Sometimes it just hits me how different my relationship with technology really is compared to others.
I've grown up in a family that valued privacy, and then my very first friend group from early on exclusively consisted of gay – later #trans – autistic furry hackers. I've never known a life of being careless about #technology and #privacy, and a DIY mentality wasn't counterculture, it was just the way #tech worked.
To me it had been completely normal that my phone would obviously have some #degoogled #LineageOS on it (or rather, #CyanogenMod back in the day). It was just part of the setup process. Same with some #Linux flavour everywhere.
Self-hosting services was just the way to get those services. I never had any cloud accounts anywhere. I had always been on my girlfriend's Nextcloud or e-mail infrastructure or whatever, later my own. I always self-hosted my game servers. My websites would never be on any random hoster.
This came with a bunch of habits and quirks I just accepted as part of the tech experience. I am used to not getting any notifications on mobile, for example. I always have cookies and site data disabled out of habit.
I don't buy smart devices that I haven't vetted and rather choose the 'dumb' version, i. e. an infrared remote instead of a bluetooth one. My first instinct when looking for software is to check the repos or the Arch Wiki/FSF Directory and such sites. I haven't used Google in forever.
All this isn't to brag or whatever at all, it's just to illustrate what my worldview is like and how I grew up. I'm not even super intense about all this; I still watch YouTube videos for example and I (have to) use some proprietary software, e. g. for work. I'm not RMS, yknow?
...
But imagine growing up like this, and now it's 2026 and you see someone use a phone. The sheer contrast??
I see people live a life where their most used app on their phone is now ChatGPT or Gemini or whatever. They use it more often than a search engine, they micromanage chats so it 'remembers' all of their emotions and thoughts. They ask for life advice, questions, make it write e-mails, everything.
They are on Whatsapp, Instagram, Snapchat, Tiktok and whatnot and actually use all of those features I've only ever heard of second hand, such as a "for you page".
They have YouTube accounts and actually are able to comment, like and subscribe – that's something that feels weird to even think about to me as someone resigned to passive use of such sites!
They have all the flashy features just available to them, like these live notifications, voice control, smart connectivity and whatnot that I accepted long ago I just "couldn't get".
It's such a different life to live, it's almost like a different culture.
Ramin Honary
in reply to lia, a bun type creature • • •I feel this.
I was trying to explain to my kid the other day why using the command line is usually faster than a search engine or asking AI because the corpus of files you search on your local system is small enough to be queried with simple patterns like globs and regexs and you don't even need the Internet to do it. "You don't need the Internet? Why is that a good thing?"
The McCarthy era (which never ended after McCarthy died) didn't just purge communism, it tried to purge the entire human instinct to form any community at all. They succeeded by replacing that instinct with consumerism as a surrogate. People's "communities" are all brands now, centered around services owned by corporations that can monitor your every interaction, and possibly flag you as a threat. I don't think that McCarthyist purge had fully succeeded until the fall of the Berlin Wall, so if you grew up before then, you probably still have some of that non-consumerist culturalization in you. That includes self reliance, learning from your community, and the idea that your tech is your personal property.
eshep likes this.