Microblog Memes

That's the biggest mindfuck for me.

In the 90s and 2000s, people made fun of me for constantly being on the computer whenever possible. Now those same people are completely hooked on their pocket computers and now I'm the one making fun of them.

I don't know how we got to this point, but all I know is that Steve Jobs is mostly to blame. The iPhone changed everything and now nobody knows how to interact with each other anymore, which is especially frustrating when trying to get assistance from anyone for anything. Even the simple process of returning a product to a store is now a lot more frustrating than it used to be, because the person running customer service absolutely refuses to interact with the customer.

In 2000 the whole data hording apparatus hadn't been fully implemented yet, and AI surveillance was something more so seen as science fiction, nothing to worry about until possibly 2100. Sure there was some data collection but it wasn't like billions of people were walking around with surveillance tech in their pocket 24/7. Things have changed and drastically. Methods to monitor, model, predict, and control human behavior are now a thing and quite robust. If only people were aware of what's happening there would be a mass migration to secure hardware, OS's, comms, and of course not a single cloud based always on assistant in sight. IOT devices are cool when they are secure but they often get the least attention, few if any security updates. If you can get rid of robot vacuumes, smart home assistants, smart TVs, smart thermostats, switch to secure FOSS OS's on your computer and phone.

You can point a laser at someone's window and accurately record their keystrokes from the sound vibrations. Things go deep in the surveillance and intelligence world. Nothing is truly and absolutely secure, just more difficult to crack.

20 years ago, I remember phones were cool and never had a crazy price-tag before the iPhone showed up. Tech in general was affordable and made sense. I mean look at the market now, you see companies forcing new tech upon us by skipping the rule of "need vs want" while making a purchase.

On a side note, I miss those fancy slider phones from the 2000s.

Technology has stopped becoming a tool and a utility and has instead become a form of control. Where we once felt freedom to explore the internet and learn about new things we now have. This technology turned against us to track our every second and control our every thought. Plus the endless crap updates that just make things worse over time instead of better, yeah I could see why people just gave up on this bullshit.

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.

I want to start farming and growing vegetables. My dream is to have a pantry filled with wall to wall canned and pickled stuff I grew myself... to live for an entire winter on good I grew and preserved...

Same with chickens. Fresh eggs and meat...

A lot of tech today is over priced subscription/data farming crap that is locked and dumbed down so the average consumer can use it without overloading their limited brain capacity.

I'm not going to sign up or use an app on my phone to activate a piece of tech.

Luckily there are still DIY projects I can tinker with. And it's much more satisfying making it yourself, although more time consuming. But that's part of every hobby, right.

20 years ago, technically competent people had an integral role in the development and use of tech. That position is now infested with people who think economics is a science and money is real.

I did it. I'm in the forest now.

I am one of the few people in my office that still has a normal (digital) wristwatch.

Reformed computer programmer here (born in the 70's, techie in the 90's). My laptop is 16 years old and runs Linux. My phone is an 8-year old refurb I got off Amazon for $80. And I now do ham radio. I even send emails over RF just because I like knowing I can communicate with voice or text without needing cell service or an internet connection.

Life long techie here. I have retreated to the forest.

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.

As a tech person, I try to do have a lot of smart devices that I can self host, try to use home assisntat, bridges to my own NAS, have some rpi for my own DNS filter (with pi-hole)

My TV is offline while I am using a Apple TV box for streaming

And yeah some stuff is unnecessary. I don’t have a smart fridge, but I have an old iPad with a custom home assistant dashboard in my kitchen

Long term techie switched to ecological field work in habitat restoration, mainly wetlands with some scrublands. In the field over 80% of the time. Bliss.

I have been told I am complaining too much about my company moving to windows 11 and that I need to grow up.

I will then watch those same people slowly but surely start to complain about changes and things not working. I got laughed at today for fighting the updates and windows 11 by a few people who are probably going to be made redundant by this change. (I'm not angry, making people laugh and being a loudmouth idiot is my favourite thing)

I have been in IT support since 2007 and I know that all the change is bad.

My personal computer is on Win10 LTSC IoT and I'm moving to Linux Mint (Thankyou to the people on this forum that recommended it).

Change in tech can be good but not when it's Microsoft, Apple, Amazon and HP making the changes.

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.

Techies stopped jumping on the newest gadgets when the newest gadgets became plastic slop that did nothing but track what you said, did, where you went, etc, and reported it back to the company so they could build a profile of you and sell that data.

normies buy the shit now because its affordable (Because of the afformentioned creepware) and because they cant be bothered to do a modicum of research to realize theres a 98.6% chance that the device will be non-functional in a year because the company collapsed (having harvest all the information it needed before rebranding as a new company to do it all over again) and took the online servers with it, because of course your fucking toaster totally needs online servers to operate.

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.

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

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.

More like 40 years ago