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).

The walls of the cyberpunk dystopia are being built up around us

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.

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.

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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.

God bless the hackers, crackers, reverse engineers, and disrupters. Pray they help keep you free of too much pain.

If you reduce your consumption corporations can't screw you over that much. Also it's good for the environment.

Wouldn't google's DRM be considered a monopoly? Not in the US, but don't they have laws and regulations against this type of stuff?

Completely agree in substance and spirit, but not on this framing of everything as about ownership. Personally I don't want to "own" data any more than I want to own a car. What I want is control, rights, privacy and personal freedom. The ownership obsession seems to me a red herring that just proves how much we've been taken in by consumer capitalism.

Forgive the rant. I agree with you on the substance.

There's a phone company out of Europe, Fairphone, that's striving to fix these problems. I can't really say if their specs are up to par or not (fwiw their newest phone can do 5G), but you can repair you phone with their Spare Parts offerings, like the selfie camera, earpiece, rear cameras, speaker, USB-C port, display, back cover, battery, etc.

Issue is that you can't buy it in the US or elsewhere, but there are some tricks where you can get it into the US/CA by going with Clove or Reship.

Phone looks to work best on T-Mobile networks, so AT&T or Verizon users might see terrible performance.

So, not panacea, but a decent solution for those willing to go down that path.

🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥everything is fine🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥

Me in the 90s.

Compatibility issues? Unspecified root problems? Nope, I ain't feeling'em.

Tech knowledge is required to use smaller services? Just a fraction of what was required before, just about enough to operate in digital world in general.

Cars are becoming SaaS? Whatever brings them closer to extinction works for me.

I undertand this feeling. I have a group of friends which use Messenger as a main chat app and they refuse to stop using it for convenience, but most of the features they label as convenience are the exact thing that are wrong with it. Many other platforms, despite not being perfect, have the same/more features and are better implemented.

Even if you transfer to a new and better platform, the big companies don't let go easily. They buy those new platforms and change them or just nuke them. If they can't, they will use ways to detect who is using alternative platforms and alienate them. It is just like the Phoebus cartel, which controlled progress to maximize profit. They are not against you or progress, they are against anything which reduces their potential monetary value.

I disagree when you mention subscriptions as a bad thing. Subscriptions have existed since forever, and work well when you deal with a service, for example paying a subscription to a video creator you like, or maintenance costs of hardware you use.

But not everything is grim. I have seen a lot of new FLOSS projects appearing everywhere, and people are becoming more aware of the many alternatives. I've even seen non programmers using ChatGPT (or equivalent) to create their own self-hosted platforms, showing that even those not techinal people are able to contribute to the general community.

Things aren't as bleak in Europe :)

Agreed, I'm currently moving my digital life to free software to escape that bullshit.

While everything else seems to be caught up in enshittification, free software is constantly improving.

They consider revenue streams more important than one-off payment.

So everything becomes service and we are left in this non-ownership economy where we own nothing.

It's the #enshitification of everything. I listened to an interview with SAG-AFTRA by a new podcaster trying to survive and just when they start talking about the investors and products admitting to trying to build out till October when actors and writers start getting evicted... then some Amazon streaming services ad. And it happened again towards the end. And no warning or apology or mindfulness from the podcaster. So so depressing. The interview was great and happy to have heard it. Wish I could get access to information unpolluted by advertisement and capitalism. Thank goodness for the fediverse.

If the companies and our government have their way, then yes, they will be able to monitor our every move and make sure we rent everything and own nothing.

This runs against the grain of the Constitution of the United States, but our Federalist Society SCOTUS jurists have been gutting the fourth and fifth amendments long before the Dobbs decision triggered a public hue and cry.

And it's going to be up to us to regard censorship as damage and route around it. Essentially, there are repair shops that can fix your iPhone for you even if they're not authorized and will even replace proprietary bolts with standard ones. Eventually right-to-repair will be established by courts if not legislators, state-by-state if not federally.

There are too many complexities in the system to lock us down permanently into their walled gardens, but they will try until we respond with [redacted] until ashes cloud the skys.