I think the issue people have with "tech" is that much of the software and devices sold take up too much space and do things people don't want them to do, without offering choice, configurability, and options for full control
this post was submitted on 02 Aug 2025
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I've been wanting to convert my life to "off grid tech". I have a nest camera i bought in 2016. So it's pre Google. Starting about 6 months ago, Google told me unless I allow them full 24/7 access to the cam then I can't use it. A product i bought almost a decade ago is useless unless I let them spy on me. Fuck you Google.
So anyways, off grid tech. Home surveillance on my own local server protected with physical data and VPN. No more streaming, pirate everything with local server. No more Google or Amazon anything. Music? Mp3. Email? No Gmail, maybe Proton or something. I'll do all banking through home desktop through VPN. Etc, etc.
I hope to have all these things achieved by 2030
For email, I recommend purelymail. It's ran by one guy I believe, but it's a solid cheap service. It's also pretty easy to setup your own email domains. I'm probably just a nerd, but I love custom email domains.
I would strongly recommend you at least have your own domain if you intend on buying a service from one guy. Everyone can land under a bus one day.
I am and probably always will be a tech enthusiast, but as time goes on I find myself more and more looking for old technology to avoid planned obsolescence, anti-repair bs, telemetry & tracking, lack of consideration for quality of life....
This is not how things were supposed to be. But this is how things will be if we don't do something about oligarchs and certain CEOs.
Technology can develop in various directions. This is exactly what it looks like when technology is developed for consumerism. Buy more now, it doesn't need to last, stimulate the economy. Rent what you can, everything else as a service.
I've never been in an uber. Never used an Internet account to order food on an app. Never signed up to spotify or netflix. Never owned an alexis or siri.
I just stay away from that stuff... And it all first started with refusing to subscribe to World Of Warcraft. I stuck with Warcraft 2, and StarCraft. None of that big tech subscription nonsense for me thanks!
I get the idea, but I am kinda stuck on the letter writing bit. They do know that the post getting delivered is kinda built on middlemen right?
Usually those middlemen don't open up your mail, read what you wrote, then serve you ads based on that.
Everything you do relies on some middlemen, it’s just about cutting out layers.
You won’t grow your own food, but you can buy it from a farmer, instead of a store who bought it from a franchise center who bought it from a supply network who bought it from a risk management futures buyer who bought it from a farming company who bought it from a farm.
We don't need to go back to handwritten mail, FOSS is the way to go.
Writing someone a letter is a very personal thing and you're creating a memory. Something tangible, concrete, also weighs in on reality. Looking at a piece of paper with your handwrite makes you understand you're commiting to something.
I'm a FOSS loon but the craze of making everything digital is absurd. I've listened to people criticizing others for using paper and a pencil to take down a memo, note or even journaling, when they can do it on their phone.
Is existing so dreadful nowadays? Does the notion of leaving proof of existence scares?
A guy I worked with, not even super closely, left me a handwritten card when he moved on saying it was a pleasure working with me. I did not expect it and almost certainly didn’t deserve it but I still have that card somewhere.
That was nice.
There is something to be said in writing a handwritten letter for someone special once in a while. But I'm so glad that I can just pick up a phone and call my brother who lives in another state and chat with him (no long distance charges). If it's something better said in writing there's email and texts.
There's also the aspect of text's that are more personal that no one really talks about. You can just check in on a friend to see how they are doing without really having any other reason to contact them. I know I appreciate it when that happens to me.
I guess you could write someone a letter asking how they are doing, but if the answer is 'not good', by the time you receive the reply days have passed and you probably missed the opportunity to be there for them when they needed it.
This isn't even considering the environmental benefits of not having to A) produce paper, pens, envelopes, stamps and B) physically deliver the letters.
There's a lot of things about modern tech that you could criticize, but I don't think more/better options for communication is one of them honestly.
Its nothing to do with contempt for the media, or not wanting to leave evidence of my existence or anything like that, its just that I got shit to do.
Yeah, handwriting sucks. I used to type my homework in a mechanical typewriter, holy cow even that sucked. Going from that to an electrical typewriter that could hold a line in memory was amazing, but still nothing compared to a proper word processor. Wordstar in MS-DOS anyone?
I still like to sketch my ideas from time to time, but all my permanent notes are stored in Joplin, encrypted, in local backup, and synced to the cloud. I can’t afford to lose them, and I can’t afford to lug around with me a heavy suitcase of papers.
I’ve seen young people wishing for simpler times, kids using Polaroid cameras, hunting retro consoles that were already ancient when they were born, longing for music that was way before their time, etc. I get they’re disillusioned with the current state of things, but romanticizing the past is not a healthy way to cope with the horrible today.
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That’s exactly what is so nice about FOSS based systems. You can use technology but without the tech bros and the corporate enshittification.
FOSS is great and I love it but we do have our own idiots/FOSSbros, even if it's not about corporate enshittification.
Saw a post on wafrn (rip on maintenance rn) complaining about FOSSbros and was confused, until they gave an example of this blog post where some asshole was shitting on the author for having criticisms against distros for not being easy and friendly for blind/visually empaired people. The blog post is line-by-line breakdown of that guy's comment.
Original Comment
Okay, first of all, it’s GNU/Linux, not “Linux.” You keep saying “Linux” like it’s some magic OS that fell from the sky, when in reality it’s just the kernel. The real operating system—the one that gives you your shells, your coreutils, your compilers, your sanity—is the GNU system. By not calling it GNU/Linux, you’re erasing the work of decades of free software pioneers who fought tooth and nail so you could sit there whining about things not being shiny enough. You sound like the kind of person who installs Arch and then blogs about how hard it is to use a terminal. News flash: it’s not hard—you’re just lazy.
Second, the whole “Linux isn’t built for people” line? Give me a break. You want an OS that’s “built for people”? What people? Consumers? Passive clickers? People who treat a computer like a Netflix vending machine? GNU/Linux isn’t built for users the way Apple or Microsoft defines users—as data sources for ads, or potential subscribers to whatever crapware-as-a-service model they’re shoving this fiscal quarter. GNU/Linux is built for users in the sense of users who use their brains. If you're allergic to learning, maybe this ecosystem isn’t for you—and that’s fine, just stop trying to dumb it down for the rest of us.
You’re mad because you don’t “feel welcomed”? Look, freedom isn’t about making you feel hugged while your system silently phones home and installs DRM. GNU/Linux is about you owning your machine. It’s about writing a shell script to replace some bloated GUI monstrosity because you can. It’s about reading the manual and understanding your stack, not begging for some dev to “just make it work like macOS.” You’re not being excluded—you’re being challenged. If you don't like that, maybe stick to using ChromeOS with your Google account tethered to every bodily function.
And don’t think I didn’t notice you never once mentioned freedom in your post. Not even once. Not a single nod to software freedom, user control, or the social contract behind all this code. That tells me everything I need to know. You think this is about convenience, when it’s really about liberation. This isn’t about your fonts not rendering or your Wi-Fi card needing a firmware blob. This is about you refusing to confront the responsibilities of being in control.
You want GNU/Linux to “love you back”? That’s not how this works. GNU/Linux isn’t Trump, trying to flatter you while stabbing you in the back. It’s not some product that wants to manipulate your emotions to get you to upgrade. It’s a tool, and it assumes you’re smart enough to wield it. If you want love, get a dog. If you want freedom, open a terminal.
So we do have the "FOSS is always easy and gets the job done, if you can't handle it you're an incompetent toddler who just wants big tech to make your life easy," tech bros. Like that "smart guy makes fun of disenfranchised people for still participating in a society" comic.
We're techy enough nerds to know there's another way to be free of billionaire influence while still keeping some resemblance of modern communication: self-hosting.
or, you know, you can have best of both worlds with open technologies. tech that you own and control.
i wonder whether we will have to seize the means of computer chip production as well ...
Of course we would.
That last panel hit me like a truck because... yeah, that's what people think happens when they do their little personal choice things to pretend they matter.
They really buy like a paper book once and go "ah, yes, Bezos is fuming right now" while he makes another billion.
We have lost all sense of how to influence society and all ability to gauge scale. For all the folksy traditionalism in this (which includes driving a gas guzzler from the 70s, apparently?) the Internet has created this entirely disproportionate sense of our footprint on the world and this strip is as much a result of the hyperconnected dystopia as everything it's complaining about.
In my experience this is extra bad for Americans who, frankly, didn't need that much of a push to go from their individualist, self-centered perception of society to this vision of sitting on a couch listening to a walkman as activism.
I’ll buy something other than a ‘gas guzzler’ the second I’m not required to trade away my privacy to go electric, and can disable every single last beep, ding, screech and other unnecessary sound some stupid fuck thought was a good idea.
Honestly that exists. Just bought a BMW i3 (their first electric) and you can disable just about everything, even the sound it makes to alert pedestrians, the infotainment warning screen everyone hates, and seat belt chimes, through an app and a BT OBDII dongle. The 2014-2017 models all have 3G cellular antennas so they mostly don’t work anymore (3G is totally gone in my area). It also has buttons for climate and their great iDrive infotainment controller. It’s a fantastic quirky electric at dirt cheap prices.
BUT, your point stands since that’s 1 out of how many electric vehicles? Yeah, sucks.
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This is why I never gave up on DVDs, even though people would laugh. As soon as Prime shoehorned ads in the middle of a show or movie, that's when I cancelled. I'll have to do the same with music and get my iPod battery fixed up if I can.
I’ll have to do the same with music and get my iPod battery fixed up if I can.
In the meantime you can just load music files onto your phone and play them that way.
It was a long time ago I watched an DVD, but I very clearly remember some of them having unskippable ads.
It's not that they're inserting themselves everywhere it's this right here: "shoehorned ads". On top of extracting as much data from you that they know more about you than almost you do yourself. dystopia authors couldn't have written it better.
help desk -> sysadmin -> CISO -> goat farmer
I'm going back in a lot of areas, yeah.
When you make a wrong turn, sometimes you need to go backwards to correct and go forward again
Lots of things have always had middlemen. Any sales representative you've ever encountered is a commission-driven middleman. Cars, insurance, housing, the guy at the phone store - they all exist solely to make money doing what a well made website is valuable of. If a company has a sales team, they ate unnecessary middlemen.
pre-computerised car
No one want to fiddle with carburetor anymore thank you very much.
And tbh, 2010-2015 is comfortable enough and less bullshit.
Pretty sure they mean computerized interiors like infotainment systems. Probably not talking about ECU and internal computerized parts.
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