Does anyone else feel as if it’s over when it comes to really owning your own things?
As of now:
- You don’t have the option of having a phone with decent specs and replaceable parts
- You have to have really good knowledge in tech to have private services that are on par with what the big companies offer
- You have to put up with annoying compatibility issues if you install a custom ROM on your android phone
- You cannot escape apps preventing you from using them if you root your device
- Cars are becoming SaaS bullcrap
- Everything is going for a subscription model in general
And now Google is attempting to implement DRM on websites. If that goes through, Firefox is going to be relegated to privacy conscious websites (there aren’t many of those). At this point, why even bother? Why do I go to great lengths at protecting my privacy if it means that I can’t use most services I want?
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. Even more important is to actually PAY for services they like instead of relying on free stuff. I’m not optimistic not just because the non privacy conscious side is lazy, but because my side is greedy. I mean one of the most popular communities on lemmy is “piracy” which makes it all the more reasonable for companies not to listen to privacy conscious people.
I wouldn’t say that this is the endgame but in this trajectory, privacy is gone before 2030.
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Fairphone exists
As someone who has a Fairphone 3: they destroyed any trust I had in them the moment the FP4 came without headphone jack and with a different form factor. I thought that their idea would be that each module could be upgraded independently. That’s what would make their offering truly innovative and eco-friendly. By departing from that, they simply became a manufacturer of overpriced phones with slightly better ethics.
ROM quality depends on your make and model,
I am using /e/OS since when I got the FP (what, 3 years ago?) and to this day the applications that need GPS are completely unreliable. I gave up on using bikesharing systems here because their apps simply fail all the time to get my location.
but they give you a ton of hardware for free
It’s not free. There is no marginal cost in what they are doing. This is all a cash grab and an attempt to further segment the market.
Everyone wants music, nobody wants to buy CDs, nobody wants to buy MP3s, and all that’s left is subscriptions.
If the lion share of music revenue went to artists, you can bet that more people would pay for it. But we know for years that this is not the case. Same for movies.
I don’t know anything about Fair phone’s modules and uogradeability, all I know is that you can buy replacement parts which is better than most other brands.
I know /e/ is far from perfect (they’ve lagged behind for years) but I don’t believe that’s the OS FF themselves support either. I just know it comes closest in terms of integration compared to stock Android. How well it works differs strongly per device, some work perfectly out of the box while others have nonfunctional hardware.
The cost of most car features is either upfront anyway (software stuff) or very minor (seat warmers). Sure, they sell you seat warmers for a couple grand or a major monthly fee, but resistive heaters really don’t cost all that much. There’s maybe $50 of hardware in a car that they will charge you ten times as much for if you buy the feature. I’m pretty sure they’re actually saving money by simplifying their supply lines and factory processes to just make a single type of chair.
I don’t think most people care all that much about artists. Most people I know just go to Youtube or Spotify because it’s free and easy. However, if you think artists get little money for CDs, you’ll be shocked to see the streaming situation. Streaming pays out MUCH less compared to physical media. If you want to support artists, go to their concerts, that’s where they rack in their cash.
I’m pretty sure they’re actually saving money by simplifying their supply lines and factory processes to just make a single type of chair.
My point is that if these types of features are so cheap to add, then why not just make it part of the standard package?If it costs $50 to make, add $100 to the price of the car and make a standard feature. This extreme segmentation just to squeeze more money is counterproductive.
if you think artists get little money for CDs, you’ll be shocked to see the streaming situation. Streaming pays out MUCH less compared to physical media. If you want to support artists, go to their concerts, that’s where they rack in their cash.
Yeah, I know. This is not a defense of streaming services.
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.
God bless the hackers, crackers, reverse engineers, and disrupters. Pray they help keep you free of too much pain.
Yes, we need to pass laws that prevent companies from blocking access to their services on the basis of using privacy tools. Basically apps should be able to run on any customised client device and they should only legally able to say “no” if my session is clearly demonstrating malicious interactions.
We need better consumer protection laws.
Dunno, I don’t use shitty apps that aren’t available in F-Droid and I’m all the better for it.
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).
“Just pretend this dystopia is a utopia and you’ll be fine!”
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.
The internet is absolute garbage now
Well, it always was. The internet was always filled with low effort webpages with ads from top to bottom. The only change is that as people got better at avoiding the old scams, new ones appeared with better CSS and more psychological manipulation.
ad-delivery platform
It is basically this. Most websites just try and dig into your profile, masking it as “personalized customer service”, but the real intention is to know what you do, who you talk to, and try to sell you goods & services.
Not always. Believe it or not it used to be kinda like it is now, here.
With the technical barriers to entry pre AOL the people online were outcasts, nerds, and science departments at universities. The ad driven model is the attempt to lower barriers of entry make profit of that and not the other way around. Lots of the Internet ran on generosity and donations.
It’s been shittier every day after there was an agreement on how to monetize though. The people at the start didn’t ever have the guarantee it would get adopted, so for all the idealism we deal with their compromises.
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.
What was the struggle 20 years ago?
Ughhh long story…
It was the height of the Desktop era. Everything ran locally, and that meant Windows. OS X just got started. Everyone was predicting smartphones, but they were a decade out (note time travellers: drop the fucking stylus). Linux was unbelievably shit. Very few drivers, you had to carefully pick your hardware. External devices were a luxury. Printing mostly didn’t work, USB printing was bragging rights. You had to buy modems with a hardware DAC, else it was done in the driver which worked only on Windows. GTK kinda just went from v1 to v2, everything looked 10 years outdated, and even Firefox had glitchy UI on Linux. If you could insert a CD and get it to show up without manually mounting, you were staring into the future.
The Web was on hold, Microsoft having won the browsers wars pt. 1, and proceeding to stall with Internet Explorer 6, correctly predicting that browsers would compete with their hegemony in the client space. There were no services: GMail and Youtube were just getting started. You ran local programs, and there were barely any for Linux. The choice was between booting Windows and dicking with cracks from Astalavista, and booting Linux to rice your E16, then staring at it. General productivity software was almost non-existent — you had a dozen compilers and interpreters instead. Where I’m from, banking required desktop software which required windows, not to mention smart cards, which also required windows.
This was made worse by the proprietary formats, which were the key to maintaining stranglehold. Everyone was emailing
.docs around, which you could sometimes open with Abiword or maybe dump just the text and Antiword. Even the PDF viewers were a bit crap. Had to submit a report? You probably booted Windows in a virtual machine to use Office, and the CPU was yet to add instructions helping with that. Media was even worse; everything was MPEG and required royalties. LAME Ain’t an MP3 Encoder because it wasn’t allowed to be. RIAA/MPAA were fighting hard to keep you buying physical shit. Meanwhile, you could only play Tux Racer and Nethack.Around that time, Microsoft was about to introduce Palladium, an attestation chain rooted in hardware. Everyone was despairing about the same future: in 3-5 years, Microsoft would use it to pull in and segregate an increasing portion of the Internet, until the whole became their walled garden. Hope that sounds familiar.
Meanwhile, older penguins just didn’t give a fuck. They simply didn’t use the shit they couldn’t use, and missed none of it. They worked to extend what they had, the digital commons.
No one could stand TVs, so as an act of disobedience, we invented p2p piracy. Napster, DC, torrents — which are alive and kicking. Xiph gave no fucks and started working on free media codecs. Vorbis became CELT became OPUS. Tarkin became Daala became (merged into) AV1. Youtube is now serving OPUS and VP9 or AV1; our best codecs trace their lineage to DIY stuff done to avoid proprietary formats. H.266 can, and will, fuck off. PDF is everywhere. Jimbo started Wikipedia. Flash went away. The modern web happened. Linux grew up and I don’t even notice I’m using it. Free software ate nonfree in most domains; the gardens are now walled through access, not by being built on proprietary stacks. Massive progress happened.
Now that the digital world runs on services — which were a clever ruse to subvert old free software (Google runs on Linux, remember?) — someone is threatening to close a few pipes. So what? Just look at the fucking size of those commons that we have created. Someone will claw back some of that… and? Worst case, we lose a few ways to waste our time, of which we have hundreds. Retract from the mainstream a little, again. Have some difficulties using a few services. Be careful which hardware we buy. Oh noez.
Shit changes constantly. Companies battle relentlessly to undercut one another. We invent workarounds and grow our knowledge. Relax, get yourself LineageOS+MicroG or GrapheneOS or even a Fairphone; get a Framework; use Fediverse; get off those services and sail the high seas where needed; use Linux+Firefox if you aren’t already; touch grass; and if someone tries to force you into extracting rent — refuse it.
Persist.
Amazing post. As someone born in the 2000s, this is definitely an unknown story for me (I grew up with WinXP), and I didn’t get to live this virtual freedom revolution. I do remember that MS owned everything though, they were the big promise, the big company that made computers and the internet work. Microsoft was everywhere.
Definitely an interesting story, I will definitely continue supporting open standards and free software, possibly even contributing once I get better at programming ;)
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.
The walls of the cyberpunk dystopia are being built up around us
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.
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.
Not that it contradicts your comment, but it’s worth noting those ads could well have been inserted by the platform or the podcast publisher.
Graphene OS does a great job of protecting your privacy. Although, since it doesn’t rely on google services, unless you want to sandbox some, most of the time you don’t get push notifications. Which isn’t that bad.
And in terms of actually owning things, instead of relying on subscriptions services, that’s what Web3/NFTs are trying to solve. Despite the fact that everyone loves to shit on them, and they’re in their infancy, their utility far exceeds overpriced pictures. Right now you have to indefinitely subscribe to Netflix or Prime to access movies and shows you’ve already paid for, but if you bought an NFT of the movie, no one could gate keep that media from you. Musicians could cheaply disburse their songs to people and not be price gouged by Spotify, and any digital asset you bought would truly be yours, including video games and their skins/weapons/pets/etc, with the ability to resell those as you saw fit. As well, there would be an incentive for the studios that create this media to make them into NFTs, because unlike with physical copies, they would make a cut of every single sale that happens. So, they’d make money on the initial sale, and then a cut of you selling to a friend, your friend selling to someone else, ect.
What I think it, ultimately, comes down to is people getting, too, complacent and just accepting any ToS that’s thrown in their face, because they can be dozens of pages long, and we just want to use the service right then and there.
+1 for GraphineOS, but I can’t get behind NFTs. The technology is cool, but for me, the definition of “owning” something includes not only the ability to view it, but also the ability to modify it. If I own an NFT of a song, then I could listen to the song, but I still couldn’t, say, make a remix of it, which for me is the entire point of owning it in the first place.
digital anything was never a thing you owned. it’s a thing you lease.
if you want to own things buy physical copies.
no idea what you are on about the phone. I buy moto phones for like $150 unlocked and they are great.
