The story as I recall- this dude gets kidnapped by aliens for some reason, they explain that they were debating blowing up the Earth because we were making too much tech progress too fast and civilizations that do that usually become a threat to their neighbors once they have weapons and stellar travel without the maturity that should go with it. But they found a different solution- they sent someone to Earth in disguise to invent television and slow down the rate of our advancement. Only then we created computers and people started getting smarter and progress accelerated again so they were worried they’d have to blow up the planet.
I think of that story and wonder, ‘if that were a true story, I bet their second solution was to invent social media’.Back in the early days of Reddit there was a thread, what would be the hardest part of modern tech to explain to someone 100+ years ago?. Highest voted answer was something like ‘everybody carries in their pocket a device that cost hundreds of billions of dollars to develop. It can quickly access and display any piece of knowledge or art or music known to man, it can communicate in real time with anyone else on the planet, and it contains the equivalent of a full photography studio, movie editing room, and can publish to the entire world. We all use them to argue with strangers, publish photographs of our food, and look at pictures of cats.’
They way I see it, computers are tools. They can just as easily be used for good as evil.
If people were going around smashing vehicles with hammers, we would (hopefully) work on better law enforcement than ban hammers. Same sort of thing with computers, we need standards and regulations.
I think the actual reality is that governments and justice systems were designed for a pen-and-paper era where letters were still delivered by horsedriven stagecoach.
I think that’s the real task: designing a new type of democratic governance that can keep up with the speed of societal change and technological change.
“The gears of justice turn slowly” made sense in the stagecoach era, because life moved slowly. It does not make sense in an era where we can disseminate information worldwide instantly for pennies.
