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Re: running to the woods. We were here on the technology spectrum:
Not enough Too much |--------------[x]--------------------------------------|Now we’re here:
Not enough Too much |-----------------------------------------------[x]-----|I’m not saying that techies are all neo-luddites in the making, but rather that everyone has a threshold for global-hyper-awareness and surveillance. At some point, it’s just too much
I personally see all this bastardized tech as components in need of liberation, techno-mage style.
If I could get my hands on a flock PCB, I’d be writing custom drivers to allow others to liberate their own hardware. Alas, nothing local, and eBay has not been kind.
Techies were just in the loop enough to see what happened to technology.
12 years ago I had a board Chair of a major tech firm in my office and she explained how the future was going to be the internet of things. I divested stock within a week. My conclusion was they had zero innovation at that company, which extended to silicon valley.
Their stock then dropped 75% over the next decade.
Just came back from a 4 day camping trip in the mountains where I turned my phone off and forgot it existed and just sat back down in my seat in my cubicle at my IT job.
I’m fucking over this.
Hear me out… anti-WiFi trees.
They grow towards any RF signals and their leaves are specially shaped to attenuate anything over 900MHz. They use the extra energy to increase their density to better resist harvesting and increase their height.
This is why I use debian stable. New releases are three whole years apart and everything works. I just upgraded to debian 13 a few days ago.
Sell your stonks! Go homesteadin’ 😎
my college roommate in 2008 was schizo, his handle was NetSecSatan, he predicted all this stuff
20 years ago was 2006.
I do not recall any tech resistance by the masses. In fact a couple years later there were people camping out overnight waiting for the release of the latest gadgets like the iphone.
Ffw to today…those same masses dgaf about their lives being tracked and monetized today; in fact, many are active and willing sycophants pushing being social media personalities as careers while using that personality to shit on higher education and intelligence.
I do agree that the limited tech community capable of independent thought and action are against the surveillance corporate state we’re headed into, but the rest are doing their best to hurry and profit off it while the dumpster fire flames get closer and closer to them.
The tech resistance slowly faded away with the first smartphones released after the iPhone I would say and really took off after the release of the iPhone 3GS. Think back to the boomers who complained about young people staring at their phones all day, now they do that themselves.
10 years ago, I privately refused a gifted Alexa after Christmas, explaining “Hey I work in the industry, I know people who work for FAANG, Amazon spending billions on very smart engineers building systems to harvest data is a bet that they will be able to extract even more money from me, is it still within the return window.” My aunt told me to go live in a cave.
Has she seen the price of caves lately?
“Alexa, list local cave prices.”
duh… you don’t buy a nice cave, you buy a starter cave and install grey click flooring and a pot faucet over the stove.
Something tells me that aunt calls for help when they have tech issues.
Maybe just personal experience…
For help, you know what you talk about. But if it is about privacy or safety, I am hyperbolic… apparently
Caves seem pretty cozy tbh
As someone else mentioned, in 2006 the overwhelming amount of ‘tech’ was not designed with slop and spying in mind. If you bought a super high end stove/oven or toaster it would NOT need constant software updates or Internet connection and be forced to give telemetry and have microphones or cameras to listen and watch you as you use it.
The absolute first ‘always online’ device was the juicero in 2013 and it was an abject failure on every level. Not only were people confused as to why it needed to be online in the first place, it was a horribly designed and extremely inefficient machine… Someone at the time brought in the proprietary bag of juice it uses and squeezed it out by hand, and he was faster and more efficient in doing it than the machine was.
I personally did not hear about online appliances until I took a course on IoT in late 2020. And that one showed how you can use an arduino to make device an internet connected device.
But even then… Both young and old heads just don’t like this shit. A toaster does not need to be online… A lamp and its lightbulb do not need to be internet connected. I am confident that if and when they make it legally required to do so (as they are absolutely going to do with cars) there will be so much disregard for the law that it will be unenforceable.
20 years ago, the Patriot Act was already in place and privacy was essentially dead (and other countries were not exempt from US spying), people just didn’t know the full extent until the Snowden leaks. But it was clear enough then, if you weren’t gripped by the hysteria, that the “emergency measures” were there to stay, and get worse.
Exactly. The War on Terror was the beginning of the end of personal liberty in the West.
Now we live in a world of panoptic surveillance and illusory freedoms.
Me when new smart devices are created
Satan’s got your back, mate.
If there’s fiber and a nearby hospital in the forest count me in.
Look at this fat cat able to afford a hospital.
There’s lots of tendrils and medicinal mushrooms, will that suffice?
We can do shrooms and connect with each other!
Deal
The hospital thing is a big one. My wife and I had considered moving to a remote location but the risk of significant injury without nearby medical facilities was one thing that changed our mind. It’s hard to accept that risk, even when you think it would probably be worth it. Medical problems ƒ suck.
I still like technology. It’s still possible to find technology that doesn’t spy on you and that you can control yourself. I use Mint, by the way.
Foss got me back into computing and seeing how fun it is. And turning my back on corpos as much as possible.
It’s not the technology that’s the problem (mostly), it’s the corporations that control 99% of it.
I use mint too! Only switched last year and i have never looked back.
Beyond what’s been said about data harvesting, 20 years ago new devices very often represented genuine improvements in form and function on each new iteration. Physical and functional differences were easily apparent between each model of early smartphones.
The only thing we have right now that’s similar was model releases from AI labs. And it seems like even those are slowing down because the urgency to release anything incrementally better undermines huge, stable jumps.
