Hearing a song I liked and missing the opportunity to listen to it again later is not a serious issue, just another piece of straw on the camels back.
My point is that a lot of little inconveniences add up to a significant life-style change, especially when the end-user is supposed to choose that life-style change.
Just a few weeks ago I used a dumbphone for 2 days in the US.
During that time
- I was called for work while out and the caller expected me to review their email and respond while on the phone with them. This would have been easy with a smartphone, but instead I had to go home, review their email, then call them back the next day. They were annoyed by the inconvenience and delay.
- I was called to schedule a doctors appointment while out, I needed to call the office back when I got home because I could not check my calendar without a smartphone.
- I was working on a project and wanted to take a photos for memories / share when explaining why the project was taking so long. I needed to leave the project site, go home, grab my camera, return to the site, take the photos, upload them to my computer, then email them.
- I wanted to log in to an account while away home, but I was unable to access my password manager or email without my smart phone.
- My family went out to eat and I needed to borrow one of their smartphones because I could not scan the QR code for the menu and the restaurant did not have paper menus available.
- I needed to deposit a check, so I would have driven nearly 20 miles round trip if I had not used remote deposit on my smartphone instead.
- I wanted to listen to an audiobook from the library, but I need to use the overdrive / libby app in order to do this.
- I heard a song on the radio and I could not use Shazam to identify it.
- I needed to display a ticket for an event, so I had a friend save my ticket on their smartphone and they used their phone for both of us.
- I needed to read a smart home monitor, but the only interface available was a smartphone app.
- Discord kept crashing on my desktop, so I used my smartphone instead.
I gave up using a dumbphone after only 2 days because smartphones are integrated so deeply into modern society that it felt prohibitively difficult to function without one where I live in the United States. Everywhere a person goes it is assumed they have a smartphone on them, so anyone without a smartphone needs to find workarounds for simple tasks and is forced to navigate dozens of inconveniences every day.
I am spoiled and addicted to the convenience that smartphones provide, but my experience persuaded me that systemic changes, instead of individual choices, are necessary to ultimately solve these problems. Evidently, it can not be expected that a significant portion of the public will choose to abstain from the convenience smartphones offer even when they are educated about the harms caused by smartphones. Therefore, the only solution I can imagine is regulation to mitigate those harms, and humane technology design that solves the problems of profit-maximizing technology design.
The reason for the opioid epidemic is not because the medical system has clamped down on prescriptions.
Pharmaceutical companies lied to doctors and patients about how addictive opioids are. Then, a series of studies concluded that many people are living with untreated chronic pain; so prescribing opioids more frequently was advised by medical associations and public health authorities.
It was only a matter of time until the truth about opioids’ addictiveness became obvious and undeniable. Only THEN did the “whole” medical system start clamping down on opioids.
The Sackler Family (owners of Perdue Pharma) directly caused the deaths of millions of innocent people by misleading doctors, patients, and health authorities. The Sackler Family is spending millions of dollars to launder their reputation and prevent the public from associating them with the opioid epidemic and the millions of lives they ruined for profit.
Look into Nextcloud calendar, you can use the default calendar application on your phone / desktop while offline and it will automatically sync with your Nextcloud when connected to the internet. Hetzner Storage Share is an inexpensive Nextcloud host with calendar enabled by default.
I believe the greatest factor is community. In my experience wealthier people, and wealthier areas, tend to have less community and weaker interpersonal bonds because they do not depend on one another to the same extent that poorer people do.
When your neighbor needs to borrow a tool, you need to sleep at a friend’s place, or you give a friend a ride to work you’re building relationships. The web of relationships between all the neighbors in a community forms a culture.
When people become wealthier they don’t need to borrow tools because they can buy their own, they don’t need to crash at a friend’s place when they can stay in a hotel, and they don’t need a ride to work if they have their own transportation.
In my experience some of the isolating effects of wealth accumulation can be mitigated with infrastructure that increases the inter-dependence, trust, and fraternity between neighbors. A few examples are walkable cities, cooperative organizations, social clubs, public parks, etc…
Companies have brands, people have personalities.
I have read too many books evangelizing hustle culture, and I have listened to too many MBAs preaching “selling yourself” by “promoting your personal brand”. It’s bullshit, I’m a human being - I don’t want to sell myself, or spend countless hours crafting a narcissistic professional persona.
All I want is meaningful work, a modest livelihood, and a stable community. None of which requires fame, and it doesn’t require tracking my every keystroke. Exploitative tech companies are so desperate to chase infinite growth that they will sacrifice and erode everything that makes life worth living in pursuit of profit.
Is it really any wonder that people just want to use the internet without being data-mined, judged, and manipulated?
I’m not sure if this is exactly the sort of solution you need, but check out Loomio. It is open source and self-hostable.
Rclone is the best program I have used for any cloud storage needs, you should be able to mount your google drive using rclone. It is a CLI program, but it is very easy and intuitive to use. As an added bonus you can skip cryptomator and use rclone’s built in encryption.
A great book on the topic is Brotopia by Emily Chang.
This is exactly the type of info I was hoping to find, thank you!
I found only one Low-Income Designated CDFI in my area. I think there’s a real void here. I need to find a volunteer opportunity or another way to connect with financial leaders in my area to learn more about my local credit unions and maybe help direct more funds towards serving the community.
It’s kind of disappointing that there aren’t better options in my area, but it is also reassuring to know I’m not just cynical! Thank you!
Check out https://frame.work/ it’s a pretty high-end and completely modular laptop.
There’s https://www.mercuryos.com/
Mercury OS is a speculative vision designed to question the paradigms governing human-computer interaction today.
If you’re wanting to self-host a cloud service, then Nextcloud is second to none. You can use NextCloud together with Cryptomator for easy client-side encryption, but If you need automatic syncing look into rclone instead.
If you are planning to use this for backups, check out borg backup and vorta(easy to use GUI for borg).
At least in my circles and where I live it’s pretty normal to shit on mainstream apps. Most people still use them, but if my opinion of those platforms comes up I never feel judged. In fact, since the social dilemma came out and after Facebook’s most recent controversies and name change I’ve heard more and more people speaking poorly of social-media, smart phones, and algorithms in general.
In my experience it’s almost as if using social-media is perceived the same as smoking was in the 80s-90s: everyone knows it’s terrible for you, but it’s normal. Now, in conversation there’s almost a prestige in saying “I don’t use Facebook” that causes people who do use Facebook to immediately justify using it by saying things like “Yeah, I only use it to keep in touch with family”, or “I don’t check it very often”.
Many of my friends and family half-joke about their addiction to their phones and apps, it seems pretty widely recognized now.
I don’t believe alternative apps, services, and platforms are necessarily better, so if I bring up the fediverse it’s usually in the context of me advocating for government forcing interoperability between social media sites to weaken the tech-giant oligopoly. Most people’s response is basically “huh, I didn’t even know that was possible”.
For using Linux I used to catch flak from my friends when trying to play games with them, but we don’t play games nearly as often anymore and anything we do play generally works on Linux now, so I don’t get teased anymore. Amongst every single non-techie friend I have they could not possible care less that I use Linux.
In order to identify systemic / cultural discrimination against certain demographics. If these types of questions were never asked we would only have personal anecdotes to guide decision making.
e.g. We are better prepared to address the gender disparity within the industry when we have surveys and studies reporting the massive imbalance of men and women. By asking the same questions year after year we are able to tell whether diversity programs and policy changes are working.
My understanding is that voice interfacing is already the most common way to interact with a smartphone in China. Chinese (and other non-alphabetic languages) are notoriously tedious to type, and all sorts of keyboards have been invented to make it easier, but they all have a learning curve. Instead, it is far simpler to simply use voice recognition. Over the last decade many companies have pivoted their focus towards the Chinese economy, so a lot of the voice assistants, customer service platforms, and other software innovations we enjoy in the west are the direct result of companies trying to break into Chinese markets (and other emerging markets) with voice-driven designs that are accessible to billions of people for whom typing is an insurmountable friction.
Cliff Kuang and Robert Fabricant’s User Friendly is a really good book for learning about state of the art UI / UX design and the current trends that are likely to determine what our computer interfaces will look like in 2025 - 2030.
https://fuchsia.googlesource.com/ , Fuchsia - Wikipedia - Another really interesting project. This is Google’s new operating system they are building from scratch to replace Android, ChromeOS, Windows, and perhaps even server Linux. Fuchsia is being built from the ground up to replace the traditional desktop metaphor with a conversational or “story driven” metaphor instead. The ultimate goal is to be able to tell your computer in human language what you want it to do and have the computer do it. e.g. “Ok Google, open the survey results Sarah emailed to me. Ok, now plot a histogram with markings at each standard deviation, oh and a pie chart too. Great, save that and email it to Kyle.”
I’m not aware of what Microsoft, Apple, or any other tech giants might be working on, but Fuchsia is at least currently open source under BSD, MIT, and Apache 2.0 licenses.
I was looking into getting an eink display for my rasperberry pi so that I could have a minimalist terminal only computer similar to the light phone. Now, I’m really looking forward to getting a PineNote, loading a compatible distro on it, and avoiding having to build my own case!
Summary of the bill from Congress.gov -