There’s one thing I wish you all could understand.
The way Apple, Alphabet, Meta and Amazon owns the world? It doesn’t have to be that way. It used to not be that way. Their ascendancy should’ve been illegal.
I was on the FOSS bandwagon before those companies took over the world. I belatedly fell off it and drank the proverbial iPad Kool-Aid in 2021 (and have also gotten into the equally proprietary, just more openwashed, “alternative” called Android in the years since) but I don’t think that was a good decision on my part.
I was a weirdo who refused to join Facebook or even have .doc files from the old Microsoft Word era. Not refusing just to be a weirdo, but refusing because these corporations are bad for society.
I have seen the world willingly tether themselves in this poison cage. These days, more and more people can see how that’s a problem but fewer and fewer can actually do anything about it.
My own life as a weirdo is getting more and more difficult. Often I’ve stumbled in my determination and tried to get down with the sickness but been unable because there’s often a bootstrap problem where the apps expect you to already be deep in that toxic “ecosystem”.
When I see our policy-makers knit our fates even closer to the fealty of these monstrous beings I don’t know what to do. The daily gaslight dose is insanely high. The streets and even the inside of the local city busline are full of TV monitors constantly saying “Use apps! Use apps! Use apps! Use apps!” I’ve had to watch that “here’s how you, loyal Apple/Alphabet customer, can activate your app ticket correctly” video loop ten thousand times since it’s blasted directly into our eyes on the bus line here where I live. I can’t handle it! I grew up in an era where there weren’t even any ads on TV, that was illegal! And now the entire city is like a never-ending ad-break.
I come from a world where this wasn’t how it worked. As I always say: we lost the downhill battle in three decisive blows just one after another:
The network effect is a very strong poison. It is an externality that our economic system just isn’t equipped to deal with. I have to keep reminding myself to not really blame anyone for succumbing. It’s a foundational bug in how money works.
But our politicians all around the world have to accept some of the blame here. Corrupted by lobbyist bribes they have enacted things like DMCA, EUCD, TRIPS, ACTA and so on. We could’ve had a much different world. We still can. ♥︎