This post and several comments agreeing with this I feel are made with some level of ignorance on “Civil Disobedience”.
Minimizing participation in the orphan-crushing machine but also debating politics on available platforms are not antithetical. Debating online is as important as doing the rest of the things that are perceived as “real” worthwhile pursuits. For instance: How can we pursue a cure for cancer if the political climate ensures scientists are scorned and distrusted? If evangelising about the “real” problems you care about is labelled as politics then can you really make progress without “political” action such as boycotting, protests and civil disobedience?
In the same vein, doing the small things in protest is the stepping stones to doing bigger things. It works the same way for any pursuit. Why shouldn’t I practice discipline with my disdain for all the evil in small ways while also pushing for more?
Jeff Bezos makes billions of dollars, But He didn’t get the $100 from me this year. Sure that sounds like a waste of time and energy for not much impact. But It didn’t cause me any hardship. But believe me that $100 had either a compounding effect on my own wealth this year or to some people i gifted essential food to. That impact was felt a lot more by me or one of the people i gifted food or essentials to.
Too bad they crushed all the old cars
Basically how i try to live my life! Buy physical media, setup a nas, unplug from the internet on most weekends (or limit it).
No. The capitalists are the problem. Not the tech grunts.
The idea that we can even DO anything about capitalism at this point is a forgone fantasy. Not to say we shouldn’t keep trying to push for a better, more equitable world until the time becomes more ripe to do away with personal gain above others, but we don’t get there all at once. There will be no revolution, nobody is coming.
But if we were to work together and firmly, decisively push actual, selected representatives into power who are committed to getting MOTHERFUCKING MONEY OUT OF POLITICS, that would bring a thousand miles closer to that ideal world we all want. Other countries have done it, but our problem in America is we have a population way too comfortable and atomized to ever band together and do this critically important thing.
I don’t have a way to reach enough people without some kind of massive disaster that forces people off their couches and makes food out of reach.
Oh, is that how we beat the Nazis? With half-assed reforms and vote organizing?
No, but keep enjoying feeling superior for knowing we need to do more while not doing more.
Please use windows XP and connect it to the internet and see what happens LOL
I connected win 98 to the internet yesterday. It was fine, and probably safer than win 11 is now. No built in Spyware either ha!
(Don’t use win 98 as your main os. I am partially joking and I only use it for running old programs and games.)
I’ve been hacked before #notfun
There are programs Searching for online old windows OS. You will be hacked sooner or later better to run linux and vm old windows instead. Putting old windows on the internet is like sticking your pp into Bonnie Blue without a condom and being the last man in line too.
I do use it within a vm on linux ha
That doesn’t count LOL
Yeah im not raw dogging it ha, unless I had my old hardware then I would
Don’t risk it they infiltrate your router too, happened to me.
Try to exist in any kind of life above “hippy with hemp clothes living in a yurt on their parent’s property and a trust fund” without things like a smartphone, a car and a computer.
I have. Nothing happened.
Oh well.
How about struggling but still extant written internet journalists? “Dumb” or simplified smart phones or e-ink devices? Modern iPod clones? The upcoming Slate car? A local LLM/voice assistant?
There are tons of neat alternatives to tech bros, the problem is attention. People just don’t know about them, so they don’t hit critical mass.
…I don’t have a good solution to this, but the attention economy is broke and following the herd is not working anymore. And there are solutions better than going backwards, but no mental energy to find them.
Who needs an iPod clone when you can literally buy an iPod, drop 1Tb of storage in it, and sync it to your library like you always could.
It’s stupidly easy to do, and those things are still rock solid. And you can put Rockbox on too, if you don’t want iTunes anywhere near your computer. Or you use Linux and can’t have iTunes.
Cutting out the middle man does not involve technologically regressing.
Cutting out the middle man means stepping up and learning how the tech you use in your daily lives actually works. The only reason some tech bro can step in and ruin your life is if you let them keep you ignorant through convenience.
You want to cut out the middle man? Use, and support, open source. Fight to make everything that requires a server, be a server that you own in your own home (or is federated and in your local community). Use, and support, repairable technology… And actually repair your technology!
They are too lazy for that.
does not involve technologically regressing.
The fallacy that technological progress is inherently good is simply flawed. You could say “instead of relying on Spotify, and instead of “technologically regressing”, learn open source alternatives and host your own Jellyfin server!”
But what was wrong with “technologically regressing” exactly? A MP3, CD or even tape recording player will: always work, sound great, require zero user friction, never receive updates or security flaws, not depend on a convoluted self hosted setup.
Do you want to listen to music or impress Lemmy? There’s absolutely no argument to be made that requires accepting all tech simply because it’s tech.
There’s absolutely no argument to be made that requires accepting all tech simply because it’s tech.
False dichotomy and a stupid comic strip making a stupid point all the way down.
If we cared about this issue we would be pushing for the installation of representatives who want to ban planned obsolescence and systems that require you to have the newest, most expensive vehicles, appliances and gadgets. Our current entire government is subservient to and employed by companies that make billions on this manufactured consent to always “needing” to spend our labor on useless junk.
To say nothing of the inherent, massive problem that we made it legal to buy and own politicians.
Yeah no. You just didn’t understand the comic and made a stupid point. It happens.
Okay, ya’ll kids keep arguing about “devices” while millions of people are forced to buy the newest phones so they can get their email and attend job interviews, while mountains of money get poured into politicians who are affording their fifth homes because Samsung pays them in wheelbarrows of cash to keep consumer protection agencies neutered or destroyed.
Oh look. Lol Amish 2.0
Calling somebody using a retro MP3 player “Amish 2.0” is as moronic as calling you a tech bro neuralink implanted Musk boy just because you’re defending technological progress. Both would be equally ridiculous statements, but the difference is, you actually wrote the moronic comment.
These technology phobes are the next generation who will be scammed out of their pension fund, inheritance or investments just like current boomers who refused to advance along with the world, and they deserve to be hacked, scammed, robbed because they refuse to keep learning.
Learn or get left behind.
It’s also a fallacy that technology always progresses. If technology from 25 years ago serves you better than technology from today, it’s the superior technology.
Exactly.
Technological progress isn’t inherently anything. It’s just technological progress; an inevitability. Fighting against it is like fighting the laws of the universe, if not outright stupidly phobic.
What defines the “goodness” of technology is how people choose to use it.
Everything more said is just pointless philosophical fluff.
Technological progress isn’t inherently anything
Exactly. So arguing that “you shouldn’t technologically regress” is meaningless.
Fighting against it is like fighting the laws of the universe
Not only is this not applicable to the argument at hand, given there’s no law of nature that makes a CD player implode just because Spotify exists, but this statement is so bizarrely wrong it’s almost hard to take the rest of the discussion seriously.
Exactly. So arguing that “you shouldn’t technologically regress” is meaningless.
Did you lose track of your own argument?
You assumed that I meant technological progress is inherently good. I said technological progress isn’t good or bad, just inevitable. That does not mean that technological regression isn’t inherently bad.
And yes, the CD player did implode, figuratively, because Spotify exists. :)
When ceiling fans and AC units requires an account, yeah, something’s wrong.
The morality of a technology is determined by those in control of it, and look who’s in control today.
Is this supposed to be satire? How is print media owned by massive conglomerates, flip phones with no OSS firmware, handwritten letters delivered by a literal middleman, avoiding the middlemen??
They’re not defining “middleman” in the traditional sense of an intermediary in an economic exchange. The first panel introduces a new definition of the term as a tech bro attempting to insinuate himself into the process of communicating with others. The remedies offered would indeed seem to preclude this type of middleman from interfering with the process.
No they wouldn’t. All of those products involve middlemen servicing content.
Again. It’s not saying there’s nobody else involved in the chain. It’s saying tech bro enshitification doesn’t have a way in. That’s the only problem it’s claiming to solve.
For instance, you don’t open up a paper book and have an AI window pop up on the page and offer to generate a summary of the book. You don’t take an ordinary pen to a sheet of paper and after two paragraphs have the pen say, “Subscribe to ink services to continue writing, start your free trial today?”
I see a few comments about self hosting stuff to escape the clutches of big tech, and while all that is effective to a high degree, it is beyond the abilities of the general populace.
Besides, I am also of the opinion that not everything has to be digital or smart.
I relish writing and receiving letters, it is tangible and indicates commitment. Fortunately, postal system isn’t going anywhere anytime soon.
I like reading newspapers and it was sad to see all shops in my neighbourhood stop selling them during or after COVID. It was equally sad to see a lot of magazines not survive that period.
I miss my old TV that was simpler to use and started quicker than my newer smart TV. It does not matter if I disconnect the latter from the internet, it takes its time to load up. Besides, I don’t see any perceivable difference in picture quality from the distance I watch from.
Older laptops, though heavier, were more repairable. In certain aspects, they are better than modern ones: more tactile keyboard, nicer screen ratio (4:3). Of course, the newer laptops decimate the old ones when it comes to performance and screen quality but that is just technology progressing.
I could keep going on with a plethora of product categories. But across all my points, I wish some companies could continue offering such products, at least to a customer base that is willing to pay more just to support the existence of those products.
I was with you until 4:3. You should be locked up.
On a more serious note: Framework laptops. More repairable than the laptops of yore, minus the soldered CPUs which seem unavoidable in laptops now.
lol.
To rile you up a bit, I wish I could say it is a subjective thing but 4:3 is the better option for laptops.
More vertical screen estate, given one would mostly be doing their reading, writing and browsing – activities that are traditionally vertically oriented.
Even most websites just centre their content and leave behind swathes of white/empty space on both sides.
Anything beyond those activities, one should be using a bigger screen (desktop or a TV)^^^.
Jokes(?) apart, Framework laptops are the best option for folks like us as it ticks the most boxes. But it is not available in the country where I live, and I don’t want to import it as it would be meaningless without its broader ecosystem. FWIW, I have dropped them emails every year requesting them to expand their presence in more countries.
Till then, old ThinkPads. They are cheap, have enough spare parts on the market even after almost 2 decades, and even come with the kind of keyboards and screens that I like. :-)
^^^This, unlike the text above it, is a subjective thing
P.S.
I always wanted to use superscript, subscript and horizontal line. Thanks to you, I got to use 2/3. :-)
Pre computerized cars is going to be pretty hard. We’ll run out of old beaters eventually.
They’re also less safe and efficient. They’re fun, but objectively worse cars to run nowadays that parts can also be hard to come by.
There is no lack of available parts for my 21 year old Chevy.
That was made this century. To go uncomputerized, we need to be looking at the 80s and back.
Cars with just efi and abs are avilable up to like 2019 before the gov made them put black boxes in.
I wouldn’t consider OBD-II computerized.
90s cars had GPS already. They’re pretty advanced, other than economy cars. 00s and on, they’re chock full of computers.
No they didn’t bud. Regular (working class, non tech) people in the 90s had never heard of GPS, had hardly heard of a computer. Outside of super niche luxury brands of cars, it wasn’t a thing at all.
I suppose that depends on the model you get. On my truck there is no GPS, no On Star, simple CD player deck, which I replaced with 3rd party deck.
Most my cars have been German. Even when there was no internet, they still had a fucktonne of computers. Think there’s about 25 ECUs in my 2007 shitbox.
That’s just false, and is also not the message of the article you linked.
The articles point is not that avoiding enshittification won’t make a difference in the amount of enshittification you experience: To the contrary, it affirms that it likely will! The articles point is that personally avoiding enshittification isn’t an effective way of combatting the ubiquity of enshittification in society, ie “consumer activism” and “voting with your dollars” cannot create system change.
Most everyone here already knows this, and I imagine you also understood the article just fine and don’t need me explaining it to you, but you botched the paraphrase in your link thus seeding a lot of potential confusion and frustration absent some clarification. This is intentionally a thread about personally avoiding enshittification, and that does not imply a rejection of the desire to also end it oestebsibly by other means.
Did you read it till the end?
Yes: We need structural remedies, not individuals opting out. But please tell me what your implied “gotcha” is supposed to be.
What a fantastic post, thank you for linking it!
Seriously though, I do think that it’s interesting that this comic and that essay seem to take up opposite positions*, but in each case they attract more contrary comments than ones that agree. I suppose no matter what you post, any given person is more likely to comment on it if it pisses them off than if it confirms their beliefs. It’s a good thing Lemmy doesn’t reward engagement, or else we’d be up to our eyeballs in ragebait, eh?
*Unless you read the whole thing instead of bouncing off the first paragraph.
on the other hand, there is generally not much to discuss if you have an agreeing position. right?
Sure, but where are the comments disagreeing with the disagree-ers? It’s all attack, no defense.
fair point, but to get there you must go to the comments to begin with, which I believe might be less likely you do when you don’t have something to say.
I think the issue people have with “tech” is that much of the software and devices sold take up too much space and do things people don’t want them to do, without offering choice, configurability, and options for full control
This is what I see whenever I see an apple device. There’s very little control that the user can exert that Apple hasn’t blessed to be something within your control.
All computers are general purpose logic machines and they’re intentionally making them not do things that they absolutely could otherwise do, just because.
Not saying iPhones are bad, or that Mac’s are bad… I’ve just noticed that if you do things in a way that is compatible with how Apple thinks you should do them, then Apple works very well for you. If you have foolish notions to do things differently (or, “think different”… If you will), then you’re going to have a bad time.
If you use homebrew you can install all kinds of things on a mac. So, you get the power of a Unix-based machine with the nice eye-candy, ease of use, rock solid drivers, etc. of an Apple device.
But, the phones are another matter. Those things are so locked down it’s ridiculous. We really need competition in the mobile phone OS market.
Yes, if you leverage the powers of root and you know what you are doing, you can endlessly modify MacOS to your heart’s delight.
I find most people don’t have that ability. They stick to the Apple app store and color inside of the lines that Apple has put down.
It’s no small feat to overcome some of the “safeguards” they have put in your way with modifying the device.
If you use an iPhone and you don’t like the Apple way of doing everything, your options are basically: 1. Tough shit, deal with it, or 2. Don’t use an iPhone.
Android has a lot of the same protections, but you can still, from the user interface, bypass a lot of it, by design. It’s “not recommended”, but you can do it.
Microsoft is trying to move towards what Apple is doing. The TPM requirement allows Microsoft to basically hold the keys to the kingdom, so to speak. What they’re aiming for is a root of trust (which is naturally, Microsoft), that allows all other things on your PC to run without warnings or dialogs, if they have been blessed by Microsoft’s certificate authority for code signing (which is a requirement for drivers, but not nearly as strict of a requirement for applications).
This is the foundation of the “trusted computing” thing that they’re pushing forward. The problem I have with “trusted computing” is who is issuing the trust? So far it seems like Microsoft is… Which is not great IMO.
However, since Windows is only requiring that level of trusted signature on code for drivers, we’re not to the same dystopia that MacOS has been “enjoying” for years.
I am now using lineage which is fine but still way too restrictive for my tastes. I tried using linux(postmarketos) as I am fine with a lot of inconveniences but was unable to make or take calls, which is kind of a hard line. There should just be an android based phone os which is degoogled and rooted by default, but really the problem lies with the hardware, I think. There need to be more phones with open firmware to make an alternative os really possible.
I’ve never been in an uber. Never used an Internet account to order food on an app. Never signed up to spotify or netflix. Never owned an alexis or siri.
I just stay away from that stuff… And it all first started with refusing to subscribe to World Of Warcraft. I stuck with World of Warcraft 2, and StarCraft. None of that big tech subscription nonsense for me thanks!
I’ve been wanting to convert my life to “off grid tech”. I have a nest camera i bought in 2016. So it’s pre Google. Starting about 6 months ago, Google told me unless I allow them full 24/7 access to the cam then I can’t use it. A product i bought almost a decade ago is useless unless I let them spy on me. Fuck you Google.
So anyways, off grid tech. Home surveillance on my own local server protected with physical data and VPN. No more streaming, pirate everything with local server. No more Google or Amazon anything. Music? Mp3. Email? No Gmail, maybe Proton or something. I’ll do all banking through home desktop through VPN. Etc, etc.
I hope to have all these things achieved by 2030
For email, I recommend purelymail. It’s ran by one guy I believe, but it’s a solid cheap service. It’s also pretty easy to setup your own email domains. I’m probably just a nerd, but I love custom email domains.
I would strongly recommend you at least have your own domain if you intend on buying a service from one guy. Everyone can land under a bus one day.
that sure would be a BIG bus!! i didn’t know flashmobs went this far…
😑
just saying, but the email domain everyoneunderabus.com is still available…
