Cutting Out the Middleman (by Jen Sorensen)

Too bad they crushed all the old cars

I mean, they were worthless.

Basically how i try to live my life! Buy physical media, setup a nas, unplug from the internet on most weekends (or limit it).

No. The capitalists are the problem. Not the tech grunts.

The idea that we can even DO anything about capitalism at this point is a forgone fantasy. Not to say we shouldn't keep trying to push for a better, more equitable world until the time becomes more ripe to do away with personal gain above others, but we don't get there all at once. There will be no revolution, nobody is coming.
But if we were to work together and firmly, decisively push actual, selected representatives into power who are committed to getting MOTHERFUCKING MONEY OUT OF POLITICS, that would bring a thousand miles closer to that ideal world we all want. Other countries have done it, but our problem in America is we have a population way too comfortable and atomized to ever band together and do this critically important thing.
I don't have a way to reach enough people without some kind of massive disaster that forces people off their couches and makes food out of reach.
- Oh, is that how we beat the Nazis? With half-assed reforms and vote organizing?

Cutting out the middle man does not involve technologically regressing.

Cutting out the middle man means stepping up and learning how the tech you use in your daily lives actually works. The only reason some tech bro can step in and ruin your life is if you let them keep you ignorant through convenience.

You want to cut out the middle man? Use, and support, open source. Fight to make everything that requires a server, be a server that you own in your own home (or is federated and in your local community). Use, and support, repairable technology... And actually repair your technology!

Cutting out the middle man does not involve technologically regressing.
But then how can you performatively sit in Starbucks with a mechanical typewriter and then post it on social media so everyone knows how progressive and anti-establishment you are???
They are too lazy for that.
does not involve technologically regressing.
The fallacy that technological progress is inherently good is simply flawed. You could say "instead of relying on Spotify, and instead of "technologically regressing", learn open source alternatives and host your own Jellyfin server!"
But what was wrong with "technologically regressing" exactly? A MP3, CD or even tape recording player will: always work, sound great, require zero user friction, never receive updates or security flaws, not depend on a convoluted self hosted setup.
Do you want to listen to music or impress Lemmy? There's absolutely no argument to be made that requires accepting all tech simply because it's tech.
- It's also a fallacy that technology always progresses. If technology from 25 years ago serves you better than technology from today, it's the superior technology.
- Technological progress isn't inherently anything. It's just technological progress; an inevitability. Fighting against it is like fighting the laws of the universe, if not outright stupidly phobic.
  What defines the "goodness" of technology is how people choose to use it.
  Everything more said is just pointless philosophical fluff.
- There’s absolutely no argument to be made that requires accepting all tech simply because it’s tech.
  False dichotomy and a stupid comic strip making a stupid point all the way down.
  If we cared about this issue we would be pushing for the installation of representatives who want to ban planned obsolescence and systems that require you to have the newest, most expensive vehicles, appliances and gadgets. Our current entire government is subservient to and employed by companies that make billions on this manufactured consent to always "needing" to spend our labor on useless junk.
  To say nothing of the inherent, massive problem that we made it legal to buy and own politicians.
- Oh look. Lol Amish 2.0

Please use windows XP and connect it to the internet and see what happens LOL

I connected win 98 to the internet yesterday. It was fine, and probably safer than win 11 is now. No built in Spyware either ha!
(Don't use win 98 as your main os. I am partially joking and I only use it for running old programs and games.)
- I've been hacked before #notfun
- There are programs Searching for online old windows OS. You will be hacked sooner or later better to run linux and vm old windows instead. Putting old windows on the internet is like sticking your pp into Bonnie Blue without a condom and being the last man in line too.
I have. Nothing happened.
Try to exist in any kind of life above "hippy with hemp clothes living in a yurt on their parent's property and a trust fund" without things like a smartphone, a car and a computer.

Is this supposed to be satire? How is print media owned by massive conglomerates, flip phones with no OSS firmware, handwritten letters delivered by a literal middleman, avoiding the middlemen??

They’re not defining “middleman” in the traditional sense of an intermediary in an economic exchange. The first panel introduces a new definition of the term as a tech bro attempting to insinuate himself into the process of communicating with others. The remedies offered would indeed seem to preclude this type of middleman from interfering with the process.
- No they wouldn't. All of those products involve middlemen servicing content.

How about struggling but still extant written internet journalists? “Dumb” or simplified smart phones or e-ink devices? Modern iPod clones? The upcoming Slate car? A local LLM/voice assistant?

There are tons of neat alternatives to tech bros, the problem is attention. People just don’t know about them, so they don’t hit critical mass.

…I don’t have a good solution to this, but the attention economy is broke and following the herd is not working anymore. And there are solutions better than going backwards, but no mental energy to find them.

Who needs an iPod clone when you can literally buy an iPod, drop 1Tb of storage in it, and sync it to your library like you always could.
It's stupidly easy to do, and those things are still rock solid. And you can put Rockbox on too, if you don't want iTunes anywhere near your computer. Or you use Linux and can't have iTunes.
The junk products are not the problem, they will be phased out in a few years anyway, like all the ones before them.
The problem is the political system that is completely subservient to corporations that allows them to create accepted social standards like "you have to have the newest phone and a computer to even dream of getting a job interview" or the manufactured consent that much of America adheres to that things like social programs, welfare and universal basic income are tools of the devil.
Or the epidemic of planned-obsolescence that every last democrat and republican representative profits from as much as the tech-barons they work for. Other countries have laws about making products that last so citizens don't have to spend their every last dime to just to keep having basic appliances and connection to the world.
If we made a unified push to install representatives that also want a better world and aren't blithering morons who want to get rich, it would go a long ways to healing the system, but I don't know how that's going to happen since we all allowed our population to also become blithering morons.
With the recent destruction of PBS and their associated programs, this is going to get even worse. But don't worry, kids will be able to ask Grok for history facts.

When ceiling fans and AC units requires an account, yeah, something's wrong.

The morality of a technology is determined by those in control of it, and look who's in control today.

I see a few comments about self hosting stuff to escape the clutches of big tech, and while all that is effective to a high degree, it is beyond the abilities of the general populace.

Besides, I am also of the opinion that not everything has to be digital or smart.

I relish writing and receiving letters, it is tangible and indicates commitment. Fortunately, postal system isn’t going anywhere anytime soon.

I like reading newspapers and it was sad to see all shops in my neighbourhood stop selling them during or after COVID. It was equally sad to see a lot of magazines not survive that period.

I miss my old TV that was simpler to use and started quicker than my newer smart TV. It does not matter if I disconnect the latter from the internet, it takes its time to load up. Besides, I don’t see any perceivable difference in picture quality from the distance I watch from.

Older laptops, though heavier, were more repairable. In certain aspects, they are better than modern ones: more tactile keyboard, nicer screen ratio (4:3). Of course, the newer laptops decimate the old ones when it comes to performance and screen quality but that is just technology progressing.

I could keep going on with a plethora of product categories. But across all my points, I wish some companies could continue offering such products, at least to a customer base that is willing to pay more just to support the existence of those products.

I was with you until 4:3. You should be locked up.
On a more serious note: Framework laptops. More repairable than the laptops of yore, minus the soldered CPUs which seem unavoidable in laptops now.
- lol.
  To rile you up a bit, I wish I could say it is a subjective thing but 4:3 is the better option for laptops.
  More vertical screen estate, given one would mostly be doing their reading, writing and browsing – activities that are traditionally vertically oriented.
  Even most websites just centre their content and leave behind swathes of white/empty space on both sides.
  Anything beyond those activities, one should be using a bigger screen (desktop or a TV)^^^.
  Jokes(?) apart, Framework laptops are the best option for folks like us as it ticks the most boxes. But it is not available in the country where I live, and I don’t want to import it as it would be meaningless without its broader ecosystem. FWIW, I have dropped them emails every year requesting them to expand their presence in more countries.
  Till then, old ThinkPads. They are cheap, have enough spare parts on the market even after almost 2 decades, and even come with the kind of keyboards and screens that I like. :-)
  ^^^This, unlike the text above it, is a subjective thing

I hate to break it to you, but your personal consumption choices will not make a meaningful difference to the amount of enshittification you experience in your life.

What a fantastic post, thank you for linking it!
Seriously though, I do think that it's interesting that this comic and that essay seem to take up opposite positions*, but in each case they attract more contrary comments than ones that agree. I suppose no matter what you post, any given person is more likely to comment on it if it pisses them off than if it confirms their beliefs. It's a good thing Lemmy doesn't reward engagement, or else we'd be up to our eyeballs in ragebait, eh?
Unless you read the whole thing instead of bouncing off the first paragraph.
- on the other hand, there is generally not much to discuss if you have an agreeing position. right?
Did you read it till the end?
- Yes: We need structural remedies, not individuals opting out. But please tell me what your implied “gotcha” is supposed to be.
That's just false, and is also not the message of the article you linked.
The articles point is not that avoiding enshittification won't make a difference in the amount of enshittification you experience: To the contrary, it affirms that it likely will! The articles point is that personally avoiding enshittification isn't an effective way of combatting the ubiquity of enshittification in society, ie "consumer activism" and "voting with your dollars" cannot create system change.
Most everyone here already knows this, and I imagine you also understood the article just fine and don't need me explaining it to you, but you botched the paraphrase in your link thus seeding a lot of potential confusion and frustration absent some clarification. This is intentionally a thread about personally avoiding enshittification, and that does not imply a rejection of the desire to also end it oestebsibly by other means.

We don't need to go back to handwritten mail, FOSS is the way to go.

Writing someone a letter is a very personal thing and you're creating a memory. Something tangible, concrete, also weighs in on reality. Looking at a piece of paper with your handwrite makes you understand you're commiting to something.
I'm a FOSS loon but the craze of making everything digital is absurd. I've listened to people criticizing others for using paper and a pencil to take down a memo, note or even journaling, when they can do it on their phone.
Is existing so dreadful nowadays? Does the notion of leaving proof of existence scares?
- A guy I worked with, not even super closely, left me a handwritten card when he moved on saying it was a pleasure working with me. I did not expect it and almost certainly didn’t deserve it but I still have that card somewhere.
- Its nothing to do with contempt for the media, or not wanting to leave evidence of my existence or anything like that, its just that I got shit to do.
- Yeah you said that, until a doctor hand you a handwritten letter.
- There is something to be said in writing a handwritten letter for someone special once in a while. But I'm so glad that I can just pick up a phone and call my brother who lives in another state and chat with him (no long distance charges). If it's something better said in writing there's email and texts.
  There's also the aspect of text's that are more personal that no one really talks about. You can just check in on a friend to see how they are doing without really having any other reason to contact them. I know I appreciate it when that happens to me.
  I guess you could write someone a letter asking how they are doing, but if the answer is 'not good', by the time you receive the reply days have passed and you probably missed the opportunity to be there for them when they needed it.
  This isn't even considering the environmental benefits of not having to A) produce paper, pens, envelopes, stamps and B) physically deliver the letters.
  There's a lot of things about modern tech that you could criticize, but I don't think more/better options for communication is one of them honestly.

I am and probably always will be a tech enthusiast, but as time goes on I find myself more and more looking for old technology to avoid planned obsolescence, anti-repair bs, telemetry & tracking, lack of consideration for quality of life....

This is not how things were supposed to be. But this is how things will be if we don't do something about oligarchs and certain CEOs.

I always say, it peaked about 2010, maybe earlier. Then innovation stopped, and surveillance REALLY took off. All they have left now is your data, and ads, because the iPhone was the last actually innovative useful device.
Its not worth innovating in late stage capitalism when you can make everything a subscription and gouge your customers for life while making your product worse and worse.
It is really weird, isn’t it. I’ve always been a major enthusiast for Tech. Always wanted to get in on VR when it was first evolving, as I could see how else could use VR. I bought oneof the first iPods cause I messed with one and realized it was a game changer for what we had at that time. Now, I find myself cautioning people on the use of AI and home automation. I feel like I’m turning into a Luddite.
- Don't be ashamed of being a Luddite. The Luddites were actually fighting for a righteous cause.
Technology can develop in various directions. This is exactly what it looks like when technology is developed for consumerism. Buy more now, it doesn't need to last, stimulate the economy. Rent what you can, everything else as a service.

We're techy enough nerds to know there's another way to be free of billionaire influence while still keeping some resemblance of modern communication: self-hosting.

Good luck self hosting something to message your contacts.
- Good luck self hosting something to message
  Dude, it’s pretty easy to set up matrix on a docker container
  your contacts
  Fuck you’re right
- My family and immediate friends are all on my Matrix server.
  I have my own dedicated public server, so I can selfhost anything I want. And I do selfhost a lot.
- Why self-host messaging when there are so many good options?

I think the issue people have with "tech" is that much of the software and devices sold take up too much space and do things people don't want them to do, without offering choice, configurability, and options for full control

This is what I see whenever I see an apple device. There's very little control that the user can exert that Apple hasn't blessed to be something within your control.
All computers are general purpose logic machines and they're intentionally making them not do things that they absolutely could otherwise do, just because.
Not saying iPhones are bad, or that Mac's are bad.... I've just noticed that if you do things in a way that is compatible with how Apple thinks you should do them, then Apple works very well for you. If you have foolish notions to do things differently (or, "think different"... If you will), then you're going to have a bad time.
- If you use homebrew you can install all kinds of things on a mac. So, you get the power of a Unix-based machine with the nice eye-candy, ease of use, rock solid drivers, etc. of an Apple device.
  But, the phones are another matter. Those things are so locked down it's ridiculous. We really need competition in the mobile phone OS market.

That’s exactly what is so nice about FOSS based systems. You can use technology but without the tech bros and the corporate enshittification.

FOSS is great and I love it but we do have our own idiots/FOSSbros, even if it's not about corporate enshittification.
Saw a post on wafrn (rip on maintenance rn) complaining about FOSSbros and was confused, until they gave an example of this blog post where some asshole was shitting on the author for having criticisms against distros for not being easy and friendly for blind/visually empaired people. The blog post is line-by-line breakdown of that guy's comment.

So we do have the "FOSS is always easy and gets the job done, if you can't handle it you're an incompetent toddler who just wants big tech to make your life easy," tech bros. Like that "smart guy makes fun of disenfranchised people for still participating in a society" comic.

I've been wanting to convert my life to "off grid tech". I have a nest camera i bought in 2016. So it's pre Google. Starting about 6 months ago, Google told me unless I allow them full 24/7 access to the cam then I can't use it. A product i bought almost a decade ago is useless unless I let them spy on me. Fuck you Google.

So anyways, off grid tech. Home surveillance on my own local server protected with physical data and VPN. No more streaming, pirate everything with local server. No more Google or Amazon anything. Music? Mp3. Email? No Gmail, maybe Proton or something. I'll do all banking through home desktop through VPN. Etc, etc.

I hope to have all these things achieved by 2030

For email, I recommend purelymail. It's ran by one guy I believe, but it's a solid cheap service. It's also pretty easy to setup your own email domains. I'm probably just a nerd, but I love custom email domains.
- I would strongly recommend you at least have your own domain if you intend on buying a service from one guy. Everyone can land under a bus one day.

That last panel hit me like a truck because... yeah, that's what people think happens when they do their little personal choice things to pretend they matter.

They really buy like a paper book once and go "ah, yes, Bezos is fuming right now" while he makes another billion.

We have lost all sense of how to influence society and all ability to gauge scale. For all the folksy traditionalism in this (which includes driving a gas guzzler from the 70s, apparently?) the Internet has created this entirely disproportionate sense of our footprint on the world and this strip is as much a result of the hyperconnected dystopia as everything it's complaining about.

In my experience this is extra bad for Americans who, frankly, didn't need that much of a push to go from their individualist, self-centered perception of society to this vision of sitting on a couch listening to a walkman as activism.

I’ll buy something other than a ‘gas guzzler’ the second I’m not required to trade away my privacy to go electric, and can disable every single last beep, ding, screech and other unnecessary sound some stupid fuck thought was a good idea.
- You're doing a lot more to save the planet by driving an old car and fixing it than buying a new one that gets 5 mpg more. People are dumb about this. Reuse is the most important thing. Buying a new prius is FAR worse than keeping on driving a 99 grand prix.
- Oh how I long for the day someone invents a car without a touchscreen.
- Honestly that exists. Just bought a BMW i3 (their first electric) and you can disable just about everything, even the sound it makes to alert pedestrians, the infotainment warning screen everyone hates, and seat belt chimes, through an app and a BT OBDII dongle. The 2014-2017 models all have 3G cellular antennas so they mostly don’t work anymore (3G is totally gone in my area). It also has buttons for climate and their great iDrive infotainment controller. It’s a fantastic quirky electric at dirt cheap prices.
  BUT, your point stands since that’s 1 out of how many electric vehicles? Yeah, sucks.
We have lost all sense of how to influence the world and all ability to gauge scale.
Absolutely correct!
I believe in "voting with your wallet" and I do little sacrifices to respect my ideas, but I'm conscious that I'm just one step above people clicking on petitions online in terms of impact.
- I think the point is that we're deluded to think that voting with our wallets does anything. You still work. You still buy. You still support the system. The one step you're taking only gets you partway from the couch to the refrigerator. It doesn't get you out the door and into a protest that would actually make a difference.
The comic is hyperbolic and not in a good way. "They wouldn't like it" - yeah, if millions of Americans did the same. And it isn't even necessary to go pre-digital or pre-internet to "cut out the middleman".
I agree with you on most, but this:
which includes driving a gas guzzler from the 70s, apparently?
is hyperbole on your part.
First of all, by-default internet connected cars haven't been a thing until relatively recently (10 years max I guess). And then, gas guzzling does not necessarily correlate with age. Cars consuming less than, say, 5l/100km have existed since at least the 80s (1st hand experience, and the car was already 20 years old at that point).
- Your comment made me remember how 25 years ago it was unthinkable, even illegal, for a company to spy on you without consent. Tech isn’t the problem, regulation has also become a joke, that’s what gave tech bros free reign, as long as they make loads of money fast so rich investors can concentrate even more wealth.
- I guess the car thing comes from the use of "pre-computerized". Cars have had computers in them much longer than they've been connected to the Internet by default. I guess my mistake was taking the panel at its word there.
  Also, man, I appreciate the alignment, but the "millions of Americans" really made me feel icky. Beyond the moral and political refusal to give Americans primary decisionmaking power on these things, these trends and companies are global. Even in the US you probably would need tens of millions to make a dent, but some of these userbases are in the billions. Millions of Americans decided Facebook was for old people and left it and it's still the biggest social media platform on the planet by some margin. That'd be the collective inability to gauge scale in a dystopia of global monopolies I was talking about.
Also, it's getting harder and harder to live without modern devices.
Try living in the modern world without a cell phone. It's hard to do almost anything without one. If you get a flip phone that can handle text messages you can get a bit further, but it's a matter of time before that's not enough.
And sure, you can listen to cassettes on a walkman. And maybe you saved some tapes from 40 years ago, and maybe they still work. But, how do you get more music? Sure, you can probably find a place to order tapes online. But, then they want to verify your account and that means texting a verification code to your phone and...
As for print media. Sure, you can still buy paper books. But, if you want a real newspaper, good luck. There are a few that are still around, AFAIK you can still get the NY Times in print. But, I really doubt you still even have a local newspaper, let alone a newspaper that prints on paper.
- All but one of the major papers where I'm from have a print version. I imagine that changes in different countries.
  But... yeah, point taken. Over here you can't even not have a Whatsapp account. Some businesses and transactions just... assume you do and default to it for communication.
  An interesting wrinkle is that some of that legacy media is part of this loop, too. You can, in fact, buy new tape players and tapes and you can put new music into them. It's all just very expensive trendy, hipstery small run collector stuff that costs a lot of money and sells to privileged people with a nostalgic desire for posturing. Which does put a lot of where this message ends up in context, I suppose.
this is it. guilliotines exist. is organizing against corporations, or actually understanding the tech we use so hopeless for regular people that they feel have to maintain 1980s shit just to be rid of it?

or, you know, you can have best of both worlds with open technologies. tech that you own and control.

i wonder whether we will have to seize the means of computer chip production as well ...
- Of course we would.

I get the idea, but I am kinda stuck on the letter writing bit. They do know that the post getting delivered is kinda built on middlemen right?

Also, food delivery has always involved middlemen. Instead of food delivered through an app, it was food delivered after a phone call. But, it was a human middleman delivery driver doing the delivery.
- Yeah middlemen have been a part of almost all commerce from the start, every store, every trade and most services are in some way middlemen. I think the comic's message is good but is attributing the terrible actions of llm to middlemen in error.
Usually those middlemen don't open up your mail, read what you wrote, then serve you ads based on that.
- GPG.
Everything you do relies on some middlemen, it’s just about cutting out layers.
You won’t grow your own food, but you can buy it from a farmer, instead of a store who bought it from a franchise center who bought it from a supply network who bought it from a risk management futures buyer who bought it from a farming company who bought it from a farm.

Pre computerized cars is going to be pretty hard. We'll run out of old beaters eventually.

They're also less safe and efficient. They're fun, but objectively worse cars to run nowadays that parts can also be hard to come by.
- There is no lack of available parts for my 21 year old Chevy.

pre-computerised car

No one want to fiddle with carburetor anymore thank you very much.

And tbh, 2010-2015 is comfortable enough and less bullshit.

I wouldn't say no one. Carbs are just fine, and were insanely good before they were killed off. With our research now, We could have AMAZING carbs. And guess what, you can fix them yourself!
Myself and many others need nothing more than roll down windows, am radio, and a seat belt. Too many lazy people today want to drive a damn land yacht with 56 screens in it. yells at cloud
- I get that, but honestly i'm getting tired of having to adjust the distributor timing and fiddle with the air-fuel ratio to get it just "right", else the car would either underpowered, use a lot more fuel, or emission is gonna be off the chart. If you work on your own car then it would be all right, it's a nightmare for people who fix it for a living. But i do get that, when it works, it works really nice.
Pretty sure they mean computerized interiors like infotainment systems. Probably not talking about ECU and internal computerized parts.
- But all displayed item from bottom panel is item from the 80s and 90s though, so precomputerised kinda either mean carburetor or primitive ecu that only control very limited function and can't scanned with a scanner tool, which is still imo bad. As an automechanic I certainly doesn't want to go back to scratching my head trying to figure out what's wrong.
  Edit: not to be too pedantic about it, but that's what i get from this comic.
I think that's more aimed at Internet connected vehicles than those with an ECU.
My favourite cars to own were made between 2003 to 2011. They’re so peaceful to drive compared to modern cars that constantly fucking screech and ding at you just for starting the damn thing.
- Same here, mine is 2006 and already quite computerized for my taste.
  But recently I did a trip in a 2020s car and it was ... disconcerting. First of all it was automatic which I'm not used to. Unable to get it in gear, the 9yo boy in the backseat said: look at the screen, it's telling you what to do!. He was right. Even so the car would not let me back into a patch of high grass, kept blocking the wheels. Jarringly.
Speak for yourself, there's nothing wrong with my carburettor!
My distributor on the other hand is a pain in the ass. Electronic ignition has its upsides...

guilliotines exist folks.

we dont actually need to subject ourselves to being luddites.

Luddites got a bad rap from capitalists. The Luddites were not anti-technology, they were against technology destroying people’s jobs. Their whole thing was destroying industrial machinery and sabotaging factories because they were replacing human labor without any alternative in place for the actual people. Hundreds of thousands of people were turned off the land, unemployed, and starving because of greedy capitalists trying to not pay for labor.
If the same people were around today, they’d be trying to blow up AI server farms.
- good point
luddites.
Luddites, the followers of Ned Ludd? The guys who smashed machines and went to war against the factory owners who were defending their factories with soldiers and cannons?
They're a lot more similar to the guys with guillotines than you seem to think.

help desk -> sysadmin -> CISO -> goat farmer

Pre-computer cars sucked. Anyone that’s worked on mechanical fuel injection will tell you so.

Dude I would love a non computerized car with fuel injection. Of course I stay with an older car with computer. My tuck and wife car are sending shit to tech bros.
I.would be interested in starting a penpal club. That be something cool to bring back in vogue. Of course we could start forms that don't do tracking or drown you in ads.
- You could get one by installing an aftermarket ECU and a fuel injection system in a car from those eras. It's probably harder than most people would be willing to do, but it's definitely doable
Nah, mechanical injection diesel engines are awesome.
i think these a microprocessors though? no internet access for them.

I've never been in an uber. Never used an Internet account to order food on an app. Never signed up to spotify or netflix. Never owned an alexis or siri.

I just stay away from that stuff... And it all first started with refusing to subscribe to World Of Warcraft. I stuck with Warcraft 2, and StarCraft. None of that big tech subscription nonsense for me thanks!

I'm going back in a lot of areas, yeah.

When you make a wrong turn, sometimes you need to go backwards to correct and go forward again

This is why I never gave up on DVDs, even though people would laugh. As soon as Prime shoehorned ads in the middle of a show or movie, that's when I cancelled. I'll have to do the same with music and get my iPod battery fixed up if I can.

I gave up on DVDs long ago, but I replaced them with files stored on a local NAS. Dealing with discs is just too clunky.
I do sometimes miss the extras they'd have on DVDs though. I ripped some DVDs and kept some of that stuff, but I haven't found a good system that indexes and organizes the extras.
I’ll have to do the same with music and get my iPod battery fixed up if I can.
In the meantime you can just load music files onto your phone and play them that way.
It's not that they're inserting themselves everywhere it's this right here: "shoehorned ads". On top of extracting as much data from you that they know more about you than almost you do yourself. dystopia authors couldn't have written it better.
It was a long time ago I watched an DVD, but I very clearly remember some of them having unskippable ads.
- Right at the start, there were sometimes the "you wouldn't steal a car" warning about pirating movies but there never has been ads in the middle of whatever you were watching.

This is what using Linux feels like.

yeah no need to find 1980s tech to use.

I’d like to add to the third panel: go see live entertainment. Local, not Live Nation. Support local bands, artists, thespians, and comics.

Lots of things have always had middlemen. Any sales representative you've ever encountered is a commission-driven middleman. Cars, insurance, housing, the guy at the phone store - they all exist solely to make money doing what a well made website is valuable of. If a company has a sales team, they ate unnecessary middlemen.

Yes, add to the third panel ordering food by phone call, going to the store when you want every small thing, buying your groceries in person, stopping taxis on the street, no file sharing, etc., etc.

I can't tell if you think those are terrible things or not.
Because that's how most people live their lives even today.
- Those are terribly inconvenient things IMO. We shouldn’t become Amish to reject tech bros, because tech makes life easier. There’s enough talent to make these same services in a non-exploitable way, but the incentives are misaligned with the common good.
  That’s why I love the Fediverse, proof that tech can be used without tech bros.
Those things can feasibly be better. I pay the delivery human with anonymous cash once I've got my order. The store has my stuff ready to go right now. The taxi is right here and they're unionized.
Can't dispute file sharing though, analog copies suck.

I really like the blog and videos of Reject Convenience, he actually does something similar with his own life.

I like this. It’s kind of the same vein as “we like being comfortable.” That’s the main issue. Until we aren’t comfortable nothing will change.

Sure, why not?

Fast forward a couple of months:

you lost contacts with 95% of your contacts you used to hear through apps. Last time you met a group of friends was when you randomly met them in a restaurant having a dinner together. "We invited you but you didn't reply". The 5% still calling you wants your money.
your bank started charging an extra fee because you did not object when they notified a change in the contract via email. You missed a notification from the tax office and now you have to pay a small fine.
your car cannot circulate anymore because you live in Europe and cities may ban old polluting engines.
you read less because it started to be expensive to buy all those magazines. On the flip side you are more fit because you have to walk 2km to reach a place that sells them.

As someone who walks everywhere....I am not fit. So no flip side. It's uphill both ways
you lost contacts with 95% of your contacts you used to hear through apps. Last time you met a group of friends was when you randomly met them in a restaurant having a dinner together. “We invited you but you didn’t reply”. The 5% still calling you wants your money.
Having done that I don't miss 95% of that 95%. The real ones will follow you. The rest know how to find you.
The comic is bullshit, your bullet points even more so. Except the one second to last. But then again, why the fuck are you driving in the city center? You are part of the problem.
- Wow, your arguments are so solid! I'm totally convinced!

I drive a pre-online car I can fix with the help of a friend, PC is Linux mint, laptop is Mac but highly restricted. My android device is silent, my iPhone is used for work only. My music is ripped and downloaded.

Cut out Spotify for Navidrome

Cut out Netflix for Jellyfin

Keep it all secure and accessible with Wireguard

All of the above solutions are free.

Run all of the above in docker on any old laptop. An llm can provide instructions.

I use Jellyfin for music and shows. Jellyfin made it easier for me to sort the ripped CDs by directory instead of all in one shared Dir.
Also, telling people to use an LLM to figure out how to self host is like telling a 16yo to play GTA to learn how to drive.
They might figure it out, they may just kill hookers and rob a bank without ever learning how to drive the car.
Here's a full guide by the FUTO organization that consists of over 13 hours of information on self hosting and how to do it step by step.
- "Telling people to use an LLM to figure out how to X is like telling a 16yo to play GTA to learn how to drive" is my new catchphrase, thanks internet person (I presume person, could be mistaken....)
- There is self hosting and there is self hosting.
  I run a proxmox machine with a dozen services but just looking at a guide like you send is overloading.
  I will save it as a useful reference but its beyond what people who are less tech inclined then me will need to start.
  Most people just need docker and some premade compose files. An llm can absolutely tell you how to install the first and create the second. People will know quickly if they want to learn more on their own or prefer to call a friendly nerd to do it for them.