cross-posted from: https://lemmy.dbzer0.com/post/55365151
I have found myself in a mental hole of tech-nihilism. Maybe even on the road to tech-fatalism. Long, rambly, Sunday night post, heads up. But I think I touch on the risk posed by even using privacy tools, something which I don’t think I see discussed here because of where most of you live (Global North, where you have the right to tell a policeman to get a warrant for the most part). This is kind of about two things at once, they’re related though.
Different events bubble this feeling to the surface but it’s always there in the background. When I (and you) defected from Reddit cold turkey after they decided to cut off the API, I had this feeling. When I started having to use a VPN permanently, I got it again. And when I had to “move” my exit country because the UK started verifying identities online, I got it again. Can you guess how I felt this week, following Microsoft’s bullshit about making it even harder to set up their OS without signing in? Or when I tried to use my trusty YouTube downloading scripts, only for them to seemingly require I feed them login cookies now? Or this whole Google Play dev verification thing? I don’t even use Android!
I’m sure this is the case for most of you, but being anonymous online feels like more of a challenge and more of a necessity now. I don’t want YouTube to log 900 music playlists under my account. I don’t want to log into every Windows mini PC I set up for family. I know most of you obviously do not, and Lemmy being Lemmy there’s this culture of saying well fuck the corporate internet altogether. Can’t rip from YouTube? Fuck YouTube! Don’t want to give M$ your blood type to set up a printer server NUC? Image Debian on it. etcetera etcetera. I know. I use Lemmy, I avoid Google search, I most definitely avoid most big tech products when I can. Don’t need em.
But like… The corporate internet is still there. I quit Reddit, even though it was my online home for over a decade. But YouTube? That’s a completely different beast. This just is where the videos are. I can host Pixelfed for my family and friends but I can’t host video, much less expect everyone to. Most people aren’t very computer savvy and YouTube is just where most people will post videos.
And since I use their service quite a bit, I did look into actually paying for their service. The folks you watch get a little kickback, and you no longer get ads on your TV and phone. I can stomach paying, even the uBlock Origin and piracy advocate that I am, just because I use it so much. But I use a VPN. And their FAQ explicitly has a page for this: you can’t connect from outside of where you’re paying, if you’re paying. But it doesn’t clarify whether it uses the country of your payment details, your IP, your location in Google Maps, or the country your account’s settings are set to. In my case, those are four separate countries lmao
These are little complaints, but I don’t think this is some “first-world” problem nothingburger. I suspect the UK identity verification scheme, or something similar, will start becoming more common around the world, regardless of how many data breaches happen. And not because some stuck up politicians are scared that a teenager could see a woman’s penis online, oh no, I totally think the true purpose is to tag “unwanted” ideologies and prevent their spread. Wouldn’t want anyone to type in ultra evil extremist words like “Palestinians have human rights” without consequences now would we. The fact that everyone is using their spin euphemism, “age verification”, instead of what it is, “identity verification”, gives them too much credit, even when being critical about it.
There is some irony in calling this a first world problem, because I live very decisively in the third world. Lebanon. Our internet speeds are shit, but for the most part, the internet here is pretty unrestricted. Combine this with most people’s service coming via legal gray area local “”“ISPs”“”" with haphazard IP ranges and messy CGNAT, and you have a plausibly anonymous and relatively uncensored connection. Beautiful, besides the 2Mb (yes, lowercase) speed.
But. But.
I was looking into setting up a meshtastic/LoRa/whatever network, that would link up my home with a few relatives who live nearby, as sort of an emergency backup. You probably only see bad news from where I live, I promise good things do happen here, but an emergency comms network in case something happens and services go down seems like common sense to me. Especially since these services go down when there isn’t an emergency. But setting one of these up would definitely get me on a list here. I’d probably get an unpleasant “interrogation” for setting up a parallel communications network. Best case scenario I get asked to take it down and to keep my nose clean kiddo. Worst case, I’m accused of espionage and thrown in a cell because it’s hard to explain what this stuff is to people who don’t care about understanding it. I do not live in a place with consistent rule of law, or even the thin veil of it. Staying out of trouble is paramount.
Further, along the same topic. I remember seeing an article about some countries in the EU raising an eyebrow about GrapheneOS, where police are associating its use with drug dealers. Perhaps I would need such an OS in the future, as someone who is not a drug dealer but who hates what is going on with commercial tech. And so I started thinking about what using it would look like. The same concerns with my local police are there, but there is a worse one: I have been flying internationally into countries with much more strict security than Beirut’s sticky, comfy little airport. I’ve been to Abu Dhabi in the past 24 months, what happens when I land in that airport with a “drug dealer phone”? I doubt Lemmy would even be allowed there if they knew what it was. I wonder what kind of shady deals Reddit had to crack to get approved, with how that place’s culture and content was.
I wonder about this a lot. The VPN I use in Lebanon isn’t blocked in the countries I visit for work, so I’ve felt relatively at ease so far. But I feel these tendrils of surveillance and data collection, of deanonymization. And it kind of terrifies me. I have to stand in the pleb physical stamping line in these techy airports, but I see people just walking through the electronic gates with nothing but an iris scan. It’s weird. I can make a burner YouTube account to yoink cookies and download videos, but I shouldn’t have to. I can log into a Microsoft account on a machine I’ll be logging into their email from every day and connecting to their Minecraft auth servers from twice a year, but… this is not right at all. We all know what’s downstream from tying your files to your identity.
I don’t know. The rise of tech-induced willful ignorance and authoritarian regimes is scaring me. The fact that people’s pensions are tied to AI companies that facilitate the terrorization and mass murder of innocents in the south of my country (and unquestionable genocide south of the border) fucking terrifies me. And it should, even if I wasn’t a working-age Lebanese man. Even if I wasn’t in those fucking databases.
I’m going to hold myself back from ranting about the fact that tech has come to almost exclusively mean predatory products and bullshit slop extruders to most people. About the cruel summary execution of our dream of cyberspace that we glimpsed on the early web. About how infuriatingly, nonchalantly shit almost every young person is at solving tech problems now. There is an immense, crushing powerlessness. I almost wish I didn’t care about tech, about privacy, that I could give Glaxo-McUberzon my mother’s maiden bone marrow and carry on with my day.
Almost.
I am 100% on the way to becoming a forest hermit with the way tech is going. And I’m a tech guy. I’m the tech guy to most people in my life. And boy howdy is a life of making coffee, chopping firewood, and screaming into the valley between commits to projects-that-go-nowhere looking real, real good right about now.
I should probably cross-post this to Tech Takes. But I don’t think I’ll be putting it on my personal blog. Doesn’t feel right.
I just assumed I was already on lists… but then like a week or two ago, I got a spam text asking if I wanted to work with J.D. Vance.
Assuming it was legit in any way, it made me feel some slight comfort that maybe they actually know nothing about my politics.
Either way, easiest “report as spam/block” I’ve ever had.
Remember reading about android custom roms with “false front” feature.
Should read up more on this, current phone xiaomi has abysmal dogshit software performance, but I’m worried about banking apps noticing the unlocked boot loader (if i can even do that on this device, so much bullshit to keep mind when buying phone nowadays).The enshittification of all social media and online services in general has been driving me continuously more towards downgrading devices, low tech solutions, and non-computer-based hobbies and interests, and I am at this point increasingly optimistic about it. I spend more time gardening now, and doing sports, and not looking at my cellphone in the middle of a date but just enjoying the quite moments. I get entertainment recommendations from human beings more than algorithms. I’m like yes please, keep making it worse, add more ads, more slop. Go on nerds, ruin search bars harder. Help me quit my addiction.
Like I wanted to know about some martial arts club that only has online information on facebook, because websites are dead (no, websites were murdered); so I made a throwaway account; facebook rejected my chosen username because it “mixes characters from different alphabets” (one small but unsung injustice of the modern Internet is increasing marginalisation of multilingualism); I put in an ethnically pure, non-race-treasonous username all in a single script; facebook then told me that my account would be verified with a selfie video, it’s easy…
So I closed the tab, thankful to Facebook for saving me from Facebook. I learned more about the martial arts club by showing up for a test training and checking the vibes, which tells me more about it than any online presence ever could and also gets me out of the house, breathing some crispy-chill autumn air, amongst fallen leaves.
I don’t know what is everyone’s red line but for me, I’ll never make an account that requires a government ID, a video selfie, or a facial photo. The way this exiles me from more and more online silos is doing wonders to help me stop my decades of being too online, to recover my ability to read paper books. I had missed being a bookworm so much. I had switched from Emacs org-mode and electronic tools to paper-based bullet journaling long ago, to great success. Now I’m banned from every single dating app due to my radical and unreasable posture of not wanting to expose my face (indexable by location (as a trans woman antifa activist latina immigrant (in this economy))). The only dating app that still accepts me is Lex, and ain’t nobody uses Lex. As a result I now find new dates through offline means, which mostly means queer parties, or metamours refereed to me by women I’m dating. Both user interfaces are significantly more satisfying than even pre-enshittification OkCupid.
I’ve downgraded my smartphone to a Fairphone 2 from 10 years ago. It’s sufficient to run the transport and authentication apps that modern life requires, or to DM my family on Matrix, but it’s slow and small and the battery runs out too fast to use for distraction. As a result my weekend trips became much more interesting, contemplative, I notice more things and the time lasts longer. I’m using more retro- or purpose-specific devices, like the ebook reader and a cheap MP3 player. But I’ve also taken to doing embroidery on trains and waiting rooms, or just people-watching and thinking. A year ago I couldn’t do anything without having a podcast or playlist shuffle on the background. Somehow the simple act of being less online also made it more comfortable for me to not have so much stimulation all the time. It might be placebo or self-image or something, I don’t care, my quality of life has increased.
All of this tech was cursed anyway, we should never have quietly accepted and normalised that everything is made by coltan mine slaves and 996 suicidal workers, we should never have accepted everything made of plastic and toxic metals dumped unceremoniously into the soil life by the tons every day due to planned obsolescence or just to inflate prices, we should never have accepted startup culture and obscenely thieving celebrity CEOs hoarding all the wealth while mechanical turk and AI taggers in Third World countries pour their blood onto the machine for pennies, we should never have continued to fund Big Tech, and increasingly open source projects for that matter, after they got in bed with governments doing literal genocides. It is an abomination that my kids in an European public school are required to used Microsoft Teams accounts on government-provided Apple iPads. I hope this whole industry crashes like nothing else crashed before, and in the meantime I hope Big Tech hubris prevents them from seeing they’re driving everyone away from the plugged lifestyle they designed.
need to get an ebook reader too, you recommend any?
TBH this reminds me of the people who say they’ve given up (e.g.) using Facebook because “fsck Zuck” and then they still use Instagram and Whatsapp. Still Meta.
Look, sorry dude, but if you vape, you haven’t given up smoking. If you take nicotine pills, you haven’t quit.
Don’t make BS statements. QUIT ALREADY.
If you use Windows for your toys, you’re still using Windows. If you need Youtube so badly you haven’t quit brainrotting online media. If you use VPNs then you are still playing pretend.
Just bloody stop, or shut up about it.
“If you cannot quit everything you may as well not quit anything” is not a great rallying cry, because there’s a strong risk that people will take you up on your suggestion.
Doing something imperfect is better than doing nothing. Let’s not purity test.
fsck
cringe
lol no.
But setting one of these up would definitely get me on a list here
Is that the standard state attitude to amateur radio there, too? I mean, obviously getting an amateur radio license involves actively putting your name on a government list and paying money for the privilege, and I can understand you not wanting to do that, but it looks like the 430 band is available to amateur radio licensees there, and you can get lora devices in that range. Amateur radio folk seem to be mostly viewed as peculiar last century fossils (and to be fair, many of them are) because everyone else (legal and otherwise) has vastly better equipment, which might give you some leeway to experiment with mesh networking?
It’s a weird situation. I think there is an amateur radio club, although last I checked their website it was last updated a few years ago.
I just looked. Latest update is from 2018, it’s about a licensing exam. I guess I could get certified, but it’s anyone’s guess if they’re still holding exams. Every single ministry is broke at the moment, so non-essential services like amateur radio licensing doesn’t seem like something they’d be doing. But I can call them directly and see.
Sorry if this seems condescending or patronizing to point out, but getting a license isn’t a solution if one person in charge gets a bad impression of you or what you’re doing. Maybe where you are, showing an officer a license can make a big difference. I can theoretically get full licensing and pull every possible string to get explicit permission from the Ministry to do anything within reason. But one army official can look at a LoRa deployment or an antenna they’ve never seen before and call me in for questioning. It looks like espionage. My computers are encrypted and I network exclusively through VPNs. Not a good look for someone who claims to have nothing to hide, eh? That’s what I was going for towards the end of my post.
I should look into it, but given the security situation at this moment I’d be poking a bear. Not a sleeping bear, a scarred, paranoid one.
I appreciate that licenses are not magic shields, and that you’re exposed to significant risks that I am not, so apologies if I came across a bit “have you tried googling”, which I was trying to avoid.
Still, even without getting involved yourself it might be worth finding some local radio folk (if there are any) if only to see what they do, and what equipment they use, and whether they’ve got into any trouble over it.
We did quite well with few long Internet videos 20 years ago, and we will do well again 50 years from now when the corporate Internet has collapsed like the Qing Dynasty or the East India Company and the Internet is decentralized, low-bandwidth, and solar-powered
What makes you think that the US tech bubble imploding will magically destroy the rest of the world’s infrastructure? Or is a truly international internet what you mean?
