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).
I find it hard to play make believe as an adult.
I mean “You’re right. Everything is fine.”
No just don’t pretend we live in a dystopia, things could be worse. Could be better as well though…
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.
Honestly? As I get older and as the tech industry chokes itself to death in pursuit of infinite profit, I find myself doing more and more things away from the computer or the internet at the very least. Spending time outside doing stuff, exercising, reading books, partaking in art or other creative pursuits, having pets, etc. I have really dialed back my social media involvement and I hardly ever use my phone now.
The internet is absolute garbage now. It’s a completely unregulated trash fire that is only getting hotter as more gasoline gets dumped on it. The internet I grew up with, the internet of seemingly endless possibility and unfathomable amounts of information, is long gone. Search results (from any engine) are all SEO trash, websites are just AI-generated garbage covered in ads, and every app or service is a subscription that promises to suck even more money out of my bank account for basic services. Not to mention that all of the above will also monitor every single bit of my activity and sell it to third party buyers. If tech is just going to exist to be an ad-delivery platform then I can do without it. People did for decades, centuries, and we can too.
This bubble is going to pop eventually. It not might be today or tomorrow, but it is going to happen. This is not sustainable.
The internet is absolute garbage now
Well, it always was. The internet was always filled with low effort webpages with ads from top to bottom. The only change is that as people got better at avoiding the old scams, new ones appeared with better CSS and more psychological manipulation.
ad-delivery platform
It is basically this. Most websites just try and dig into your profile, masking it as “personalized customer service”, but the real intention is to know what you do, who you talk to, and try to sell you goods & services.
It definitely wasn’t always that. Sure, there were lazy, greedy, fuckers in the early internet putting up crap content and “you’re the 1 millionth visitor, you win an iPhone!” Pop-ups, but for a good decade or more the internet was filled with passion projects. Websites and services built from passion and desire, not for an endless pursuit of money. When corporations were ignoring the internet as a fad, it was a remarkable place. Once they realized how much money Google and MySpace were making, they all jumped in head first and began the rapid enshitification of the digital frontier. The same type of people that ruined the physical frontier ruined the digital one as well. Pinche jotos.
Not always. Believe it or not it used to be kinda like it is now, here.
With the technical barriers to entry pre AOL the people online were outcasts, nerds, and science departments at universities. The ad driven model is the attempt to lower barriers of entry make profit of that and not the other way around. Lots of the Internet ran on generosity and donations.
It’s been shittier every day after there was an agreement on how to monetize though. The people at the start didn’t ever have the guarantee it would get adopted, so for all the idealism we deal with their compromises.
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.
They don’t. People don’t care, don’t understand, and don’t care that they don’t understand. The average person is oblivious of the way the world around them works, and they’re okay with that. Ignorance is bliss, after all.
The truth makes for tough reading. Now for the good news: imagine all the free software you use every day, and all the people who built it with passion and countless hours of hard work, and - not least! - how much more powerful that software is than it was even a decade ago.
It seems that the ignorant masses are not entirely in the driving seat, right?
Ignorance goes both sides though, free and open source has dark aspects to it. The assumed security has no one to hold to account, and for profit companies has real leverage over projects and can hurt the ecosystem if given a chance. Add to that how lax the wider community attitude is to breaking licences and you have a ecosystem that can fail if all you do is assume good faith.
Remember to keep an open mind to everything and not just the things in life you have a particular issue with. Everyone is ignorant to something.
It comes in cycles. 20 years ago, it was a struggle to maintain your digital freedom. 10 years ago, when everyone was basking in free software and low interest rates, it was quite easy. The industry is contracting again, so it’s going to be harder to do so while using commercial offerings. But we will find ways and the cycle will repeat.
Persist.
Ughhh long story…
It was the height of the Desktop era. Everything ran locally, and that meant Windows. OS X just got started. Everyone was predicting smartphones, but they were a decade out (note time travellers: drop the fucking stylus). Linux was unbelievably shit. Very few drivers, you had to carefully pick your hardware. External devices were a luxury. Printing mostly didn’t work, USB printing was bragging rights. You had to buy modems with a hardware DAC, else it was done in the driver which worked only on Windows. GTK kinda just went from v1 to v2, everything looked 10 years outdated, and even Firefox had glitchy UI on Linux. If you could insert a CD and get it to show up without manually mounting, you were staring into the future.
The Web was on hold, Microsoft having won the browsers wars pt. 1, and proceeding to stall with Internet Explorer 6, correctly predicting that browsers would compete with their hegemony in the client space. There were no services: GMail and Youtube were just getting started. You ran local programs, and there were barely any for Linux. The choice was between booting Windows and dicking with cracks from Astalavista, and booting Linux to rice your E16, then staring at it. General productivity software was almost non-existent — you had a dozen compilers and interpreters instead. Where I’m from, banking required desktop software which required windows, not to mention smart cards, which also required windows.
This was made worse by the proprietary formats, which were the key to maintaining stranglehold. Everyone was emailing .docs around, which you could sometimes open with Abiword or maybe dump just the text and Antiword. Even the PDF viewers were a bit crap. Had to submit a report? You probably booted Windows in a virtual machine to use Office, and the CPU was yet to add instructions helping with that. Media was even worse; everything was MPEG and required royalties. LAME Ain’t an MP3 Encoder because it wasn’t allowed to be. RIAA/MPAA were fighting hard to keep you buying physical shit. Meanwhile, you could only play Tux Racer and Nethack.
Around that time, Microsoft was about to introduce Palladium, an attestation chain rooted in hardware. Everyone was despairing about the same future: in 3-5 years, Microsoft would use it to pull in and segregate an increasing portion of the Internet, until the whole became their walled garden. Hope that sounds familiar.
Meanwhile, older penguins just didn’t give a fuck. They simply didn’t use the shit they couldn’t use, and missed none of it. They worked to extend what they had, the digital commons.
No one could stand TVs, so as an act of disobedience, we invented p2p piracy. Napster, DC, torrents — which are alive and kicking. Xiph gave no fucks and started working on free media codecs. Vorbis became CELT became OPUS. Tarkin became Daala became (merged into) AV1. Youtube is now serving OPUS and VP9 or AV1; our best codecs trace their lineage to DIY stuff done to avoid proprietary formats. H.266 can, and will, fuck off. PDF is everywhere. Jimbo started Wikipedia. Flash went away. The modern web happened. Linux grew up and I don’t even notice I’m using it. Free software ate nonfree in most domains; the gardens are now walled through access, not by being built on proprietary stacks. Massive progress happened.
Now that the digital world runs on services — which were a clever ruse to subvert old free software (Google runs on Linux, remember?) — someone is threatening to close a few pipes. So what? Just look at the fucking size of those commons that we have created. Someone will claw back some of that… and? Worst case, we lose a few ways to waste our time, of which we have hundreds. Retract from the mainstream a little, again. Have some difficulties using a few services. Be careful which hardware we buy. Oh noez.
Shit changes constantly. Companies battle relentlessly to undercut one another. We invent workarounds and grow our knowledge. Relax, get yourself LineageOS+MicroG or GrapheneOS or even a Fairphone; get a Framework; use Fediverse; get off those services and sail the high seas where needed; use Linux+Firefox if you aren’t already; touch grass; and if someone tries to force you into extracting rent — refuse it.
Persist.
Fantastic write up. I first got a real taste of the Internet around 2003 when my parents finally relented and got dial-up from a local power company. We had dialup with the associated drawbacks for around 3 years until we got DSL in around 06. The ability to use the net when I wanted let me start learning how things worked, very slowly.
I do wish I’d had Internet access earlier and been a little bit older to experience the height of BBSes and the like, but I got to see the tail end of a different time in internet history, which I appreciate in itself.
Amazing post. As someone born in the 2000s, this is definitely an unknown story for me (I grew up with WinXP), and I didn’t get to live this virtual freedom revolution. I do remember that MS owned everything though, they were the big promise, the big company that made computers and the internet work. Microsoft was everywhere.
Definitely an interesting story, I will definitely continue supporting open standards and free software, possibly even contributing once I get better at programming ;)
