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.
They way I see it, computers are tools. They can just as easily be used for good as evil.
If people were going around smashing vehicles with hammers, we would (hopefully) work on better law enforcement than ban hammers. Same sort of thing with computers, we need standards and regulations.
I think the actual reality is that governments and justice systems were designed for a pen-and-paper era where letters were still delivered by horsedriven stagecoach.
I think that’s the real task: designing a new type of democratic governance that can keep up with the speed of societal change and technological change.
“The gears of justice turn slowly” made sense in the stagecoach era, because life moved slowly. It does not make sense in an era where we can disseminate information worldwide instantly for pennies.