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.
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).
Being a cynic is entirely reasonable and probably a good thing
I disagree.
/nihilist
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
The walls of the cyberpunk dystopia are being built up around us
- Hot Saucerman ( @dingus@lemmy.ml ) 59•11 months ago
We get all of the bad parts, without any of the cool parts. Except for smart phones. Smart phones are pretty amazing, actually.
- argv_minus_one ( @argv_minus_one@beehaw.org ) 1•11 months ago
It’s a little battery-powered handheld thing…that runs circles around some of my old high-performance gaming PCs! Yeah, that’s pretty awesome.
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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- 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!
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.
Let me just spare a few dollars for privacy after paying for rent & groceries in my third world country currency.
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.
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.
God bless the hackers, crackers, reverse engineers, and disrupters. Pray they help keep you free of too much pain.
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)
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?
Nah, because it will be considered a service that people choose to integrate with, and you won’t be required to use Google’s authentication service
Yes, also pretty sure Meta will roll their own offering too since the main appeal is for advertisers.
So my choice is gonna be between Google or Meta?
Real Sophie’s Choice there huh? 🫠
At that point, other than at work, I will stop using the internet.
You will if you want your website indexed by Google.
Even if it was, it likely wouldn’t be enforced, since it’s overseen by lawmakers and judges who have only the barest sense of what a webpage even is.
And are all on Google’s payroll.
If you reduce your consumption corporations can’t screw you over that much. Also it’s good for the environment.
true. why should I need a facebook account? I only need to talk to the few dozen people I know, not to the millions or billions of mostly bot accounts.
Me in the 90s.
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.
help the fact that you only put a one in the first paragraph is bothering me
I’ve never heard of Clove or Reship before though, thanks!
I was just responding to the first point made by OP. Didn’t intend on commenting on the other stuff because either I agree or don’t know enough to contribute!
No worries, my problem was that markdown indents the first paragraph after a list item declaration like
1.. My recommendation which you can definitely ignore is just ditch the number
Fairphone is excellent for repairability and the general ethics their company have, but that comes at the cost of performance and software updates. They don’t come close to modern flagships and their Android versions are years behind. Making a good, private phone costs money, and few people care enough about their privacy to buy a Fairphone.
That said, phone hardware has become fast enough that even the slower SoCs will work just fine for most people and it’s not like Android has gained any important features in the last two or three major updates.
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.
Some companies are trying to bring SaaS to the world of bicycles. It’s not going well. Or rather, they’re going out of business.
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Things aren’t as bleak in Europe :)
Unfortunately, we still suffer a bit. A lot of internet content originates from USA and the rest of America. And the big tech companies, who control a lot of the market standards, are also from there.
And the U.S. completely lost any interest in regulating companies or breaking up monopolies, seeing how the representatives are constantly bankrolled or looking to be bankrolled by those very monopolies.
- argv_minus_one ( @argv_minus_one@beehaw.org ) 2•11 months ago
Europe is about to make open-source software development illegal.
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.
I didn’t understand when everyone jumped on Facebook messenger instead of just using their phone’s built in text messaging and I still don’t. It’s like people crave spying or something…
The Phoebus Cartel is not the greatest example, since there’s a solid argument for energy efficiency. I also think most cases of software subscriptions are bad and far worse than e.g. Adobe’s CS days
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.
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.
Yeah that’s true. I guess I forgot that there are some really cool stuff that are objrctively better than the google stuff like hosting your own NAS, backup, local high quality music from Bandcamp, etc. Not to mention that Lemmy is really growing on me now.