(2024-08-19) It's all about ownership
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There is a huge problem no one can be silent about anymore. A huge question
that you need to ask yourself whenever you consider buying anything, or even
receiving it as a gift or something: "Will I own it once I get it?"
The scale of this problem is much larger than you think. And I'm not even
talking about legal restrictions (let's be honest, no one fully cares about
them), I'm talking about real dystopian stuff. I'm talking about every time
some game or software switches to a subscription model (including the
firmware of frigging cars that people already have paid a ton of money for),
every time a hardware crypto key breaks, every time you rely upon streaming
services instead of downloading everything locally and self-hosting it
whenever required, and then suddenly find out that the content you got used
to is no longer there and you can do absolutely nothing about it.
For instance, I keep seeing cryptobros actively advertising "hardware
wallets" like Tangem or Ledger. Who is to guarantee that the master keys
never leave the device or weren't backed up by the manufacturer even before
putting them inside? How do you restore your wallet keys if the device
breaks? If you choose the recovery passphrase option, how does it differ
from you just memorizing the BIP passphrase and using it to restore the keys
with any other wallet, without introducing this extra point of failure?
Lastly, whatever happened to "paper wallets" where you just print out your
keypairs as QR codes and hex values and store them in a secure place?
This kind of plague didn't appear overnight. Since mid-2000s, we've been
slowly but surely fed the worst Orwellian practices disguised as
technological progress. All "for our own convenience", of course. It's just
that now the amount of things we have to pay for but still don't own becomes
so apparent that it can't be ignored anymore. The most important part of it
is that such things were considered a novelty and out of place back then,
but are so commonplace now that the general public already can't imagine
otherwise, and readily and mindlessly considers anyone who prefers to
actually download stuff "a pirate", "a dork" or "a geek" at best. This is
how scarily efficiently Overton window sliding works nowadays.
So, what can be done about this? Plenty, actually. Increase your local
long-term storage capacity. Archive your software and data. Go Linux and BSD
way. Go FOSS-first regardless of the platform. Collect game ROMs and support
emulation. Download books, music and movies. Learn how to liberate the
firmware of whatever proprietary electronics you have to use. Combat planned
obsolescence. DIY wherever you can. Learn analogue skills (mech watch
regulation, slide rule usage, Sun/star navigation etc). Resist corporate
normie propaganda and keep your mind clear of online noise.
