I jibe with a lot of what you've written here, and have some of the same attitudes and feelings. You mention it's been a long time, but I'm not sure how long we're talking. I've been strictly on Linux since the mid-2000s, and I can't remember exactly when I deleted my Facebook and Twitter, but I think it was around 2010-ish (possibly earlier--I know I switched from Gmail to Fastmail in 2012 and I had already been off most social media for a while by that point). The thing that I stuck with the longest was Reddit, finally deleting my account around (I think) 2018. Actually that's not entirely true, at some point since then I created a Discord account because so many god damn projects rely on that as their sole source of documentation and support, but I just deleted that too in the face of the recent face-scanning announcement. I've also been using some variation of de-Googled Android phones or straight-up dumb phones for around 10 years now. I guess the point is it's been a long fucking time for me, too.

I'll still point things out to my wife and kids--like I've convinced them to avoid Tik Tok, and when my wife was considering Ring cameras to monitor the merchandise at some shops that she runs, I convinced her to try some other more privacy-respecting options--but these days I can't really muster up the energy to proselytize the importance of privacy and speaking against corporations with your wallet outside of my immediate family. It just feels so much like a losing battle, like you're trying to go up against all the billionaire-run corporations all by yourself.

I'm also a software engineer, and my approach to AI so far has been limited to treating it as a SearchEngine++. In fact the only one I interact with is the chat bot that comes along with my subscription to the search engine Kagi. Usually it can point me in roughly the right direction, and it provides links to its sources that I can follow up on if I'm suspicious it's feeding me bullshit (which probably happens about as often as not). I don't work for an AI startup, but I do work with other engineers who have consumed far more of the AI flavor-aid than I have. I think that my co-workers might view me as the old-man-yells-at-cloud meme when it comes to privacy/capitalism/AI, and that suits me fine for now. Down the road if the AI hype-men prove to be correct and the job of software engineer morphs into something akin to babysitting AI agents that do all the fun and interesting stuff for you, that will be my signal that it's time to step away and maybe help my wife build up her retail business instead.

I dunno what the point of this ramble of a response is. I guess just to let you know that I see you and you're not alone.

I view this motion by Discord as the next step in the enshittification of that platform

I don't think this one makes sense. Discord is doing this not because it wants to, but because it's forced to due to government regulations. The UK and Australia have already passed laws that would require it to do age checks, it needs to do so in many US states, many European countries like France also require it to do so, and the entire EU has laws in the works that would require age verification.

There is no actual benefit to Discord to do this. Any actual information they can gather from your age verification - which I genuinely don't think they are doing, but let's assume they are - is worth jack shit. What's on an ID? Your age? You don't think Discord can estimate your age?

The most worthwhile data is actually the raw text for the LLM companies, not your government ID.

And meanwhile they lose paying customers, for zero gain. Discord would love if children went on gooning parties in NSFW channels as long as they were paying for nitro. It's like wondering if casinos are doing age checks because they want to steal your data.

That's why there is no escape from this. Any alternative, if it gets big enough, will also have to do age checks. Mastodon in the world of Twitter clones is an example. The big servers have to do age checks in the UK. Is what it is.

I really feel you. I know exactly the pain of just feeling exasperated over the next "we prioritised profit/ease of development/minimising support costs/etc. over user experience", and it's only accelerating.

For me, I've been mildly grumbling since around 2015 from the insidious, pervasive prioritisation of ads over functionality on the web, ever since Google decided to kill search engine effectiveness to facilitate advertising revenue. That combined with how Facebook migrated so much of the internet onto it's platform and got prohibitively shitty to the extent a lot of people voted with their feet, it feels like a huge part of the internet straight up died. Then Reddit torpedoing community and interesting discussion for low effort memes, and the beginning of the attention-as-currency era, it's just so exhausting!

It really feels like in the last decade we have exponentially ramped up on the death of "products and services are there to provide value to the user" and it's replacement with "services and products are there to extract as much capital (directly or indirectly) from the user", especially with the whole move away from consumer sentiment and corporate reputation seeming to matter at all to companies.

I feel more and more of my day to day experience is spent rubbing up against corporate interest, and it is increasingly hostile towards me. It feels bad.

An artist here, going through pretty much the same / similar things. Thanks for posting and making me feel less alone!

I believe this constant tension we're feeling is a precursor to a bursting of a bubble. It's an incredibly thin, soapy surface we sit on, becoming increasingly stressed in multiple directions until it can't remain intact anymore. No wonder it feels awful. One reason it feels even more awful than most awful things in life is because we don't know how long it'll still take for it to burst. It could happen this year, it could take a few more years - if some strange and rare event occurs, it can take even longer (although I don't believe that's likely).

I'd like to describe my own experience around the topics you mentioned.

Enshittification and being the only one who cares
For me, the bandwidth-consuming battle against enshittification started around 12 years ago when Adobe released Creative Cloud and started manipulating users to sign up and stop using the local software versions (CS). I saw the writing on the wall and covered my bases, resulting in my peers thinking I was a bit of an oddball. I've managed to work all these years without having to get even a trial period for CC, but last year's new development where Adobe now claims they own all rights (practically speaking) to my work if any collaborator of mine decides to work on it using CC is a new source of stress and worry. Most of my collaborators aren't as diligent or as short for funding as I am (at least they weren't up until now, more on that later), so they just kept getting locked into the Adobe ecosystem, the logic being that their end customers are paying for it, so why not. It isn't easy to get out at this point even if they wanted to.

I've been managing my systems and processes outside of the Adobe "garden" for so long now that it's become routine for me and I can more or less consider myself safe. But it's certainly more work than it would have to be in a better world where services exist to actually serve people.

Disruptions in my field
Related to the above, the reason I've been short for cash when the people around me have not: I'm producing concrete, real world items while my collaborators are mostly producing digital work and most of my peers are producing specs. Making tangible things requires a lot of technical know-how, money to cover the often steep material costs, and overall an attitude where I have to be mindful of every single small detail at every level of what I do. This kind of existence is hard, and for that reason, it's also frowned upon in my field. We were taught at university to strive for a position where we don't personally touch the manual labour component - rather a "true professional" is someone who has others do it on their behalf. People who "have to" do the manual parts themselves are seen as unsuccessful to some degree.

At the moment, I'm glad that I chose the concept I did, because hard as it is, it definitely cannot be replaced by AI - and more importantly, no one is even claiming that it can. The really shitty thing is that these claims and partially erroneous beliefs are actually causing people to lose their jobs even when the claim itself is likely false. I recently contacted a small digital design agency I used to work with, only to discover that their website doesn't exist. I haven't contacted them yet to ask what happened but I fear the worst. Many clients with large budgets - the ones that used to cover for the steep Adobe CC subscription fees - are now trying to cut costs, most likely by experimenting with AI. As a result, many high level professionals lose their best clients. I don't believe for a moment that this level of professionalism can actually be replaced by AI even when the end product is digital, but the clients are certainly going to try it because they can. And they won't understand their mistake before my friends' businesses have already gone bankrupt many times over.

This feels incredibly hard on many levels. There's some minor satisfaction I feel, realising I haven't been taxing myself in vain by going against the grain of common practices and sticking to my guns. At the same time, watching people's lives crumble and important skills get lost hurts like hell. And it hurts more because it was always so incredibly predictable. Systems built by blindly power-hungry people, intended to enable them to do "art" (among other things) without having to go through the process of becoming an artist (a process that involves growth as a human being and learning to be responsible in a way that isn't possible unless you painstakingly put yourself through that process) - it's so very obvious what kind of world this leads to. Which brings me to the next pain point.

Turbo capitalism and the rise of economic (and emotional) colonialism
In secondary school, I was taught a story about colonialism. I haven't checked for its accuracy but I don't think it matters much whether or not it was fabricated because the same thing is happening in our current societies. The story was that Native Americans traded their land in for glass beads - not realising the full implications of the transaction until it was already too late. The colonialists obviously knew the implications and deliberately failed to disclose.

I feel like the people around me who don't care about privacy and other consumer rights (sometimes human rights) that Big Tech is trampling on are being similarly deliberately misguided, and it's extremely painful to watch. The logic of colonialism seems to be: do bad thing now -> apologise when others realise it was bad -> immensely profit anyway because it'll be too late to go back and now you hold the power. This logic is being applied more and more often in the context of capitalism, in an increasing variety of ways, almost like capitalists are testing to see where else they can get away with it.

While I believe in the basic principles of capitalism and I don't think there are better ways to enable human and societal flourishing, I also think that what we have here is something else and quite sinister at that. It's not people choosing in free market conditions what makes their life better and rejecting what doesn't. It's people (and smaller organisations) being led on in an increasingly manipulated marketplace, rife with lock-ins and other ties to businesses and products that no one would actually choose if we started from a clean slate. It's being forced to use and pay for products and services that have negative value to society - things that leave us worse off! It's crazy and every sane adult should be actively going against it, but most are not.

(This text is already too long for me to get into "emotional colonialism", so I'll save that for another day.)

About the bubble
So, I mentioned that our emotional uneasiness is due to the looming bursting of our current bubble. And I do believe this, but at the same time: my own experience of life and work in the world has always been like this. I do things that I believe in, while realising most other people don't care, or don't believe in, the same things. I do what I do anyway, accepting the costs to my personal life and mental health (of which I then take extra good care for, so that I don't burn out or lose balance).

At the moment though, I can see and feel a shift taking place. It used to be easier for me to accept that the world was largely not built for me, or that it didn't cater to my needs and interests too well, because I could see and believe that it was a good place to live in for the majority of people. This is becoming harder and harder to believe as corporate interests keep shifting from value creation towards value extraction. The rift that used to divide me and a small outgroup of similar people from society - that rift is repositioning itself to divide most of civilised humanity into large cohorts with conflicting interests. When I say "large", I don't necessarily mean a large number of people on the colonialist side, just that their influence is large enough to effectively oppress and act against the rest.

All I can say is: I hope that this bubble, when it bursts, will not only take the dotcom-esque ridiculous AI hype with it, but also the naïve belief that glass beads are of equal value to the land we live on.

That was an fun and engaging read. Thanks for sharing. You voiced many thoughts that have been running through my head for the last 5 years. A little bit after the COVID restrictions lifted I had an epiphany. I don't know what it was about the transition from isolation back to normal life, but a switch in my brain flipped and the sight of any advertising triggered a visceral reaction against being manipulated. I felt violated any time someone tried to sell me something. As if they were trying to reprogram melt brain against my will just to get me to give them money for a product I don't actually want. When that happened I did a similar social media/privacy purge as you did. Although I did keep yt premium as it actually aids in avoiding ads. Watching long for video essays with ads is absolute torture. I also kept windows as my main OS. I enjoy my video games too much to give it up and my LAN pinhole ad blocking makes it tolerable. In some ways this has made me happier. But I do feel a bit ostracized by not really knowing about any instagram or tiktok trend when friends and family talk about them.

As a fellow programmer, I've been dealing with similar feelings about AI. Especially the feeling of becoming an outcast when everyone around me seems to be joining a cult.
I'm slightly more tentative about AI usage than you though. I do use it extensively for rubber ducking and finding out about alternative ways to do things. But using it for writing important code beyond toy projects or scaffolding is almost non existent in my workflow. I used to use it a lot more in the past but noticed two effects that made me stop. First, even with reviewing all the generated code, my long term understanding of my code bases was lacking. I supper at least for my brain, writing something imprints itself much more strongly than just reading. While writing a new feature was sometimes a bit faster, fixing a bug on code no human on my team wrote took a lot longer than it did before. The second one is I felt my skills atrophying. Having to look up how a library worked or names of methods became much more commonplace.

I broadly agree as well. Ultimately, I think that I'm not alone in saying:

"the internet is not our space anymore and we're pissed."

Well, maybe we're no longer pissed off. Maybe we're checking out.

This feels a lot like climate change and the rise of autocracy worldwide.

Eroding are our communal rights and norms, and with it, our sense of personal and collective value.

The pace of change is so rapid that the old checks and balances aren't working, and as the communal canaries in the coal mine, were beginning to break.

Personally, I'm off of all do the major networks for anything but information sharing and selling marketplace items. I fucking hate it and once loved being a character of myself on Facebook.

It sucks, but it's not worth losing sleep over. Pushback will be slow, and a shift into the next phase won't be loudly announced from the legacy platforms. Watching them slowly die under the weight of bad decisions and abdication of moral responsibility is a production I'll watch gladly.

So honestly, I agree broadly with you. I think other commenters have done a good job of sharing their feelings and talking about your sections and I won't try to do the same.

You are clearly very passionate about these things and I think that's maybe why you're seeing the disconnect with "everyone else".
I'm bothered about my privacy, I'm bothered about the AI hype and enshittifaction, but I don't think about it all the time nor do I go too far out my way to do anything about it... Because honestly it would completely ruin my mental health.

I'll be completely real with you, if I wanted to be genuinely upset about something and have it effect my mental health in a real, negative way then I would be getting upset about the outright murder and genocide going on right now, or global warming, and not "trillion dollar companies have once again decided to make more money at the expense of Discord".
I can do without a third space on the internet, I can do without AI and fuck it I can just not use the internet except for work to be honest.

But I do want a healthy lifestyle, food on the table, a loving parter, etc. World peace would be nice too but let's be real.

So I dunno, I agree, it's not good. Huge corporate is gonna make everyone's lives worse in someway if they can make more money, that's a fact. It's shit the internet is trash these days and we aren't going back, the deal is done. But I personally think that too many people let their mental health get effected by wrong things. And yeah, that's also the modern internet to blame for that too in a big way.

Before I get started, apologies if this reply ends up a bit of a ramble. Your post ties into a variety of things I have been thinking about and also talking about on tildes and elsewhere. I could copy paste relevant bits from those comments in here creating a new wall of text, but I'll link to previous discussions instead. Not sure what is better since some people really hate clicking links.

Anyway, on with the actual reply! I can very much relate to a lot of what you are saying. I haven't gone exactly as far as you have (I see no benefit of hiding behind a VPN for example) I have moved away from gmail, am using Nextcloud for my cloud needs, run with adblock, etc.

Also I know for sure you are not alone in this because this blog post blew up on lobste.rs the other day. Which I feel covers part of what you are saying as well.

Among privacy-conscious folks and small internet communities like Tildes, none of the above are particularly novel thoughts.

They aren't novel thoughts, that much is true. But even in smaller communities I still find myself being worn down by specific factors ingrained in modern tech culture.
I am not looking for a echo chamber, I like discussing things from various sides. But, I can relate more to the people who are entirely done with various things (not just tired) like AI, even if I get some decent use out of it.

What I cannot relate to is a different group of people. There is a large contingency of techy people who conflate technology with silicon valley and as a result also turn into "techno apologists" as they see it all through a lens of "march of progress" thing. To them, any friction or error is just a necessary stumbling block on the road to the future, so they brush it off. On tildes it isn't "that" bad, though it certainly is there. Which, in my opinion, does poison a lot of actual possible discussion.

Another aspect of it is the tendency in tech culture to see technology as "neutral" to the extreme. Where it is just "the wrong use of the tool" that is an issue, not the technology itself. Which, certainly in combination with the other point, can lead to some pretty warped logic and lead to discussions where I am just wondering how far down I have to look for the moral baseline.

I think this group of people within the tech sphere have always been around. But they certainly have become more pronounced and encountering them is just really tiresome.

These people also engage with the same people you do. So for all the times you are talking about privacy and the impact of big tech they might also be there handwaving these worries away as not a big deal, giving a good sounding excuse for why it has to be this way, etc.

The thing is, they either aren't aware of the degree of data collection going on on every major internet platform, or they don't care.

I think it is possibly both combined with a few other factors. People are generally already dealing with a lot of other things and dealing with some extra thing on top of that can simply be too much for a lot of people. As you said, you are technical enough to have taken steps to move away from a lot of large tech. But, it takes time and effort. Self hosting is not trivial and if you are going to look for other commercial services you might end up outside of big tech but still with a company aspiring to be one of the big boys one day. So moving to the right service also takes a lot of research. Most people simply don't have the time for that as they have other activities as technology isn't their hobby.

Combined with the other voices from the tech world a lot of people will also simply brush it off as it is easier to believe the thing that doesn't impact them right now.

So it isn't as much that you are crazy, but you are in a sense privileged enough to both see what is going on and take actual steps away from it. Which, is still tiresome, just a different kind.

As far as your interlude goes I fully do relate to that. A lot of why this is happening also has to do with what I mentioned before. Just on a corporate scale.

Regarding discord, I saw you already got some pushback there, but I don't think you are wrong in mentioning it. In fact, in your reply to the pushback you perfectly articulate why it is still problematic from a variety of viewpoints. Because yeah, they don't have to do it world wide right now. Sure, law in the making could be a driving factor but equally so can an IPO. Not to mention that some of the verification methods (handwave AI analysis of your Discord habits) very much smells like the sort of corporate rush job of just having ticked the boxes to the outside world. Since some of the laws mentioned are still in the process of being drafted up there is no way for Discord to know if what they are doing now will actually hold up against them anyway.

I don't have a nice paragraph to end my reply. I still have various loose thoughts but to be honest that would result in a much longer rambling post. So I'll leave it at this (for now).

My stance is somewhat neutral. I read a blog post absolutely glazing it, I roll my eyes. I read a blog post absolutely trashing it, I roll my eyes. I think about AI, I roll my eyes. It's all just so tiring.

That seems pretty reasonable.

AI is the Current Thing. In the bay area at least, most conversations tend to converge on the Current Thing sooner or later. Some previous current things were:

• The Internet. (Dot-com era).
• House prices. (Comes and goes.)
• 9/11.
• Smartphones.
• The Great Recession.
• Cryptocurrency.
• Trump.
• The Pandemic.

I totally get that conversation about the Current Thing can get really tiresome. There is so much duplication - people saying pretty much the same thing lots of other people have already said.

On Tildes, we had to quarantine pandemic discussion for a while so people could get away from it. Yep, it's important, but often you want a break from it.

I actually love the modern Internet and think it's in the golden age. I've been a digital native since the 2000s, and I find there are infinitely more platforms, communities, and third places now than before. There are more options than ever. Software is better than ever too. There are tons of privacy-oriented options for literally everything. And everything comes in a dozen different design philosophies too.

I'm part of like... maybe 40~60 online communities, including this one? I get to connect with many irl and online friends and acquaintances across many hobbies and interests.

More people are online than ever, and I get to know the lives of every kind of person on earth.

There's more choice than ever, and you get to make your own experience.

This is a bit tangential/specific to social media use..

I feel the same, but am less technologically knowledgeable than you, so have the inertia of having to learn new skills/info before I can implement new strategies to block annoyances. It's been easy enough to stop using Facebook regularly as ive just never logged into it on my phone (though i keep my acct so i can check messenges on my computer; like you, i don't want to lose my connections), and i never got into other social platforms.

Reddit, though, has been impossible to kick. After migrating over to Tildes, I've found myself going back to mindlessly browse more and more, even though I can see how trashy it is.

This post finally gave me the push to figure out how to block r/all. I didn't want to block all of reddit, as it's honestly still useful to search for info (case in point, i found my solution on reddit!), and I appreciate a couple subreddits.

I already have ublock installed on firefox, so figured there might be a way to create my own filter, and after a bit of searching it's worked! Hopefully it's just enough of a nudge to help me disengage more.

For anyone else interested, here's what worked as a custom filter (reddit wrapper loads, but feed is empty):

reddit.com##:matches-path(r/all) shreddit-feed

There are a lot of points I don’t have a comment for (I don’t work in tech, etc) but I saw this and I want to add my own rant to your rant

Extrapolate that friction out to people who aren't as close to me though, and it feels somewhat like dying by a thousand cuts. Not in the sense of mental anguish, just general fatigue. Over 50% of my communication with my good friends takes the form of them sending me memes on Instagram. I react and reply because I'm not just going to ghost them because of muh privacy. But there's that like 1% of my brain that goes "yeah I wish you wouldn't do that". I have not bothered to ask them to stop, because I don't (yet) care to proselytize to them in the name of privacy at the risk of shutting down what is effectively one of their love languages.

I tell people over and over again, I almost never use instagram, I don’t like it, please just text me instead and I still get messages frequently by the exact people I tell this to.

I feel honored that people think of me, but I really just wish that we could go back to communicating the way people used to. I find a lot of the humor from social media memes to be low effort and I just don’t really find prerecorded soundbits over people lip syncing humorous.

When I do check insta, I have like 20 of these and it makes it so overwhelming to interact because I know people are expecting a response.

I just wish that I could make my friends understand that it’s such a waste of your brain power to be hopelessly addicted to social media consuming the equivalent of junk food for the mind, and I’m saying that as someone who did fall for that trap myself and wasted years of my life doing it.

Bring back compelling media that tells in depth stories that are compelling, jokes that take some brain power to digest, etc etc.

I am so exhausted being the only person I know irl that isn’t glued to the platform.

I lowkey hate genAI and wish it had been kept to making quality of life improvements/advances in medicine and science. It's another example of why people can't have nice things.

Now I spend hours throughout the year combing through the privacy policies of all websites I have accounts on, so I can send data opt out requests. I'm the only person that I know who does this, but it's a small way for me to fight back against greedy data mining corporations.

I say keep fighting for what you believe in if you can. We are but one speck in the universe, and we don't know how the battle between AI-replaced vs. AI-assisted vs. return to analog will play out. It's tiring the expend all of this mental and physical energy to protect your privacy, but that is also all that we can do.