“I used to have a living wage, friends I could talk to, affordable energy and water and intelligence that allowed me to think critically and make decisions for myself. When billionaires came along with their glorified digital parrots, you obviously can’t have all that now.”
“Smart”, proprietary tech and with mandatory internet access = do not buy. If you do: expect not to own, but be owned, and suffer enshittification at some point down the line. The only way to win the game is not to play it.
No disagreement here generally. The EU had a good track record in terms of holding big tech accountable, and GDPR has certainly paved the way for similar regulation elsewhere (looking at you, California).
That said, EU bodies have recently shown much less determination: the recent Twitter fine under the DSA was a joke, born from fear of retaliation from the Trump administration which had been bought by Musk beforehand stands in firm support of American companies out of the pure goodness of their black hearts. The same goes for the so-called trade “deal” with the US and the “Digital Omnibus”, both of which caved to American business interests. And with regard to the EU’s ongoing dependence on the US - both technologically as well as militarily - that is unlikely to change in the short term.
Social media has had a negative effect
on the youth, it sucks.
FTFY. Algorithmic social media owned by American big tech is a net negative for anyone involved, save the billionaire owners of these platforms. If you feel like banning something, ban algorithmic social media in its entirety. Deny these networks to operate in your country, full stop.
Just don’t give me that crap about “social media bans only for under-16s”, which is just a pretext for introducing identity verification and killing anonymity on the net.
Time for a slap on the wrist, that’ll teach 'em!
Ugh, that description triggered my PTSD acquired during the latest repairs on a Lenovo Yoga. Tons of printed and taped-on PCB in place of once solid construction.
I guess that’s why nowadays, whenever I need to buy new, I first watch a teardown video to see the insides. If things look finicky and hard to access/repair, I’m not buying. Refuse > repair.
We’re quickly moving towards a Warhammer40k world where “old stuff is better”. Just like digital services become increasingly enshittified, late-stage capitalism incentivises companies to produce things ever more cheaply just to squeeze out some more of that precious shareholder value. Plastics, electronics, garments - everything is so thin nowadays that it will crack, break and tear quickly.
Case in point: here’s a picture of two types of copper wiring.
On the left, you can see the original wiring of a defunct LED light. Further examination showed that the wiring had simply broken in parts of the cable. So I went to the scrapyard and scavenged the wires off an old 1960s lamp plug (that’s the wiring on the right-hand side). These wires had 3-4x the amount of copper strands as compared to modern wires and will not snap easily. I soldered them onto the lamp - now the lamp lives to light another day.
I can only encourage everyone to get a simple soldering iron, some screwdrivers, or a bit of sewing equipment and get to work. You have nothing to lose from tinkering with your stuff (almost*) . If something was broken before, chances are you’d have discarded it anyway, so you can’t break it much more. But the dopamine hit you get when something previously defunct suddenly jumps back to life and serves you for several more years - that’s priceless. Also, fixing your shit is an erect middle finger to the capitalist logic of ever-decreasing product life cycles and the ever-increasing amounts of deliberately produced waste - all that at a time where we’re more painfully aware than ever that resources are finite, and the so-called first world is squandering a lot of them at the expense of everyone else.
So do your bit. It’s thrifty. It’s fun. And it’s the right thing to do.
* Unless you’re dealing with batteries or high voltages, in which case you want to be careful and do your research; house fires are no fun.
Step 1: Don’t put incompetent con men in power…