It feels like all the joy I used to feel from being an enthusiast has been completely voided as computing has become the modern vector for fascism and surveillance. I find myself recoiling from all online spaces, even independent and open source ones that I’d loved and supported in the past.
It’s been an exceptionally strange impulse to go from having an elaborate online presence to now feeling like the only acceptable way to engage with the network is to have as minimal of an online footprint as possible.
This especially hurts when it feels like an issue of skilling, where I know how to do certain tasks with computers, but have to teach myself for the first time the analogue alternatives that my parents and their parents likely already knew well.
How have you chosen to deal with it? Do you find yourself moving away from computing and the internet, despite formerly loving it as a hobby? Have you replaced things that computers used to do for you with analogue replacements?
I’m curious how other people are experiencing this.
I’m not trying to poke fun at you, but I found that we can really apply what you said there to a lot of other aspects of life and it wouldn’t sound too crazy these days.
Tools are tools. The car brings you from point A to point B. That point B can be your home where you feel safe, or right into some person to hurt or even kill them. The kitchen knife lets you cut your veges, but you can also cut off someone else’s finger. But do we say we should stop using these tools because of how badly other people are using them?
What you’re tired of is people being irresponsible, people wanting to act with impunity, to gain dangerous powers, to threaten others, to satisfy only themselves, be it sadistic, sexual, egotistic, self-compensation, or whatever. The problem lies in certain groups of people, not the tool. Why are we fussing over the tool when it’s the people that we need to deal with? Sure, we can argue that the tool makes doing the harm easier, and yes we should try to find ways to build better, safer tools, or control who gets to use the tools, but it never removes people’s abilities to do harm through other means. Not having the Internet and technology just means that these harms are more localized and muted. A tree fell in the forest and no one was there to hear it, but it also means no one knows if someone’s actually there and they’re hurt because of it.
No you’re absolutely correct. I’ve found it harder to have faith in other people as much as I did when I was a little younger, because of the state of the world and the lack of movement on the part of people around me. I think part of the struggle I’m having is that computers aren’t a hobby one engages with in a vacuum. If someone was really into knitting and all of the sudden half the knitting community got into fascism for some reason, that person could reasonably go on knitting in the comfort of their own home without feeling like it is in any way contributing to or condoning those fascist knitters. But with computers, half the hobby is the joy of networking! Of these shared spaces created by tying computers together in new and interesting ways. Which unfortunately have now created a wicked gestalt surveillance apparatus. Hell is other people and their computers?
I get your sentiment, but I’ll use your argument against you here: just as computing as a hobby doesn’t exist in a vacuum, the enjoyment of any hobby doesn’t exist in one either. I get it if you’re feeling guilty by association — lots amongst us are likely feeling that way, and I started off thinking that way too, even if I, demonstrably, am not contributing to the enablement of that evil. The person knitting at home for leisure may get lumped with the fascist knitters. Their techniques at knitting up beautiful sweaters that they’ve shared is being used to make fascist uniforms, used as a symbol of repression. It’s disappointing, but it should not be reason for us to give up on this space we’ve created and allow these forces of evil to take up the whole space and allow the hobby, the technique, the tool, to truly and fully become monopolized by these forces. That evil isn’t going away by us staying quiet and just leaving the space; the tools are already there, and if we just passively shy away from pushing back, then the tools and narrative are theirs to control.
And all this is why it’s important for us to continue participating in the discourse, even if we don’t actively push back against that force. We show that normality exists, that not all the people in the space is some dickhead.
At least that’s what my optimistic side is telling me, and my pessimistic side wants to believe that we can actually do that so that I don’t just fine up on humanity entirely.