It feels like all the joy I used to feel from being an enthusiast has been completely voided as computing has become the modern vector for fascism and surveillance. I find myself recoiling from all online spaces, even independent and open source ones that I’d loved and supported in the past.
It’s been an exceptionally strange impulse to go from having an elaborate online presence to now feeling like the only acceptable way to engage with the network is to have as minimal of an online footprint as possible.
This especially hurts when it feels like an issue of skilling, where I know how to do certain tasks with computers, but have to teach myself for the first time the analogue alternatives that my parents and their parents likely already knew well.
How have you chosen to deal with it? Do you find yourself moving away from computing and the internet, despite formerly loving it as a hobby? Have you replaced things that computers used to do for you with analogue replacements?
I’m curious how other people are experiencing this.
Computing was never as great as it is now. Never before did we have so much free open source software at such a high level of quality to use and tinker with. Never before was it this easy to find help for the most obscure problems. Never before was playing on Linux a viable option.
But online and offline social networking really got enshittified a lot. 3rd spaces online like offline are fully commercialized. Online, everything is remembered and if it can be used against you, it will be used against you either by the government or some rando just because they can.
But you can use a VPN and as many pseudonyms as you need to properly separate your community-specific personas. And if you live in a city of religious fanatics, the internet also is a great to find like-minded people. There are communities for everything.