Man, I’ve felt this way for decades now. It’s a constant fight just to accomplish basic utility without divulging everything short of your genetic code to hundreds of “partners” in the process. It’s at the point that I spend more time trying to get relatives off tech entirely instead of helping them utilize it to improve their lives, for the simple reason tech doesn’t improve life right now, at least not for a lot of folks in my circles.

We built tools of mass communication, art, creativity, passion, and sharing, and then allowed the pursuit of advertising revenue to pervert them all into toxic cesspools of vitriol and incomprehensible UI/UX rife with dark patterns for maximum extraction of resources and rent.

You know what I still love about tech? The IRC server daemon chugging along without complaint and enabling pseudonymous communication without signups. The Jellyfin server hosting media to friends and family on Docker. The Caddy container handling certificates and reverse proxies for everything.

I love the things I build that just work, frozen how I like them, patched only when vulnerabilities become an issue or new features are something I find value in. The way tech was meant to be, I believe.