I’m starting to wonder what the real benefit even is anymore. Between the technofeudal landscape we live in, where billionaires own the means of communication, data is constantly mined for profit, and surveillance is baked into every layer, it feels like I’m standing at the beach, using my bare hands to push back an endless tide.
Even when I take the so‑called “liberated” path through Linux, self‑hosting, and privacy tools, it often feels futile. The web itself is poisoned. Browsers are turning into tracking engines. Sites rely on manipulation and dark patterns. Social media is full of misinformation and ragebait.
Even open-source projects are being pulled under corporate influence (ex: Firefox adoption of AI).
It feels exhausting to route around a web that’s already been captured.
So I’m asking myself: what’s the point? Why not just step away?
Why not trade the illusion of digital control for actual peace, get a dumb phone, a CD player, and check out books, movies, music, and games from the library as my entertainment?
Does anyone else feel this way? Have you found ways to reconnect with technology?
Honestly, you should just step away. Tech is best when it’s viewed as a tool to achieve your goals, not as a goal in its own right.
It’s fun as a hobby, but that requires you to have fun doing it, so yeah.
IT Professional here.
I’ve been ready to burn it all down for about 20 years now.
Whenever I got called for an issue, I would tell the user “eh, just throw it out the window,” and then they would laugh like I was joking or something
Is it a printer? Hold on. I will come help you throw it out the window.
Cool, Maintenance said we can use their appliance dolly if we let em watch
Does anyone else feel this way? Have you found ways to reconnect with technology?
I’ve been stepping away slowly for a few years now. Back to low-tech and analog… and back to privacy/ownership/control. I don’t plan on giving up on tech at all, I just put it back at its place which is one tool in my toolbox that contains many more. One tool that, I quickly realized, was not even the most essential (pen and paper would be, for me).
I went much of my life with no tech. No cell, no computer, even then slow adoption. I think it has been a net negatibe, for me, and society. Now that capital has bought out all functions, created shittrusts on any remaining competition, and all maximized revenue. With a captured government, including a pet judiciary and prosecutors, there is no check on them left. No government, no consumers unions, no competition.
Reminds me of a joke I heard a few years ago.
The “Tech Enthusiast” : My whole home is rigged up with smart systems! I can control my AC and my lights from my phone from 1,000 miles away!
The Tech Engineer : the most recent piece of equipment I own in my home is a printer from 2003 and I keep a loaded gun next to it in case it makes a noise I don’t recognize.
joke
Ahaha, yep, totally a joke.
i self-host everything i reasonably can and im having the time of my life with it (i am special)
This is where I’m at. The process is fun for me, though. Setting everything up, maintaining it, seeing other people using the things I’ve put my time and effort into. Feels good.
Not for everyone, though, and I think that’s where division of labor comes in. We all have the weeds we wanna be in. Where someone sees weeds, I might see dandelions. Where I see weeds, someone else might see white clover, and we all work together to make each other’s lives easier
Having the time of my life setting things up. Not having the time of my life maintaining it. Fucking hating on securing my server.
im having the time of my life with it (i am special)
I just keep supporting open source and following the forks as needed. Otherwise, I’m self-hosting what I can and going lo-fi where I can’t.
Also: [email protected] for all your “ranting about how modern tech sucks” needs.
Fantastic community thanks.
I agree completely. And I’ve worked in tech for 20+ years.
I find myself doing more and more specifically to get away from using the internet. It has totally become a tracking service for corporations and marketing. It is frustrating, because it was paid for by the people to disseminate information. Yes, you can still get good information (like Wikipedia), but what are the tradeoffs now? Most of what I see are ads or clickbait or just outright AI slop. I’m so tired of the constant barrage of bullshit. Even ad blockers can only do so much.
So for me is isn’t about getting away from tech, per se, but it is about getting away from the internet. In practice this restricts a lot, though some things are fine (I don’t mind playing games, for example, even though I’m technically using the internet).
But definitely: I’ll play local music files or put on a record instead of streaming anything. I’ll read a book. I’ll play a (single player) game. But don’t make me go online.
And before you say it: yes, I also restrict my Lemmy usage.
billionaires own the means of communication
Billionaires own PieFed/Lemmy? Damn. Didn’t know that.
Ohhh you mean they own the shitty parts of the Internet? Yeah it’s simple, don’t use them.
I understand your point hence my upvote. I don’t know about you, but I mainly use Lemmy on a phone made by Apple. Many of my friends use Google phones and Microsoft computers.
most people can still only be contacted through facebook messenger and whatsapp
Well giving up on tech certainly won’t help with keeping in contact with those people.
I’m not going to give up, but I’ve really stagnated on upgrades over the past decade.
I used to get a new phone every year back when you could do that for $100 a year. Now I go five years between.
My last computer was built in 2012 and I used it until October 2024, and could have kept using it. It was fully upgraded and played all new games on high settings fine. That said, I’m extremely glad I did a new build in October 2024.
And then you have consoles. One has no exclusives and is dead, the other has two exclusives and is there, and the other is Nintendo and is expensive and has its own lineup issues, depending on who you ask.
Tech is stagnating hard and has been for a while. Buy the mid range or high end of what you can afford and acquire right now, and then sit on it for a decade.
Corporations have transformed a once enjoyable place into a dreary and unpleasant environment. I, for one, would prefer not to swim in the port-a-potty it’s become.
They’re doing that everywhere because it’s about how many dollars you can make in the short term. They don’t expect to be around long enough for it to matter some reason.
Of course not, it’s always been about the quick buck. It’s like watching telemarketing scammers run a business, if the scammers were stupid enough to shit where they eat.
Im stuck (deliberately) about the year 2010 ish tech wise… People need automation to turn on a light switch, i long ago figured out how to open my curtains sans alexa as well.
Alas everything enshitifies.
So I’m asking myself: what’s the point? Why not just step away?
Video games are amazing and fascinatingly diverse!
Not in the slightest.
But, where I used to super interested in cutting-edge tech stuff, I’m now extremely jaded. I used to actively seek out news on new tech companies / projects because it genuinely felt like there were a lot of problems out there to be solved, and tech was solving those problems. These days it seems like tech often is the problem, and it’s never going to be solved because they have the DMCA, Section 230, trillions of dollars, and the entire apparatus of the state ensuring that their shitty tech keeps getting in your way.
The thing is, I still like tech. I can’t imagine living in a world without it. Whenever I see these memes about people wanting to become farmers it amazes me, because farming sucks. I don’t like the great outdoors, the indoors is far greater. I can appreciate non-digital tech. An internal combustion engine is a really cool gadget, for example. And, I’m happy to do my own bike maintenance. But, real world things are greasy, loud, and inelegant. It amazes me when people claim to like record players instead of good quality digital media. It’s amazing how record players work, but they’re still terrible, outdated things that objectively produce a less accurate sound than a good digital file. I still prefer technology, preferably digital technology. I just don’t like the stuff that makes up 95% of the Internet these days.
It sounds like you really feel the same way, because:
get a dumb phone
That’s tech.
a CD player
Also tech.
check out books, movies, music, and games
I’m pretty sure any movies and music you check out from the library in 2025 will be digital, that’s tech.
Have you found ways to reconnect with technology?
If you don’t like it, don’t reconnect. Become a farmer or a fisherman or whatever makes you happy. But, I’m not going to join you. I may be veering a lot more towards DIY tech, and offline things than I used to. But, to get me to abandon technology you’ll have to pry it from my cold, dead hands.
wanting to become farmers it amazes me, because farming sucks
I agree, I think people romanticize it and think of it like gardening. It can be relaxing, therapeutic even, to do some home gardening. Actually becoming a farmer sucks. It’s why a lot of its done by immigrants who don’t have many better options.
Besides, that’s tech now too and it’s also been enshittified. Look at John Deere.
Not to mention a true farming life is brutal. Those 4am wakeup calls aren’t optional, if you’re truly living off it. Tractor breaks down? Cow’s sick? Want lunch?
You fix it, you kill it, you make it.
Because the non-industrial scale profit margins on farming suck. So you don’t have the money to pay someone for many of the luxuries city folks enjoy. Do it for a year, and you either learn to love the struggle or you quit.
There are some amazing parts of farming. And the life can be incredible. But farmers are ridiculously tough for a reason.
Yeah, I mean, that’s the only part of farming that actually seems interesting to me. It’s not that it makes me want to do it, but I’m curious about tractors using GPS to sow seeds then plow a field. But, John Deere tractors seem even more enshittified than most tech right now.
But, that also emphasizes your other point. To make farming less labour intensive and require less expertise, you can now buy really expensive farming equipment with the latest tech that makes certain aspects of farming easier. But, that equipment is extremely expensive.
Farm work used to be done by slaves. In the US, once slaves were freed, many continued to be farmers because that’s all they knew how to do, and it wasn’t a job that anybody else wanted to do. Now farming has diverged in 2 directions, on one end there’s the (white) farm owner, or upper tier farm worker who owns million-dollar pieces of equipment with all kinds of modern tech. On the other end there are farm workers, who are often illegal immigrants, or at least immigrants on very restricted visas who work the toughest jobs for almost no money. And, both jobs suck.
The suck of the farm worker’s job is obvious. Back breaking labour in terrible weather for almost no pay. It’s a job that nobody with any options would choose to do.
The farm owner’s job sucks too. You’re at the mercy of the weather, and that weather is only getting more unpredictable as the climate changes. You have to invest in extremely expensive equipment just to have a chance, so you might have millions of dollars in assets (harvesters, livestock, land) but your average cashflow is only in the low 6 figures, and in bad years it can be negative. You don’t own your own seeds, you “own” your tractor, but need John Deere’s approval for your own repairs, and you’re kind-of tied to the land.
then idea of the down on his luck farmer is a lie sold to you buy the farm lobby. the overwhelming majority of farmers are multi-millionaires abusing this system to ratfuck public funds the same as everyone else who is rich. they even have their own special class of bankruptcy that lets them protect large chunks of assets and that class of bankruptcy literally only benefits rich farmers.
Not completely, but more and more I find peace of mind in analog and offline spaces. Physical books feel better than e-books, a real bike is more fun than a Peleton (cheaper too), and cooking my own food is better than GrubHub.
I have an educational background in IT, but I’ve worked as a mechanic for most of my adult life. I’m a tool using primate. Tech is a tool. If a new tool improves on the old and makes life easier, I use it. If it doesn’t, it’s not worth having around. When your job is fixing things, “ain’t broke, don’t fix it” makes a lot of sense.
I’m not going to bend over backwards for tech that I don’t need just because a rich CEO tells me it’s revolutionary. I can flip a light switch, lock my doors, make a grocery list without the help of an AI fridge, and write my own emails.
The problem comes when there are no more non-AI fridges around and people start mocking you for building your own dumb fridge, you weirdo.
That’s usually how it goes.
The trouble I’d have to go through to build a dumb fridge would bother me more than people talking shit about me building or owning one.
People can talk shit all they want, don’t mean I’m gonna listen.
My aggravation at the people who run big tech companies makes me more interested in hacking than ceding tech to them.
I think stepping back from a lot of specific tools is appropriate. I’m trying to de-Google, and I’ve left a lot of platforms. I also appreciate unnetworked things like physical media, and music and e-books on non-networked devices.
But leaving tech overall isn’t appealing to me. I just recently started getting into mesh radio, for instance. It’s dope stuff.
My aggravation at the people who run big tech companies makes me more interested in hacking than ceding tech to them.
The current wave of doomerism, which I share, is from watching them make unashamed moves to seize the means of computation from us.
You can’t hack anything if you can’t get any information on how it works, any tools to disassemble it, any devices to interface with it. They stopped printing books on these subjects, and soon the whole internet will be LLM agents that can edit the responses of. We’ll all float around in our hoverpods with our 8GB tablets like the motherfuckers in Wal-E
What really fucks me up is how enterprise has their heads burried in the sand to all this. They really think it’s a good idea to put all their little secrets in the cloud. Microsoft is going to predict every move the market makes someday…
You do realize that a CD player, books, music, games etc are technology too right? Yes modern corpo tech is bullshit but that is not the fault of technology and there are alternatives to everything. Its a question of convenience. Do you want to be spoon fed with a pretty solution that gets marketed to everyone? Well you gonna have a bad time in the long run…
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