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.
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.
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.
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.
+1
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.
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.
Computing itself is fine. I can still do most everything I used to do on my PC pre-popular internet. I have essentially no cloud services on my PC.
However, the internet itself is a dumpster fire. It always was, except you had to deliberately looking for those places and they tended to be isolated back in the day.
Of course monetization destroyed the internet with corporations doing everything possible to carve it up and shove their ads and billionaire-controlled media slant in front of you, and their engagement-bait feeding of lies and giving a platform to controversy and stupidity on social media.
Most all of the good spaces are gone. Very few exist in anything remotely close to their original form, they’ve been corporatized, disappeared, or swallowed up by places like Reddit.
Leaving IT. Gardening. Trading pc nerdery for soil science nerdage.
What of you’re in IT and are ready to leave but don’t like gardening or woodworking?
I still like electricity. Maybe I can be a part time electrician.
Check your local IBEW to see if they have any apprenticeships.
You too? I don’t have any soil so my garden is all in pots, but it’s doing good. The tulips were glorious - I love a tulip - my first rose flowered yesterday, my opium poppies are thriving, and my tomato seeds finally germinated.
These days I only use a computer for minimum essential work stuff, and my steam deck. I work outdoors too. I have less money but I’m fitter and happier.
Edit - if you’re into soil science, two words - compost toilet. Total game changer.
Edit - if you’re into soil science, two words - compost toilet. Total game changer.
I’m actually debating between bokashi or traditional composting; probably going to end up doing both. Pretty sure my wife would veto a composting toilet.
Today’s our wedding anniversary so maybe I’ll ask for a composter and bokashi starter kit to celebrate 11 years.
Here’s some of our gardens and a WIP greenhouse.
Wow, that looks gorgeous! I’m in a different situation, because everything has to be in pots. You can see the lavender in the foreground just getting going, the orange flowers are mostly calendula and California poppies. The tree is a cherry - looks like it’ll fruit this year! And I’ve got a couple of bonsai apples. Tomatoes and chillies are still germinating, I’ve got a tiny greenhouse for them. The red flower is a rose, first of the season. Tulips are pretty much finished, and daffodils are looking gone. I’ve done gladioli on the way tho. With so much stuff and so little space I have to feed them, I use an organic seaweed thingie.
I love your container garden! Everything looks happy. I’m excited for you getting cherries. It gets too cold for most fruits here but that’s why we got the greenhouse.
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
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.
I was looking for a tech positive outlook and found solarpunk for myself. Since then I’ve learned a lot that doesn’t have to do with tech, but also on the topic of how technology can empower people. It helps I was already an environmentalist before.
I started looking a lot more into contributing to open source projects. I started looking into decentralized networks like lora radios. I self host a lot more. Got rid of Google on my phone…
Biggest issue is the job. With my attitude change my well paid corporate tech job has become soul sucking.
I’m really enthusiast about open source and free software.
Software corporations can go fuck themselves for all I care.
I grew up as a computer nerd kid in the 90s with my first computer being a 386 DX 66mhz off brand IBM PC clone with 8mb ram.
I was put on this earth to do computer stuff no doubt about it. I was the first on my block with dialup. I was the first on my block with DSL. I was the first kid on my block with cable internet. Taught myself C when I was 15 and and a software engineer professionally over a decade without any college education.
With that being said, what we call “AI” (LLMs) completely exhausts me and I have absolutely no interest about AI garbage. I am depressed because AI exists to cheapen literally everything I have a passion for.
When I was young I always wanted to be at the head of technology and always stay up to date with it I’d read books and news daily. Always had a genuine passion for it, but I can’t stand it now.
I just stay stuck in the 90s and play old consoles like PlayStation and N64. That gives me comfort and I know there’s no AI slop in those games.
We have similar stories! Except I was way out in the country where the fastest internet available was 26.4kbps dialup (the phone lines were too old to support anything faster and there was no cable). Mine was an overclocked 486 IBM clone with 8mb ram and like 600 or 800 MB HD.
I recently saw a colleague post on that one professional network that “he guessed he wouldn’t get to write code himself anymore”. That’s depressing as hell to me. Everyone’s minds work differently. I find that writing code gives me new ideas that I wouldn’t have come to otherwise. It’s a loss of creative process. And it’s tragic. Like sometime saying “I guess we won’t paint any paintings ourselves anymore”. What an incredible tragedy.
If someone picks up a chair and hits a person with it, is the chair now evil? Should you avoid using chairs because of the potential hurt they can cause? Computers are the same.
Focus on the positive and don’t dwell on the negative. Play games, tinker with hardware and open-source software. Get off platforms like Reddit/Lemmy where negativity is much more pervasive.
Of course, if you find yourself “recoiling from all online spaces” then consider alternative hobbies that give you the same level of satisfaction.
I am lucky that I got a job that is, if not doing good, at least not doing something evil. And I get to play with cool hardware. Not something practicable for everyone, I know. But those jobs are out there.
Besides, I have met many people with similar feelings recently. You are not alone. I don’t know how to find those people where you live. But for instance, there are many people helping worthwhile causes with the tech side.
Personally, I might have to use two phones in the future, kind of like how I saw some do in China. One for the official, mandated bullshit, and one for personal things, with an operating system that does not snitch on every action I take.
Personally, I might have to use two phones in the future, kind of like how I saw some do in China. One for the official, mandated bullshit, and one for personal things, with an operating system that does not snitch on every action I take.
but how will you make sure the mandatory phone does not snitch on you when it’s around you? Considering you’ll probably keep it at home, maybe even bring it with you when out and about when needed for some reason.
It will snitch on me, it already does. Somehow we accepted that constant tracking is a cool feature and not a horrifying virus. But it can’t see what happens on the other phone, right? And, I can still turn it off, keep it in a drawer, and that limits most of the tracking. Still, not impossible, but much harder.
you can’t actually turn it off unless you can disconnect all power sources
True.
But off is a lot better than on, still. Modern high-speed radios use quite a bit of juice. So at most, it would keep some microcontroller on for predefined functions, and wake up every now and then. It simply isnt practical to keep the big stuff on for more than a few days or so.
If you want to avoid even that, get a phone with removable battery. Or put it in a metal box. A tin can with a bit of aluminium foil around the seal gets you 60+ dB dampening.
Don’t let perfect be the enemy of good.
Make new hobby gym. All health. No evil.
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.
