I have found myself in a mental hole of tech-nihilism. Maybe even on the road to tech-fatalism. Long, rambly, Sunday night post, heads up. But I think I touch on the risk posed by even using privacy tools, something which I don’t think I see discussed here because of where most of you live (Global North, where you have the right to tell a policeman to get a warrant for the most part). This is kind of about two things at once, they’re related though.
Different events bubble this feeling to the surface but it’s always there in the background. When I (and you) defected from Reddit cold turkey after they decided to cut off the API, I had this feeling. When I started having to use a VPN permanently, I got it again. And when I had to “move” my exit country because the UK started verifying identities online, I got it again. Can you guess how I felt this week, following Microsoft’s bullshit about making it even harder to set up their OS without signing in? Or when I tried to use my trusty YouTube downloading scripts, only for them to seemingly require I feed them login cookies now? Or this whole Google Play dev verification thing? I don’t even use Android!
I’m sure this is the case for most of you, but being anonymous online feels like more of a challenge and more of a necessity now. I don’t want YouTube to log 900 music playlists under my account. I don’t want to log into every Windows mini PC I set up for family. I know most of you obviously do not, and Lemmy being Lemmy there’s this culture of saying well fuck the corporate internet altogether. Can’t rip from YouTube? Fuck YouTube! Don’t want to give M$ your blood type to set up a printer server NUC? Image Debian on it. etcetera etcetera. I know. I use Lemmy, I avoid Google search, I most definitely avoid most big tech products when I can. Don’t need em.
But like… The corporate internet is still there. I quit Reddit, even though it was my online home for over a decade. But YouTube? That’s a completely different beast. This just is where the videos are. I can host Pixelfed for my family and friends but I can’t host video, much less expect everyone to. Most people aren’t very computer savvy and YouTube is just where most people will post videos.
And since I use their service quite a bit, I did look into actually paying for their service. The folks you watch get a little kickback, and you no longer get ads on your TV and phone. I can stomach paying, even the uBlock Origin and piracy advocate that I am, just because I use it so much. But I use a VPN. And their FAQ explicitly has a page for this: you can’t connect from outside of where you’re paying, if you’re paying. But it doesn’t clarify whether it uses the country of your payment details, your IP, your location in Google Maps, or the country your account’s settings are set to. In my case, those are four separate countries lmao
These are little complaints, but I don’t think this is some “first-world” problem nothingburger. I suspect the UK identity verification scheme, or something similar, will start becoming more common around the world, regardless of how many data breaches happen. And not because some stuck up politicians are scared that a teenager could see a woman’s penis online, oh no, I totally think the true purpose is to tag “unwanted” ideologies and prevent their spread. Wouldn’t want anyone to type in ultra evil extremist words like “Palestinians have human rights” without consequences now would we. The fact that everyone is using their spin euphemism, “age verification”, instead of what it is, “identity verification”, gives them too much credit, even when being critical about it.
There is some irony in calling this a first world problem, because I live very decisively in the third world. Lebanon. Our internet speeds are shit, but for the most part, the internet here is pretty unrestricted. Combine this with most people’s service coming via legal gray area local “”“ISPs”“”" with haphazard IP ranges and messy CGNAT, and you have a plausibly anonymous and relatively uncensored connection. Beautiful, besides the 2Mb (yes, lowercase) speed.
But. But.
I was looking into setting up a meshtastic/LoRa/whatever network, that would link up my home with a few relatives who live nearby, as sort of an emergency backup. You probably only see bad news from where I live, I promise good things do happen here, but an emergency comms network in case something happens and services go down seems like common sense to me. Especially since these services go down when there isn’t an emergency. But setting one of these up would definitely get me on a list here. I’d probably get an unpleasant “interrogation” for setting up a parallel communications network. Best case scenario I get asked to take it down and to keep my nose clean kiddo. Worst case, I’m accused of espionage and thrown in a cell because it’s hard to explain what this stuff is to people who don’t care about understanding it. I do not live in a place with consistent rule of law, or even the thin veil of it. Staying out of trouble is paramount.
Further, along the same topic. I remember seeing an article about some countries in the EU raising an eyebrow about GrapheneOS, where police are associating its use with drug dealers. Perhaps I would need such an OS in the future, as someone who is not a drug dealer but who hates what is going on with commercial tech. And so I started thinking about what using it would look like. The same concerns with my local police are there, but there is a worse one: I have been flying internationally into countries with much more strict security than Beirut’s sticky, comfy little airport. I’ve been to Abu Dhabi in the past 24 months, what happens when I land in that airport with a “drug dealer phone”? I doubt Lemmy would even be allowed there if they knew what it was. I wonder what kind of shady deals Reddit had to crack to get approved, with how that place’s culture and content was.
I wonder about this a lot. The VPN I use in Lebanon isn’t blocked in the countries I visit for work, so I’ve felt relatively at ease so far. But I feel these tendrils of surveillance and data collection, of deanonymization. And it kind of terrifies me. I have to stand in the pleb physical stamping line in these techy airports, but I see people just walking through the electronic gates with nothing but an iris scan. It’s weird. I can make a burner YouTube account to yoink cookies and download videos, but I shouldn’t have to. I can log into a Microsoft account on a machine I’ll be logging into their email from every day and connecting to their Minecraft auth servers from twice a year, but… this is not right at all. We all know what’s downstream from tying your files to your identity.
I don’t know. The rise of tech-induced willful ignorance and authoritarian regimes is scaring me. The fact that people’s pensions are tied to AI companies that facilitate the terrorization and mass murder of innocents in the south of my country (and unquestionable genocide south of the border) fucking terrifies me. And it should, even if I wasn’t a working-age Lebanese man. Even if I wasn’t in those fucking databases.
I’m going to hold myself back from ranting about the fact that tech has come to almost exclusively mean predatory products and bullshit slop extruders to most people. About the cruel summary execution of our dream of cyberspace that we glimpsed on the early web. About how infuriatingly, nonchalantly shit almost every young person is at solving tech problems now. There is an immense, crushing powerlessness. I almost wish I didn’t care about tech, about privacy, that I could give Glaxo-McUberzon my mother’s maiden bone marrow and carry on with my day.
Almost.
I am 100% on the way to becoming a forest hermit with the way tech is going. And I’m a tech guy. I’m the tech guy to most people in my life. And boy howdy is a life of making coffee, chopping firewood, and screaming into the valley between commits to projects-that-go-nowhere looking real, real good right about now.
I should probably cross-post this to Tech Takes. But I don’t think I’ll be putting it on my personal blog. Doesn’t feel right.
Yeah, things are getting bad rapidly. I think much of the world is going to be doing stuff like China is doing with respect to the great firewall, surveillance, and whatnot. I’m curious how the Chinese people stay anonymous online or if it’s even practical anymore. I’ve heard China has improved their traffic analysis ability, so circumvention that previously worked, like snowflake, does not.
Networks like Tor and i2p are really only suitable for avoiding civil lawsuits, not to protect against advanced state actors that may have a large view and control of the network. Mixnets look like they might be a little stronger (has mitigation against correlation attacks), but I think they’re mostly academic. As you stated, simply just using things like this could draw attention. I don’t think tech can really solve these legal and systemic problems.
If you don’t need the encryption of Meshtastic, perhaps Ham radio (or FRS or GMRS if the distances allow) is a thing where you live which wouldn’t raise eyebrows. I think directional WIFI antennas can go pretty far, so you could maybe set up a private wireless LAN. I think some Ham radio people modify wifi access points to create disaster recovery networks covering large geographic areas (encryption is not allowed though).
I’m there as well.
I used to get so excited about the newest technology and tech gadgets, but that excitement gradually waned until now, I find myself trying to make my older, unintrusive devices last as long as possible. If it needs an account or an internet connection to function, I’m simply not interested anymore.
I switched to Graphene OS recently, after I discovered that an iOS software update had added a “consent” option (default opted-in) for Siri to learn from my interactions with my apps, which you have to opt out of for each individual app. It’s ridiculous but I felt so betrayed by Apple. I opt out of everything and have never used Siri, and they still sneaked it in and opted me in.
I live in Europe so safety isn’t an issue, but I can’t use the simplest things anymore, like the post office app, and the govt auth app. It’s madness - these are govt services that require me to share my data with American tech companies. Wth?!
I won’t pretend to understand what it’s like living in the Middle East right now, but I can relate a little. My family still live in South Africa. Fortunately the current govt is too incompetent for privacy tools to be dangerous. That could change though, and then their white skins will make them vulnerable.
Anyway, just wanted to say you’re not alone. Stay safe.
Something you touched on here that I think is a HUGE issue that fucking no one is doing anything about:
The internet is a necessity. Digital devices are necessities. People commit crimes on digital devices.
There is no one available, even in first world countries with great internet speeds, that you can go to with a problem more sophisticated than “someone took money from my bank account”.
There is no one you can talk to that understands the problem, let alone who can take action to remedy it.
Critical infrastructure is seriously vulnerable and there are multiple layers of the dunning Kruger effect and straight up fucking stupidity you would need to somehow wade through if you were facing any kind of skilled attacker, and you’d need to first identify what the fucking problem is in the first place, at which point what the fuck will they even do?
This isn’t 1996. The lackadaisical attitude towards cybersecurity held by virtually the entire world is a ticking fucking time bomb and it’s only a matter of time until it blows up and fucks over a lot of people in a big way.
If we can’t even keep critical infrastructure safe then what hope does a single person ? It’s fucking insane. Grandma may notice her phone is acting weirdly while her old ass router are being used as a spearhead for a sophisticated attack on the power grid or some shit, and there is zero chance, ZERO, anything could ever be done about it from her end.
She could take her phone to the cell carrier who would just sell her a new one. She could take it to the police who would say she’s probably senile. She could contact the manufacturer who wouldn’t do a fucking thing. She could know enough to know that something fucky was going on but there is NOTHING she could do to stop it.
We were infantilized by our technology for 40 years, and have become a society of children.
There will be growing pains, with so few adults left.
I agree with your rant. Privacy is quickly eroding globally and only a handful of companies are easily capable of locking us out of almost everything out there nowadays. Replacements like lemmy just don’t have parity, but they could some day.
I think it’s even worse though. People will swear up and down that blocking javascript will keep us secure, but more and more things will not work with that disabled. There are workarounds that rely on ONLY HTML and CSS to determine user mouse location which will become prevalent of javascript is suddenly disabled en masse by users so saying blocking JS is ‘the way’ also will not work. Tracking mouse movements is important to link people to how their hands work on a mouse and connect completely unrelated actions on various sites even with the most robust privacy safeguards in place- even if you were to have a remote window to a different physical machine to display each web site you go to, you could potentially be doxed and then all of those accounts/actions/metadata could be linked to develop a whole picture of all that has been done, thwarting even the most robust privacy measures available to us today.
Ultimately these massive companies will shut down any alternatives that inhibit their advertising revenue that doxes us and is handed over to the government and who knows who else for surveillance purposes, likely to attack people on the basis of ideology as you describe. Like most awful shit, it’s all innocent fun and games until they implement it and then it’s too late to escape.
None of that matters if everyone continues to use Chrome on Windows or Mac.
As someone on the other side of the world, thank you for sharing.
A lot of this is directly related to the fact the world is walking into ww3 and this is a preparation step. Controlling media is crucial, specially the internet, where the common joe can give his opinion and show what he is seeing. Imagine explaining to soldiers they are going into a war that will kill millions of people in order to keep capitalism running. The same capitalism that gave us no cure for diseases that have expensive treatments, that gave us famine and obesity at the same time, that gave us colonialism, unemployment, homelessness, etc etc etc. There can be no free flow of information. Things will probably only get worse
I am 100% on the way to becoming a forest hermit with the way tech is going. And I’m a tech guy. I’m the tech guy to most people in my life.
I got rid of as much ‘digital’ as I could in my live, moving back to analog/physical instead and to being not connected. Beside the smartphone that I only use for whatever I truly must (like 2FA and banking, no social, no streaming, nothing personal not even email, heck it’s barely if I use it as a phone ;)), the tech I’m still ok to use and trust with my data must be Free/Libre.
Not always simple to do but so far I have zero regret.
That being said, not sure about feeling ‘nihilistic’. I mean, I’m very much sad, because I’m old enough to have seen the Internet become a thing that had so many promises before it turned into this dystopian & nightmarish circus it has become, but I still believe in some… ideals, so I would not qualify as nihilistic.
I think we’ve been spoiled by an extended era where it was possible to be truly anonymous on the internet, which is public infrastructure at its core. In that perspective it’s fundamentally worse than real life for privacy. Everything goes through centralized hardware, making it trivial to log your traffic and digital fingerprint in perpetuity. Imagine if the camera at your local park didn’t just see you enter, but perfectly stored your height, weight, shoe size, eye color, gait, etc…
From that it becomes pretty clear that the only safe way to use the digital space is read-only on socially acceptable platforms with the herd protection of the pseudo-anonymous crowd. And of course, that makes the internet much less interesting and useful, so I might as well go touch grass and talk to my friends in physically private spaces.
Well it was fun while it lasted at least… 🍻
