This is Depressing

Thalestr, 10 months ago

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.

float, 10 months ago

This is the way. I’m basically only online at work now. Once I’m home I just smoke a bowl and relax offline. I’ve been making music a bunch lately and going on photo walks. I used to play video games to pass the time but even those are awful now.

tocano, 10 months ago

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.

cakeistheanswer, 10 months ago

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.

Anticorp, 10 months ago

It definitely wasn’t always that. Sure, there were lazy, greedy, fuckers in the early internet putting up crap content and “you’re the 1 millionth visitor, you win an iPhone!” Pop-ups, but for a good decade or more the internet was filled with passion projects. Websites and services built from passion and desire, not for an endless pursuit of money. When corporations were ignoring the internet as a fad, it was a remarkable place. Once they realized how much money Google and MySpace were making, they all jumped in head first and began the rapid enshitification of the digital frontier. The same type of people that ruined the physical frontier ruined the digital one as well. Pinche jotos.

sexy_peach, 10 months ago

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).

Gutless2615, 10 months ago

Being a cynic is entirely reasonable and probably a good thing

MxM111, 10 months ago

I disagree.

/nihilist

JubilantJaguar, 10 months ago

Cynicism, i.e. the view that everyone else has base motivations, is the definition of a self-fulfilling prophesy. You’re cynical? Well, soon everyone around you will be too, and where will we be then? All the politicians are crooks and phonies? Well, they sure will be soon if everyone voting for them thinks that. In fact, as far as I can see, cynicism is the rule across the world, and look at the state most countries are in. For comparison (there aren’t many), check out the world’s least cynical countries - i.e., those with the highest social trust, where people believe that “others are basically good”, where they trust their politicians. I won’t name them (you can guess them) but those countries just happen to have the best indicators on pretty much every measure of success - not just economic wealth but also all the social indicators and indeed happiness. To me at least, the connection is plain obvious. Being a cynic is a choice, and a completely counterproductive one if you want to see good things in the world.

Skepticism, on the other hand? I’m all in on that.

spookedbyroaches, 10 months ago

Yeah I guess it never really was perfect. But this one really caught me off guard since I took it for granted that the web is more free than the walled gardens that Google and Apple make. But the FOSS community is making some cool stuff these days that we gotta focus on.

brimnac, 10 months ago

“Just pretend this dystopia is a utopia and you’ll be fine!”

Sneptaur, 10 months ago

Nuance status: out the window

brimnac, 10 months ago

I find it hard to play make believe as an adult.

I mean “You’re right. Everything is fine.”

Sneptaur, 10 months ago

You threw out the baby with the bathwater here… they’re saying you can be hopeful while still facing reality. Hopelessness like this is useless. Woe is me, let’s do nothing. Worthless perspective tbqh

brimnac, 9 months ago (edited 9 months ago)

Who said I do nothing?

I’m on the leadership board for my local political party’s senate district as a Table Officer.

I help field manage and campaign with leftist candidates door knocking weekly (edit: and my candidates win).

I’m pretty involved.

Maybe I do those things because of my “worthless perspective”… but… what do you do?

How are you making change? What are you doing besides throwing insults at a person who is helping, especially when volunteers are so hard to come by?

Edit: As you can tell, I’m all “woe is me, let’s do nothing…”

Sneptaur, 9 months ago

Your perspective stated above doesn’t align with my idea of someone who would be politically active. I’m glad you are fighting the good fight instead of simply participating in slacktivism, and I wasn’t trying to imply that you personally did nothing. I’m implying that your stated perspective above discourages action by instilling a sense of hopelessness.

I am also politically active although not to the degree you are; I participate in protests and mutual aid as well as other smaller forms of political activism. I do as much as I can given my mental health, which is an ever increasing amount as I grow and heal.

If you are participating in politics, you should know that perspective and optics are massively important. Saying “we’re all doomed and there’s no point!” can be harmful, actually. Maybe it helps motivate you, but for most people it’s disheartening.

brimnac, 9 months ago

Awesome, but who said there’s no point? Like, literally. Where?

Maybe you implied that from what I said, but there was no such verbiage.

It’s important to be clear in communicating. I’m sorry that you misunderstood one throw-away line and made an assumption of who I was based on that.

And thank you for the reply, sincerely.

Sneptaur, 9 months ago

While the fault may be mine for my assumption, it’s also good to analyze why someone might construe your comment in that way. Have a nice day!

brimnac, 9 months ago

I appreciate the tone! Have a good one.

Anticorp, 10 months ago

Where is the soma we were promised?

kugel7c, 9 months ago

You have to at least be able to imagine a utopia to begin creating one, just being unhappy about our collective distopia isn’t gonna help anyone. Systems created and made up of people can be destroyed by people, it’s very difficult but it can be done, and if we think we’re in a dystopia there’s good reason to destroy some systems.

brimnac, 9 months ago

Thanks for the reply. I help locally :)

sexy_peach, 10 months ago

No just don’t pretend we live in a dystopia, things could be worse. Could be better as well though…

brimnac, 10 months ago

Who’s pretending?

wizardbeard, 10 months ago

If you think this is a dystopia, I have a lot of books for you to read.

There’s a lot of dystopian shit going down, but (assuming you hail from a first world country) we are definitively not living in one.

Wean yourself off news media, limit your consumption of it. They literally make their money through keeping eyes watching. The easiest way to do that is to keep viewers feeling like there are ongoing crises constantly and to stoke visceral emotional response in their readership/viewership as much as possible.

This is not some issue siloed off to news organizations that lean to one political side or the other, it is an inherent result of how they all generate revenue in the modern age. They are all optimizing for ad impressions.

These are hard times, not end times.

brimnac, 10 months ago

Your suggestions are appreciated but they were not asked for - I don’t like pretending.

My wife is a journalism major and I’m very involved locally in politics.

Weaning myself off the news won’t make the planet any cooler during this time.

Weaning myself off the news doesn’t stop those with money and influence from being above the law.

Weaning myself off the news doesn’t change anything, except make me less informed.

Ignorance may be bliss to some, but to others it’s just ignorance. Downvote away, but honestly I’ll stick to this until we have an actual Utopia (without slaves).

dingus, 10 months ago

Fuck yeah, this is the right attitude. It absolutely takes more mental effort and acuity to shift through the piles of absolute bullshit produced by modern media to generate rage and clicks and engagement, however, expending that energy to do so is so fucking important.

Checking out and being like “the news makes me too upset” is kind of part of the problem. Honestly, if you’re not fucking furious every minute of every day for the horrors modern humans suffer under the richest nations on the planet, you’re not paying the fuck attention, and that’s on you.

wizardbeard, 9 months ago

And here we have an intense difference in world view.

If you’re actually “fucking furious every minute of every day”, you have a serious emotional issue. And you’re hiding behind this idea that reading more news has any reflection on mental acuity to justify it. Effort, hell yes it takes more effort, but fuck off with elitism over your righteous anger.

You don’t need to sift through all the piles of absolute bullshit to stay informed, or to be aware of all the horroble shit in the world. It doesn’t take a concentrated effort to be aware. It does take a concentrated effort to stay emotionally invested in things that don’t directly effect you, and I’m of the opinion that effort is much better spent taking action, or simply doing what you can to better your small slice of the world every day.

Unfortunately it is extremely unlikely for any of us to have significant impact on large scale issues in the world. Stay reasonably informed, do what you can, and get on with your life. No sense in wallowing when there’s far better uses of time and energy.

wizardbeard, 9 months ago

My man are you for real? You commented in a public forum on the internet. You’re going to get unasked for feedback/advice/shit talking/commentary. That’s just how things work.

And no one’s asking you to pretend, whatever you mean by that. I’m assuming you mean that it’s impossible to accept that this world is not a dystopia, so doing otherwise requires one to pretend?

I’m asserting that we are not living in a dystopia as you and many others repeatedly claim. Maybe you disagree, but it’s not something that I personally have to pretend. Again I’ll repeat the last sentence of my last comment: These are hard times, not end times.

Plus, there’s a whole spectrum of news media exposure between “drinking from the fire hose” and “burying your head in the sand”. Everyone should stay informed, but there’s a lot in the news that only serves to get emotional response over things that have no impact on your life, where knowing of it does not convey any significant value besides emotional effect.

I have seen far too many people actively contribute to their own mental issues due to feeling some obligation to engage in news that has no direct impact on their lives, or that they can do nothing about but worry. Additionally, being aware of the emotional and psychological effects of media exposure does not make you in any way immune to it. I know way too many people suffering from depression and anxiety related issues directly and significantly exacerbated by how much they consume news media, which is why I have a hard time keeping my trap shut about this.

Moving past that, being married to a journalism major is not the supporting argument you may think it is. Of course you would bristle at the idea that news media may be harmful when you are married to someone who spent years training to be in that industry. I’m not saying any of this as an attack on journalists themselves or as an attack on caring about what is going on in the world. Ideally journalists and news organizations serve a vital part of keeping people informed, which is vital to a good society and proper political process. Unfortunately the entire way that news media makes money to continue to exist in the modern era is entirely dependant on optimizing for views, which means optimizing for emotional impact.

JubilantJaguar, 10 months ago

Your slightly condescending tone is obscuring a decent message. I agree with you.

baked_tea, 10 months ago

Lmao but it’s real??? They don’t need to pretend… are you aware of the DRM situation?

skullgiver, 9 months ago

People who use the word Utopia like this don’t seem to be that familiar with what Utopia was actually described to be like in the story the word came from.

I think “utopia” is actually a pretty apt description of what tech companies would like society to be like. An isolated island, with strict hierarchies if who control who, severe punishments for dissenters, a slavery based economy. Removal of the people who become a burden through willing euthanasia or other means, a lack of private property, with travel between sections restricted by internal passports. It seems control and a hard-working, sheepish population are what Utopia thrives on.

By all means, I think the Chinese state is the closest to the description of Utopia. Utopia is quite dystopic!

brimnac, 9 months ago

See below, my dude. Said w/out slaves… I read the book in 11th grade.

originalfrozenbanana, 10 months ago

Technology creates fiefdoms where rentiers extract value from the rest of us. But I’m not losing hope

floofloof, 10 months ago

Don’t blame technology; blame capitalism. Technology could equally well be used to benefit everyone, but doing that doesn’t vastly increase the personal wealth of the already wealthy.

dingus, 10 months ago

This is exactly it. Free Open Source Software aims to benefit everyone, but the downside is that it has mostly benefited private corporations who leech off of the free labor of the FOSS community. Capitalism ruins fucking everything.

originalfrozenbanana, 10 months ago

You’re right, of course. The end result of capitalism is necessarily feudalism - capitalism doesn’t make universally efficient markets. It makes markets that are efficient for the winners. I should have said technology companies and not technology as a whole

dingus, 10 months ago

As I like to say, capitalism is just feudalism with extra steps.

jerkface, 10 months ago

Me in the 90s.

itchy_lizard, 9 months ago

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.

itchy_lizard, 9 months ago

Dunno, I don’t use shitty apps that aren’t available in F-Droid and I’m all the better for it.

hobs, 9 months ago

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.

off_brand_, 9 months ago

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.

skullgiver, 9 months ago (edited 5 months ago)

deleted_by_author

Lemminary, 9 months ago

Let me just spare a few dollars for privacy after paying for rent & groceries in my third world country currency.

skullgiver, 9 months ago

What’s the alternative? Lemmy is run by the community and pretty much a labour of love, but everything fro phones to search engines is made by companies, not charities.

You can rely on open source, volunteer products if you want affordable privacy. That’ll deprive you of luxuries and it’ll require you to put in more work yourself, but it’s not the end of the world.

Lemminary, 9 months ago

The alternative is putting pressure on companies to not succumb to greed and to go as far as enacting regulation to protect consumer interests. Paying some other companies to mitigate the harms of these companies while pretending that it’s a sensible solution to everyone is not my idea of solving a problem. You’re just sequestering privacy behind a paywall and pretending it’s all fine. It’s not; it’s elitist and plays into the pay-for-privilege that toxic capitalism breeds. Because let’s keep in mind that privacy–unlike the continuous stream of manufactured goods–is a choice that only needs to be made once.

rglullis, 9 months ago

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.

skullgiver, 9 months ago

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.

rglullis, 9 months ago

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.

spookedbyroaches, 9 months ago

• I know about Fairphone but the specs are a bit limited IMO.
• I do have a Pixel with the stock (I know bad idea) ROM but I rooted it. I do have the kdrag0n Safetynet fix, but there is one app that somehow finds out about it. I guess one app out of however many I have is not too bad now that I think about it.
• I haven’t really looked too far into this, but I assume that they build some tamper detection in the seat warmers (unless they’re incompetent or lazy). But the good news is that the seat warming subscription is no longer there.
• For this one I was just looking for things to complain about. I have no subscriptions for media and just buy the physical stuff (or digital from Bandcamp).

I guess it’s not a guarantee that DRM would be that proliferated and I can avoid it. I was being way to pessimistic at the time.

Thanks for uplifting words mate!

theneverfox, 9 months ago

It was outlawed out of concerns it would make us less productive

theneverfox, 9 months ago

If it’s a physical object, how can you turn one into 1000? How can it be both the alignment of magnetic domains on a spinning disk, or an area containing more or less electrons than normal, or a sequence of letters printed on a page? It can even be stored in meat if you memorize a sequence, or separated in space and time then reunited

Data isn’t a physical object, it’s any pattern that can be decoded to result in the same useful sequence. It’s information.

At best, you can call it a property of a physical object

eruchitanda, 9 months ago

3. I’m guessing that Google apps would be problematic. Except those apps, I didn’t have any compatibility issues, on Custom ROMs. Especially GrapheneOS, CalyxOS, LineageOS, and /e/OS.

4. On a different user, I installed banking app that would usually prevent you from using it. No problems to use the app whatsoever.

uriel238, 9 months ago

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.

b1ab, 9 months ago

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

Deathcrow, 9 months ago

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

That’s delusional. As soon as more and more parts of software are run remotely on proprietary hard- & software there will be nothing to hack or crack. Sure, someone could reverse engineer it, but there aren’t enough hobbyists in the world to rewrite all this software.

We see this more and more in gaming… it used to be the case that they just gave you the software to run your own game in multiplayer setups, nowadays, if they shut off the servers, the game is dead (unless, someone releases a very wonky, extremely buggy, barely usable, reverse engineered server with 10% of the features some time down the line)

lunaticneko, 9 months ago

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.

dukethorion, 9 months ago

Why would they sell you something for $50 one time, when they can charge you $9.99 / month forever?

Daisyifyoudo, 9 months ago (edited 9 months ago)

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