Does anyone else feel as if it’s over when it comes to really owning your own things?
As of now:
- You don’t have the option of having a phone with decent specs and replaceable parts
- You have to have really good knowledge in tech to have private services that are on par with what the big companies offer
- You have to put up with annoying compatibility issues if you install a custom ROM on your android phone
- You cannot escape apps preventing you from using them if you root your device
- Cars are becoming SaaS bullcrap
- Everything is going for a subscription model in general
And now Google is attempting to implement DRM on websites. If that goes through, Firefox is going to be relegated to privacy conscious websites (there aren’t many of those). At this point, why even bother? Why do I go to great lengths at protecting my privacy if it means that I can’t use most services I want?
It sucks because the obvious solution is for people to move away from these bullshit companies and show that they actually care about their privacy. Even more important is to actually PAY for services they like instead of relying on free stuff. I’m not optimistic not just because the non privacy conscious side is lazy, but because my side is greedy. I mean one of the most popular communities on lemmy is “piracy” which makes it all the more reasonable for companies not to listen to privacy conscious people.
I wouldn’t say that this is the endgame but in this trajectory, privacy is gone before 2030.
You will forever have these feelings, if you have a better world than the status quo in mind. Be careful to not be overwhelmed by them, if you suffer too much long term you could give up or become a cynic. Nothing is perfect, we strive to make better systems (and smartphones).
No just don’t pretend we live in a dystopia, things could be worse. Could be better as well though…
I find it hard to play make believe as an adult.
I mean “You’re right. Everything is fine.”
People who use the word Utopia like this don’t seem to be that familiar with what Utopia was actually described to be like in the story the word came from.
I think “utopia” is actually a pretty apt description of what tech companies would like society to be like. An isolated island, with strict hierarchies if who control who, severe punishments for dissenters, a slavery based economy. Removal of the people who become a burden through willing euthanasia or other means, a lack of private property, with travel between sections restricted by internal passports. It seems control and a hard-working, sheepish population are what Utopia thrives on.
By all means, I think the Chinese state is the closest to the description of Utopia. Utopia is quite dystopic!
You have to at least be able to imagine a utopia to begin creating one, just being unhappy about our collective distopia isn’t gonna help anyone. Systems created and made up of people can be destroyed by people, it’s very difficult but it can be done, and if we think we’re in a dystopia there’s good reason to destroy some systems.
Cynicism, i.e. the view that everyone else has base motivations, is the definition of a self-fulfilling prophesy. You’re cynical? Well, soon everyone around you will be too, and where will we be then? All the politicians are crooks and phonies? Well, they sure will be soon if everyone voting for them thinks that. In fact, as far as I can see, cynicism is the rule across the world, and look at the state most countries are in. For comparison (there aren’t many), check out the world’s least cynical countries - i.e., those with the highest social trust, where people believe that “others are basically good”, where they trust their politicians. I won’t name them (you can guess them) but those countries just happen to have the best indicators on pretty much every measure of success - not just economic wealth but also all the social indicators and indeed happiness. To me at least, the connection is plain obvious. Being a cynic is a choice, and a completely counterproductive one if you want to see good things in the world.
Skepticism, on the other hand? I’m all in on that.
Graphene OS does a great job of protecting your privacy. Although, since it doesn’t rely on google services, unless you want to sandbox some, most of the time you don’t get push notifications. Which isn’t that bad.
And in terms of actually owning things, instead of relying on subscriptions services, that’s what Web3/NFTs are trying to solve. Despite the fact that everyone loves to shit on them, and they’re in their infancy, their utility far exceeds overpriced pictures. Right now you have to indefinitely subscribe to Netflix or Prime to access movies and shows you’ve already paid for, but if you bought an NFT of the movie, no one could gate keep that media from you. Musicians could cheaply disburse their songs to people and not be price gouged by Spotify, and any digital asset you bought would truly be yours, including video games and their skins/weapons/pets/etc, with the ability to resell those as you saw fit. As well, there would be an incentive for the studios that create this media to make them into NFTs, because unlike with physical copies, they would make a cut of every single sale that happens. So, they’d make money on the initial sale, and then a cut of you selling to a friend, your friend selling to someone else, ect.
What I think it, ultimately, comes down to is people getting, too, complacent and just accepting any ToS that’s thrown in their face, because they can be dozens of pages long, and we just want to use the service right then and there.
+1 for GraphineOS, but I can’t get behind NFTs. The technology is cool, but for me, the definition of “owning” something includes not only the ability to view it, but also the ability to modify it. If I own an NFT of a song, then I could listen to the song, but I still couldn’t, say, make a remix of it, which for me is the entire point of owning it in the first place.
Completely agree in substance and spirit, but not on this framing of everything as about ownership. Personally I don’t want to “own” data any more than I want to own a car. What I want is control, rights, privacy and personal freedom. The ownership obsession seems to me a red herring that just proves how much we’ve been taken in by consumer capitalism.
Forgive the rant. I agree with you on the substance.
Me too. I just want people (and the businesses they run) to deal with me honestly and fairly. If C-suite execs and investors were named and shamed over and over again, even for the little things, they might grow a heart and learn to build humane companies. Co-Ops give me hope. Free Geek in the Pacific Northwest. Independent book shops and restaurants. Qwant, MetaGer and Brave search and ublock origin and Mozilla and the fediverse give me some hope.
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Fairphone exists
As someone who has a Fairphone 3: they destroyed any trust I had in them the moment the FP4 came without headphone jack and with a different form factor. I thought that their idea would be that each module could be upgraded independently. That’s what would make their offering truly innovative and eco-friendly. By departing from that, they simply became a manufacturer of overpriced phones with slightly better ethics.
ROM quality depends on your make and model,
I am using /e/OS since when I got the FP (what, 3 years ago?) and to this day the applications that need GPS are completely unreliable. I gave up on using bikesharing systems here because their apps simply fail all the time to get my location.
but they give you a ton of hardware for free
It’s not free. There is no marginal cost in what they are doing. This is all a cash grab and an attempt to further segment the market.
Everyone wants music, nobody wants to buy CDs, nobody wants to buy MP3s, and all that’s left is subscriptions.
If the lion share of music revenue went to artists, you can bet that more people would pay for it. But we know for years that this is not the case. Same for movies.
I don’t know anything about Fair phone’s modules and uogradeability, all I know is that you can buy replacement parts which is better than most other brands.
I know /e/ is far from perfect (they’ve lagged behind for years) but I don’t believe that’s the OS FF themselves support either. I just know it comes closest in terms of integration compared to stock Android. How well it works differs strongly per device, some work perfectly out of the box while others have nonfunctional hardware.
The cost of most car features is either upfront anyway (software stuff) or very minor (seat warmers). Sure, they sell you seat warmers for a couple grand or a major monthly fee, but resistive heaters really don’t cost all that much. There’s maybe $50 of hardware in a car that they will charge you ten times as much for if you buy the feature. I’m pretty sure they’re actually saving money by simplifying their supply lines and factory processes to just make a single type of chair.
I don’t think most people care all that much about artists. Most people I know just go to Youtube or Spotify because it’s free and easy. However, if you think artists get little money for CDs, you’ll be shocked to see the streaming situation. Streaming pays out MUCH less compared to physical media. If you want to support artists, go to their concerts, that’s where they rack in their cash.
I’m pretty sure they’re actually saving money by simplifying their supply lines and factory processes to just make a single type of chair.
My point is that if these types of features are so cheap to add, then why not just make it part of the standard package?If it costs $50 to make, add $100 to the price of the car and make a standard feature. This extreme segmentation just to squeeze more money is counterproductive.
if you think artists get little money for CDs, you’ll be shocked to see the streaming situation. Streaming pays out MUCH less compared to physical media. If you want to support artists, go to their concerts, that’s where they rack in their cash.
Yeah, I know. This is not a defense of streaming services.
Let me just spare a few dollars for privacy after paying for rent & groceries in my third world country currency.
What’s the alternative? Lemmy is run by the community and pretty much a labour of love, but everything fro phones to search engines is made by companies, not charities.
You can rely on open source, volunteer products if you want affordable privacy. That’ll deprive you of luxuries and it’ll require you to put in more work yourself, but it’s not the end of the world.
The alternative is putting pressure on companies to not succumb to greed and to go as far as enacting regulation to protect consumer interests. Paying some other companies to mitigate the harms of these companies while pretending that it’s a sensible solution to everyone is not my idea of solving a problem. You’re just sequestering privacy behind a paywall and pretending it’s all fine. It’s not; it’s elitist and plays into the pay-for-privilege that toxic capitalism breeds. Because let’s keep in mind that privacy–unlike the continuous stream of manufactured goods–is a choice that only needs to be made once.
- I know about Fairphone but the specs are a bit limited IMO.
- I do have a Pixel with the stock (I know bad idea) ROM but I rooted it. I do have the kdrag0n Safetynet fix, but there is one app that somehow finds out about it. I guess one app out of however many I have is not too bad now that I think about it.
- I haven’t really looked too far into this, but I assume that they build some tamper detection in the seat warmers (unless they’re incompetent or lazy). But the good news is that the seat warming subscription is no longer there.
- For this one I was just looking for things to complain about. I have no subscriptions for media and just buy the physical stuff (or digital from Bandcamp).
I guess it’s not a guarantee that DRM would be that proliferated and I can avoid it. I was being way to pessimistic at the time.
Thanks for uplifting words mate!
It’s the #enshitification of everything. I listened to an interview with SAG-AFTRA by a new podcaster trying to survive and just when they start talking about the investors and products admitting to trying to build out till October when actors and writers start getting evicted… then some Amazon streaming services ad. And it happened again towards the end. And no warning or apology or mindfulness from the podcaster. So so depressing. The interview was great and happy to have heard it. Wish I could get access to information unpolluted by advertisement and capitalism. Thank goodness for the fediverse.
