I’m starting to wonder what the real benefit even is anymore. Between the technofeudal landscape we live in, where billionaires own the means of communication, data is constantly mined for profit, and surveillance is baked into every layer, it feels like I’m standing at the beach, using my bare hands to push back an endless tide.
Even when I take the so‑called “liberated” path through Linux, self‑hosting, and privacy tools, it often feels futile. The web itself is poisoned. Browsers are turning into tracking engines. Sites rely on manipulation and dark patterns. Social media is full of misinformation and ragebait.
Even open-source projects are being pulled under corporate influence (ex: Firefox adoption of AI).
It feels exhausting to route around a web that’s already been captured.
So I’m asking myself: what’s the point? Why not just step away?
Why not trade the illusion of digital control for actual peace, get a dumb phone, a CD player, and check out books, movies, music, and games from the library as my entertainment?
Does anyone else feel this way? Have you found ways to reconnect with technology?
Not completely, but more and more I find peace of mind in analog and offline spaces. Physical books feel better than e-books, a real bike is more fun than a Peleton (cheaper too), and cooking my own food is better than GrubHub.
I have an educational background in IT, but I’ve worked as a mechanic for most of my adult life. I’m a tool using primate. Tech is a tool. If a new tool improves on the old and makes life easier, I use it. If it doesn’t, it’s not worth having around. When your job is fixing things, “ain’t broke, don’t fix it” makes a lot of sense.
I’m not going to bend over backwards for tech that I don’t need just because a rich CEO tells me it’s revolutionary. I can flip a light switch, lock my doors, make a grocery list without the help of an AI fridge, and write my own emails.
Im stuck (deliberately) about the year 2010 ish tech wise… People need automation to turn on a light switch, i long ago figured out how to open my curtains sans alexa as well.
Alas everything enshitifies.
IT Professional here.
I’ve been ready to burn it all down for about 20 years now.
Whenever I got called for an issue, I would tell the user “eh, just throw it out the window,” and then they would laugh like I was joking or something
Reminds me of a joke I heard a few years ago.
The “Tech Enthusiast” : My whole home is rigged up with smart systems! I can control my AC and my lights from my phone from 1,000 miles away!
The Tech Engineer : the most recent piece of equipment I own in my home is a printer from 2003 and I keep a loaded gun next to it in case it makes a noise I don’t recognize.
Not in the slightest.
But, where I used to super interested in cutting-edge tech stuff, I’m now extremely jaded. I used to actively seek out news on new tech companies / projects because it genuinely felt like there were a lot of problems out there to be solved, and tech was solving those problems. These days it seems like tech often is the problem, and it’s never going to be solved because they have the DMCA, Section 230, trillions of dollars, and the entire apparatus of the state ensuring that their shitty tech keeps getting in your way.
The thing is, I still like tech. I can’t imagine living in a world without it. Whenever I see these memes about people wanting to become farmers it amazes me, because farming sucks. I don’t like the great outdoors, the indoors is far greater. I can appreciate non-digital tech. An internal combustion engine is a really cool gadget, for example. And, I’m happy to do my own bike maintenance. But, real world things are greasy, loud, and inelegant. It amazes me when people claim to like record players instead of good quality digital media. It’s amazing how record players work, but they’re still terrible, outdated things that objectively produce a less accurate sound than a good digital file. I still prefer technology, preferably digital technology. I just don’t like the stuff that makes up 95% of the Internet these days.
It sounds like you really feel the same way, because:
get a dumb phone
That’s tech.
a CD player
Also tech.
check out books, movies, music, and games
I’m pretty sure any movies and music you check out from the library in 2025 will be digital, that’s tech.
Have you found ways to reconnect with technology?
If you don’t like it, don’t reconnect. Become a farmer or a fisherman or whatever makes you happy. But, I’m not going to join you. I may be veering a lot more towards DIY tech, and offline things than I used to. But, to get me to abandon technology you’ll have to pry it from my cold, dead hands.
wanting to become farmers it amazes me, because farming sucks
I agree, I think people romanticize it and think of it like gardening. It can be relaxing, therapeutic even, to do some home gardening. Actually becoming a farmer sucks. It’s why a lot of its done by immigrants who don’t have many better options.
Besides, that’s tech now too and it’s also been enshittified. Look at John Deere.
Not to mention a true farming life is brutal. Those 4am wakeup calls aren’t optional, if you’re truly living off it. Tractor breaks down? Cow’s sick? Want lunch?
You fix it, you kill it, you make it.
Because the non-industrial scale profit margins on farming suck. So you don’t have the money to pay someone for many of the luxuries city folks enjoy (yes, even despite shitty wages). Do it for a year, and you either learn to love the struggle or you quit.
There are some amazing parts of farming. And the life can be incredible. But farmers are ridiculously tough for a reason.
Honestly, I’d rather use dumb tech than the smart tech we were in.
Also, in terms of Linux, self-hosting, and privacy tools, I don’t think it’s futile, but rather, as someone who uses as much FOSS as possible, it is liberating if you control it. For the AI part, I’d just use Ollama and Qwen 3, as much of corporate AI is sloppy.
What about Gaming and TV shows?
The way I see it, tech itself is still okay as long as you pirate and heavily scrutinize the software you use for quality. I’m at the point where if software is written in JS/Python/Unity/etc or is oddly large (50+ MB) I stay far away. I don’t give a single fuck if that offends anyone.
What I’ve given up on is social media. Even lemmy is fucking atrocious and 90% of its communities need to be blocked. Find a tiny forum that’s been online for 30 years with 12 nerds on it and make that your home.
I hear ya. I have always loved tech. Its been the space i worked in, so it feels like i am turning my back on a lot of my beliefs, but its happening. I visit very few places online now. Its very specific sites. Probs less than 20 TBH.
I am becoming increasing hostile esp to providers who push my bounds on privacy. Example i just picked up some insurance they told me i had to use their app after i signed up, i asked for a browser link they refused. I requested a full refund. Idiots. But i agree its hard to escape the clutches even to just function…you drive you have to give details. You want a house you have to give details.
I craft and make. I enjoy that. I also agree fediverse is a real help when i am feeling out the loop.
My aggravation at the people who run big tech companies makes me more interested in hacking than ceding tech to them.
I think stepping back from a lot of specific tools is appropriate. I’m trying to de-Google, and I’ve left a lot of platforms. I also appreciate unnetworked things like physical media, and music and e-books on non-networked devices.
But leaving tech overall isn’t appealing to me. I just recently started getting into mesh radio, for instance. It’s dope stuff.
My aggravation at the people who run big tech companies makes me more interested in hacking than ceding tech to them.
The current wave of doomerism, which I share, is from watching them make unashamed moves to seize the means of computation from us.
You can’t hack anything if you can’t get any information on how it works, any tools to disassemble it, any devices to interface with it. They stopped printing books on these subjects, and soon the whole internet will be LLM agents that can edit the responses of. We’ll all float around in our hoverpods with our 8GB tablets like the motherfuckers in Wal-E
What really fucks me up is how enterprise has their heads burried in the sand to all this. They really think it’s a good idea to put all their little secrets in the cloud. Microsoft is going to predict every move the market makes someday…
Technology is a tool. Treat it as one.
that’s why I keep it in the garage in a plastic tub.
It’s hard to remember now, but you truly can just step away. I think about it sometimes. Not as a single deliberate act but as a gradient for the next few decades of my life, just like the gradient to this point in which tech became increasingly important…only in reverse. If you can quit social media, if you can go back to iPod/CD/records/radio/humming, if you can be content to share your thoughts in a journal or blog or letters to the editor instead of networked communities, if you can be happy with older cars that don’t spy on you and add the safety / guidance features you need for a couple hundred bucks, if you can use a dumbphone and/or a landline, if you can read books and do art and build things and stare at the wall and go on walks and garden and visit with friends (etc.) instead of scrolling and clicking and Discord’ing…
…and on and on, you feel me? It doesn’t have to be dramatic. It doesn’t have to be baby-out-with-the-bathwater. It doesn’t have to be all-encompassing and hardcore. It’s just remembering, and learning to return to (where you need it), the fact that we all used to live without all this shit barnacled onto our attention spans and our wallets. We used to live without surveillance capitalism and constant notifications and screens and error messages and just…skinner box shit, you know? It wasn’t perfect, but there were a lot of things that felt better…at least compared to the tech landscape of 2026. If you need to turn the dial down on some of this shit, just do it, and enjoy the journey.
I’ve deleted YouTube off my phone. I’ve also reinstalled it like three times in the past week. It’s hard to break habits. But I find that when it isn’t on my phone, I may listen to more music or NPR in the car; I may listen to an audiobook, but also, I am finding more and more that even these things are too overstimulating, because AirPods make it seem like you really should have headphones in at all times, even though you absolutely should not…and your entertainment (even mild stuff like instrumental music) is just often at odds with things that deserve your full attention like (debatably) work. I love a lot of content on YouTube but it’s a firehose and it’s never ending (just like all content on the Internet) and anymore it all just tires me out. It tires me out that it’s in competition with real world considerations like work. It tires me out that I always feel like I’m missing out on things and I have to check to find out what they are and then figure out how I’m going to cram into my daily schedule catching up on them all. It tires me out that the algorithm so transparently thinks I just want the same ten themes ramrodded down my throat forever; it’s insulting that the system thinks I’m that simple and easy to satisfy, you know? And so it’s not that I’m anti-YouTube. It’s that I’m anti-how-much-YouTube-has-become-embedded-in-my-schedule-and-my-consciousness.
I feel similarly about the Apple Music service and app. I don’t want a playlist to curate my own tastes in a random order and serve them back to me as Heavy Rotation. Anymore I don’t know what I want to listen to, I just feel like I should be listening to something. What kind of a way is that to feel about music? I’m trying to use my iPod more, and the wired headphones are more of a pain in the ass than I thought they were for the first 30 years of my life, and I can’t do it all the time…I just can’t. But that’s okay. I’m at least in dialog with myself about when and why I want to do things like listen to music, or listen to music through a specific convenience device, instead of just moving automatically out of impulse and routine.
I could go on. I have typewriters. I don’t use them for all or even most of my journaling and writing, but sometimes I need or want to slow down and hammer out my letters as deliberately as possible, in a medium that is not connected to the Internet or indeed anything that plugs into the wall at all. I’m trying to revisit anime and video games from the past and especially with the way computers and hardware manufacturers are heading in the age of AI (fuck your thin clients, Jeff Bezos), it’s just a reminder that I’ve got more old, wonderful content to catch up on than I could ever know what to do with, and there is no reason to stress about whether I’m up to date on all the new stuff.
I’m just rambling now, but you know what I’m re-learning to enjoy lately? This goes back to YouTube, Music, headphones, all of it. Just silence. I think I mentioned it earlier. But just…silence. Or whatever is closest to silence. The sound of the cars driving down the road outside. The sound of the air intake for my central air system when it spins up and tries to keep my old house warm. The (horribly irritating) sound of my animals licking themselves. Not everything has to be “content”. Not every moment has to be entertaining and informative. Good Christ, but I could stand to have less information coming into my perception all the fucking time, you know?
Just do what you gotta do for you. Don’t apologize. Don’t rationalize it. Don’t get strangers on the Internet to sign off on it. If you gotta get off one service, ten services…if you need to see x% less screen illumination in the course of your day…if you need to redefine your relationship with any part of the technological world, it’s your thing to do, and you’ve only got one life to live, so go ahead and experiment. I think a lot of us are re-learning that it’s entirely within our control to do. We’ve just been so habituated that it’s like flexing an atrophied muscle or bending a stiff joint. It doesn’t feel good. Not right away. But you know it will, and probably sooner than you imagine.
In our local community we have been toying makimg our own meshnet. Like a bunch of houses with mesh net wifi. We may pull the trigger soon.
I started buying physical media again (in addition to data hoarding) because I don’t like the idea of just “renting” everything and having some company decide to remove media from their catalog at any point.
Been buying books, manga, Blu-rays, DVDs, CDs, and records so I can enjoy things without the internet.
Hate the that AI is being shoved into everything as well without any ability to opt out. I’d rather just avoid using your product completely if that’s the case.
I’ve had similar thoughts these past two or three years but at least with my current life (family, work/studies, volunteering…) going offline isn’t even close to feasible. But at least I have started to move more and more of my online life to FOSS services or smaller or European companies. Finally installed Linux last year, also thinking of dabbling in self-hosting some time in the near future.
But I’m pretty sure the next years will give us a kind of Neo-Luddite movement, because you’re clearly not the only one fed up with modern digitlal tech.
