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.
Cut it down, your computer is not a source of evil. Especially if its a second or third hand buy. People think life is about control, its not. Life is full of things that we cannot control, can only influence, or can only really observe on an individual scale. Now what really helps is activism. Get out with a group of people to affect change. Put more good into the world than evil and your hobbies matter a little less (given they are benign)
What’s interesting and I think is tied into that “people think life is about control” is that I am deeply convinced that the tech barons learned to hate democracy because administering computers and networks is not democratic in nature at all. An admin always has access and controls for everything, nobody votes an admin into position. Hell, we’ve seen numerous Fediverse sites come and go because being an admin is actually a huge task, especially if you’re handling it on your own. Even with that power diffused among multiple administrators, it can often be difficult escape the hierarchical nature of how computers are designed at their core.
As you point out, this isn’t evil, this is a type of tool. Like all tools, it can be used for good or ill, to build or to destroy. Currently we are being overrun with people who want to use it to control everyone else. They certainly think life is about control, and it’s part of why they are so deeply unhappy.
It’s also why the open source world is so fucking precious. The Cathedral versus the Bazaar. The bazaar style of development is such a massive deal because we could extrapolate this kind of governance to other parts of society. I worry deeply for a potential schism in the open source community when Linus Torvalds stops developing from old age or disease or just dying randomly in a car crash.
Open Source is that good that computers are being used for. Outside the corporate funded open source, there’s so many tiny little open source projects for almost anything imaginable, all shared freely so others can bear the fruits as well.
Tech barons have never administered computer.