- Technology -
There are so many things I would like to say to voice my frustrations, my approximation is, it would take around 20KiB to store the text, this page will sum it up. People use computers a LOT, be it because of convenience, necessity or other reasons. It is very easy to forget how much time these computational black-boxes suck out of a day. Keep it up and suddenly a week goes by, then a month.
People use things they do not understand the functioning of all the time, even I am guilty of this at times. I sense that the rate at which technology has been intertwining with our lives has been increasing, even if I was not born during the start of the internet, do you see where I am going with this?
I think it is good to remind yourself how much of an impact technology has in and on your life. Have you ever wondered why that refrigerator is so-called "smart", why it asks you to connect it to a Wi-Fi network? why you said *word* and suddenly you get *word* advertisements?
Most IoT devices are beyond-insecure spyware but to the average person, they are neat little devices that are conveniently cheap & easy to use. This is not meant as a snide remark and the fact it sounds like one shows how fucked it really is.
To me, any product that is called "smart" or has any mention of Wi-Fi functionality without needing it is looking for another way to bend me over the counter next to a 4000$ LG smart screen refrigerator and penetrate.
The reason being, the money they make off a personalized profile of you & whoever is inside the residence by sensors meant to utilize that Wi-Fi functionality and report that data home before being sold is worth it to them. They do not care if it is not humane, they get more money, investors are happy. If a little fucky-wucky happens and something comes out that should not, give it 2% of the budget to sweep that under the rug.
I do not think it is a coincidence most people use a handful of web services, I think it is due to the rotting state of the internet and search engines (look up SEO) not giving a fuck about people. They are after money.
Look at it this way, the people try to search for cool shit but cannot because search engines are giving them the handful of sites with the best SEO scores, they are then faced with a brick wall not being able to progress. What do they do? use the service they can, the cycle continues.
In fact, the leading search engine company Google have their entire business model based on personalized advertising, which of course, gets data aggregated with their privacy-invading apps and off "smart" products that I mentioned previously, the cycle continues.
Alright class, here's a fun quiz: which company has contracts which allow them to have their apps pre-installed on a particular phone OS with a market share of around 70%? the one running on 3 billion phones? that's right!
Google.
Now that the gloom and doom section is done, I will talk about the good the internet has produced. Advancements in a lot of fields have been greatly aided by the internet's ease and speed of getting information to people. The internet was & is revolutionary, the "information age" if you will. Wouldn't what I previously ranted about be void if people were educated about the subjects & took appropriate countermeasures? I will be honest I have no fucking idea, probably not though lol.
I think the internet is a positive for the average person granted they know how to use the tool, navigate around the downsides and control their usage. The corporatization & monetization of the internet is a byproduct of the net-positive the internet had on society which inevitably lead to its enshittification. It's important to get the full picture to appropriately assess things, negativity bias, anyone?
For the case of IoT devices, Privacy-respecting open source IoT software does exist, you can create a great setup if you don't mind tinkering a bit with an ESP8266 or a small SBC for the hardware.
You can use privacy-respecting solutions to fuck up the efficiency of advertising from fortune 100 companies. Or don't, it's your choice. You may wonder why I say this and it's because the advertising system requires garnering data which incentivizes data-collection, I say fuck that.
This is not meant to be a secret redpill, it's just my two cents on technology.
Don't be a sheep like me, baaaah.