There is a generation of people that got into computers because they were a tool for empowerement and creativity. When I was a child, my younger sister would create movies editing frame by frame in MS Paint while I would learn Pascal to make a sequencer to play "melodies" using the PC speaker bell commands. Her friend would learn HTML to create a manually updated blog where she would post fantasy short stories. In the Internet, we all hang around with nicknames in chat rooms and learn to make flashy websites and get through the chain emails from relatives. We needed no Netflix or Facebook to share stuff, we had P2P and email and IRC. Then we learnt about GNU/Linux: the ultimate tool to get control of our machines. It was all organized chaos, instant communication that no one could control, limitless creativity, the ultimate dream of a post-capitalist anarchist society...
At some point, some got to believe that if only these tools would become mainstream, the mainstream would adopt these values. A techo-revolution!
This overestimated the transformative power of technology. What happened was otherwise: technology is now mainstream and has become a tool for social control and the ultimate frontier of consumerism. Tech didn't change society, society changed tech...
I still want to believe in these utopic values. But I understand that it is a long way traveled in little steps whose significance is hard to see while at it. In the meantime it's often tiring and lonely to live in the computing underground. One has to explain people why you don't have a smartphone (and it gets harder to reach people without having Wassapp and so on), one has to explain relatives why you don't want to work for BigTechCorp, while tryin to stay "up to date" one has to go through the angry rants of Apple users on HN [1] or the celebration of the new Micro$oft facelift, and the collective systemic submission in the startup world in this new gold rush...
The hardest part for me is to find stuff that I can do well and that I find valuable to the world... and still get paid for it. And I am an Software Engineer, the profession of the future! How can I be so obnoxious to have plenty of well paid jobs around me and not be interested in them? This makes me very sad and makes me feel deeply alienated...
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[1] You are not angry because of the design of a computer, you are angry at the realization that you are so personally invested in a technology that you have no control of, but has control over you!