How to Retain Your Personal Computing Freedom and Avoid Going Back to the Future

The post-personal cloudified system has so many nice advantages, but undeath it all the sad naked truth that you control nor see nothing; everything about you is far off artifice produced in some data center where you cannot see it, you cannot experimemt with it, you cannot adapt or control it.

The cloud is the new mainframe & it robs us of what made the PC era before it distinctly better & neat; it had been a semi fair shake, albeit one that required us also to operate & orchestrate our own small string of machines. But as we got more devices & had so little mini-administratoe wins, moving to centralized cloud was such an easy out.

Alas for us all. Humanity gave up so much for the convenience we won, from accepting other people's neo-mainframes into our pockets.

This article is long AF but has some real gems to it. I really really struggle to disagree with the article's synopsis that Pluton is, alas, little more than a way that other people can have control & dominion over you when you use you computer. It has legit safeties it enables, but it also looks a lot like a not so veiled way to let the cloud/neomainframe do what it wants on your personal computer that you have no say over. There's enormously veiled enormously large forces at play in the computing universe, & as harsh as it is, this article is good base context setting for where, I dunno, say, 2013-2023 have been at.

It’s important to save source code of programs you use lest they be ruined now too. X.org developers have this nasty habit of removing perfectly good things from the tree, for example. It’s little wonder why - they’ve explained that even though their job is to maintain X.org, they can’t you on their new shitware which coincidentally won’t eve work on old computers.

Although I also have fond memories of computing in the 90’s, the fears in this article seem to me both a little paranoid and unrealistic.

Paranoid because ‘they’ will take away our freedom, a classic conservative fear reinforced by citing the Nazi minister of propaganda.

Unrealistic because there is no going back in history. The future seems to be headed to a mix of local and remote computing, I’ll grant that. Especially with the looming dominance of GPT etc that so far requires resources not typically available locally.

But what that means and how unfree we will become is not all that clear. I think the main problem with such a statement is that it mixes a political attitude with a capitalist one. It fails to appreciate how disinterested Big Tech really is in politics and people. It will do what it needs to do to make money now and in the future.

There is probably not a lot of profit in prohibiting all kinds of computer usage. Yes, moderation on behalf of governments will remain a battlefield. But in the end no one forced us to go from BBS to Facebook. Enough people wanted to and then things became enshittified. You don’t need to force us, people can make the commons a shitty place all by themselves.