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.
Make your shit work for you again. Learn to self-host and embrace open source.
This is exactly what I did. Part of it is reminding ourselves the old Net didn’t update just by scrolling and every website wasn’t filled with infinite people engaging. It’s slow.
this…this is what did it for me.
Got any advice on how to start doing that, for someone who considers themselves tech-savvy, but not enough to know how to self host, or to know the open source alternatives yet?
For self hosting stuff, you can follow this https://youtu.be/jFrGhodqC08 its a tutorial on how you can host your own website and teaches knowledge you can transfer onto self-hosting dockerized services.
Thank you!
BTW, dont feel bad if it seems like it takes a lot of time to move forward through steps, its a very condensed 10 min video. Each step when done for the first time can take a while to grasp and learn
That’s fair. At least I got an starting point now even if it’s hard at first.
Definitely try things out on a little single board computer (SBC) like a Pi, or a VM (virtual machine), or even an old laptop. It’s harder to break things than you might think, especially when using containers and stuff, but it does happen.
Rolling back or reinstalling a VM is sometimes way less hassle than trying to decipher cryptic issues.
It’ll feel easier to play around if you can always just start over, as opposed to risking “I hope this works” with your precious data.
Oh yeah, whatever you do (and I know this is hard advice given the price of storage now, UGH), figure out what a 3-2-1 backup strategy looks like to you, for your most important things.
Most importantly: Have fun! Sounds cheesy, but having an exciting goal in mind will definitely encourage you to keep learning and enjoying the process. :)
+1
Partial solution to a partial problem. But necessary step for a first step.
Any tool can be used for good or for evil. Try not to get sucked into the doom spiral, there are plenty of FOSS and adjacent projects making the world a better place.
This. Use as much ethical open source software as possible for you, while supporting and advocating for important projects in that space. And don’t let yourself get sucked into some closed platform or ecosystem you don’t like. For communication and social media, use only open and decentralized servers/protocols. Use as much end to end and strong encryption as possible. Minimize your data footprint. Buy from local and ethical shops. Be the change you want to see in the world.
Computing itself is fine. I can still do most everything I used to do on my PC pre-popular internet. I have essentially no cloud services on my PC.
However, the internet itself is a dumpster fire. It always was, except you had to deliberately looking for those places and they tended to be isolated back in the day.
Of course monetization destroyed the internet with corporations doing everything possible to carve it up and shove their ads and billionaire-controlled media slant in front of you, and their engagement-bait feeding of lies and giving a platform to controversy and stupidity on social media.
Most all of the good spaces are gone. Very few exist in anything remotely close to their original form, they’ve been corporatized, disappeared, or swallowed up by places like Reddit.
Leaving IT. Gardening. Trading pc nerdery for soil science nerdage.
What of you’re in IT and are ready to leave but don’t like gardening or woodworking?
I still like electricity. Maybe I can be a part time electrician.
Check your local IBEW to see if they have any apprenticeships.
You too? I don’t have any soil so my garden is all in pots, but it’s doing good. The tulips were glorious - I love a tulip - my first rose flowered yesterday, my opium poppies are thriving, and my tomato seeds finally germinated.
These days I only use a computer for minimum essential work stuff, and my steam deck. I work outdoors too. I have less money but I’m fitter and happier.
Edit - if you’re into soil science, two words - compost toilet. Total game changer.
Edit - if you’re into soil science, two words - compost toilet. Total game changer.
I’m actually debating between bokashi or traditional composting; probably going to end up doing both. Pretty sure my wife would veto a composting toilet.
Today’s our wedding anniversary so maybe I’ll ask for a composter and bokashi starter kit to celebrate 11 years.
Here’s some of our gardens and a WIP greenhouse.
Wow, that looks gorgeous! I’m in a different situation, because everything has to be in pots. You can see the lavender in the foreground just getting going, the orange flowers are mostly calendula and California poppies. The tree is a cherry - looks like it’ll fruit this year! And I’ve got a couple of bonsai apples. Tomatoes and chillies are still germinating, I’ve got a tiny greenhouse for them. The red flower is a rose, first of the season. Tulips are pretty much finished, and daffodils are looking gone. I’ve done gladioli on the way tho. With so much stuff and so little space I have to feed them, I use an organic seaweed thingie.
I love your container garden! Everything looks happy. I’m excited for you getting cherries. It gets too cold for most fruits here but that’s why we got the greenhouse.
I’m getting more involved in that I’m discovering more open source projects that I can support.
Open source really gives me hope. Instead of a profit motive, communities form and work together out of passion and dedication to a project or idea.
That’s really invigorating to me. And, in many ways, can often be a big fuck you to our capitalist overlords. I’m working on presentations and such to teach my friends and spread the word about various projects and better op sec to make it all the harder to harvest our data.
We should built our own internet, with blackjack and hookers!
If someone picks up a chair and hits a person with it, is the chair now evil? Should you avoid using chairs because of the potential hurt they can cause? Computers are the same.
Focus on the positive and don’t dwell on the negative. Play games, tinker with hardware and open-source software. Get off platforms like Reddit/Lemmy where negativity is much more pervasive.
Of course, if you find yourself “recoiling from all online spaces” then consider alternative hobbies that give you the same level of satisfaction.
I was looking for a tech positive outlook and found solarpunk for myself. Since then I’ve learned a lot that doesn’t have to do with tech, but also on the topic of how technology can empower people. It helps I was already an environmentalist before.
I started looking a lot more into contributing to open source projects. I started looking into decentralized networks like lora radios. I self host a lot more. Got rid of Google on my phone…
Biggest issue is the job. With my attitude change my well paid corporate tech job has become soul sucking.
I feel this. I used to find computers and the promises of the internet exciting. Then things slowly turned into what they are now, and these days I often can only see everything computer as a layer of bullshit that has been put on top of the real world to keep us in a trance and not engage with reality anymore. But a lot of good things came from being connected as well. Maybe it’s like growing up and finding out a beloved parent was after all slightly abusive. And then see them decline in old age and have their worse traits worsened even more.
Another image that comes to my mind frequently is that of the internet as the haunted shopping mall: It was once a shiny place, everyone went there, it was all the rage. Now most of the shops are boarded up, the few that are left seem rather dodgy, and the only visitors seem to be a bunch of drug addicts hanging out at the bottom of the out-of-service escalators.
Currently I’m a bit lost trying to return to my analog hobbies. I draw, I paint, I play music, I scratch the donkeys. I often don’t have the energy I wish I had to do things other than sit at a screen. Takes time to get used to it again I guess.
I am lucky that I got a job that is, if not doing good, at least not doing something evil. And I get to play with cool hardware. Not something practicable for everyone, I know. But those jobs are out there.
Besides, I have met many people with similar feelings recently. You are not alone. I don’t know how to find those people where you live. But for instance, there are many people helping worthwhile causes with the tech side.
Personally, I might have to use two phones in the future, kind of like how I saw some do in China. One for the official, mandated bullshit, and one for personal things, with an operating system that does not snitch on every action I take.
Personally, I might have to use two phones in the future, kind of like how I saw some do in China. One for the official, mandated bullshit, and one for personal things, with an operating system that does not snitch on every action I take.
but how will you make sure the mandatory phone does not snitch on you when it’s around you? Considering you’ll probably keep it at home, maybe even bring it with you when out and about when needed for some reason.
It will snitch on me, it already does. Somehow we accepted that constant tracking is a cool feature and not a horrifying virus. But it can’t see what happens on the other phone, right? And, I can still turn it off, keep it in a drawer, and that limits most of the tracking. Still, not impossible, but much harder.
you can’t actually turn it off unless you can disconnect all power sources
True.
But off is a lot better than on, still. Modern high-speed radios use quite a bit of juice. So at most, it would keep some microcontroller on for predefined functions, and wake up every now and then. It simply isnt practical to keep the big stuff on for more than a few days or so.
If you want to avoid even that, get a phone with removable battery. Or put it in a metal box. A tin can with a bit of aluminium foil around the seal gets you 60+ dB dampening.
Don’t let perfect be the enemy of good.
I’ve been online for like, too long to see it decay and rot into the form it has been turned into. My only regret is that I didn’t embrace the early days or the first 15 years I was online for. Tack on 15 more years and I got to watch, albeit slowly, the corrosion take form.
Everywhere I’ve been to is either gone or transformed into a shallow representation of its former self. Everyone I know and knew are growing up and the times we had can’t be replicated anymore or enjoyed similarly. Features are being shoved in that nobody asked for but everyone uses without question. Optimization has taken a back seat, where everything breaks down in a moment’s notice as we’re given empty promises and apologies for it.
The spirit of community has fallen to tribalism and hivemindedness where simply being nuanced is just simply unacceptable anymore. It’s like you MUST pick a side, you MUST say the right opinions, you MUST express yourself justly or you’re whatever the side thinks you are. There is no room for critical thinking.
And every other day, I ask myself “what the fuck am I even doing anymore?” when it comes to being online. I’m just coming online for no other reason than just to check things and waste clicks. Because I’m not enjoying my time anywhere without being constantly reminded about the things I’ve watched the internet become for so long.
There was someone I knew, that when her gaming PC broke down 2 years ago, she decided that it was it for her. She wasn’t tech savvy, she wasn’t glued to the net or computers as much. She’ll use something until it breaks before she decides whether to continue. And when that computer died, she shrugged and decided to move on living as simple as she can be.
I don’t think I’ll go that route when my PC dies, I’ll still have a use for it. But if the internet becomes too expensive or it just plainly isn’t serving its purpose to me as it once did completely, I’ll probably consider it a good run well-lived.
Like many have said here : open source is one way to cure your technodepression. Little project are happy to get you involved. I have helped many project without being a dev.
I grew up as a computer nerd kid in the 90s with my first computer being a 386 DX 66mhz off brand IBM PC clone with 8mb ram.
I was put on this earth to do computer stuff no doubt about it. I was the first on my block with dialup. I was the first on my block with DSL. I was the first kid on my block with cable internet. Taught myself C when I was 15 and and a software engineer professionally over a decade without any college education.
With that being said, what we call “AI” (LLMs) completely exhausts me and I have absolutely no interest about AI garbage. I am depressed because AI exists to cheapen literally everything I have a passion for.
When I was young I always wanted to be at the head of technology and always stay up to date with it I’d read books and news daily. Always had a genuine passion for it, but I can’t stand it now.
I just stay stuck in the 90s and play old consoles like PlayStation and N64. That gives me comfort and I know there’s no AI slop in those games.
We have similar stories! Except I was way out in the country where the fastest internet available was 26.4kbps dialup (the phone lines were too old to support anything faster and there was no cable). Mine was an overclocked 486 IBM clone with 8mb ram and like 600 or 800 MB HD.
I recently saw a colleague post on that one professional network that “he guessed he wouldn’t get to write code himself anymore”. That’s depressing as hell to me. Everyone’s minds work differently. I find that writing code gives me new ideas that I wouldn’t have come to otherwise. It’s a loss of creative process. And it’s tragic. Like sometime saying “I guess we won’t paint any paintings ourselves anymore”. What an incredible tragedy.
I am experiencing the exact same thing, but in my mind it’s a disillusionment not with tech itself but with tech products.
I have my Linux PC set up so that I can use it on the couch at home while hanging out with my family. I have a smart phone, but I consciously try to use it as little as possible.
Now instead of following the details of the next generation of phones/consoles/GPUs/AIs, I like to tinker with existing technology that I haven’t learned yet. And since I work on computer stuff at work all day, I try to spend my time at home doing analog stuff based in the real world, ideally outdoors even if that means my own yard.
I’m really enthusiast about open source and free software.
Software corporations can go fuck themselves for all I care.
