3 Years Left.

[aleteoryx]

this one's gonna be a bit bleak; contrary to what you may guess from the title, it is not about Current Events in US Politics. I have 3 years to entirely reorganize my life, for entirely different reasons.

see also: solderpunk's The Standard Salvaged Computing Platform.

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Grove giveth, and Gates taketh away.
Jobs 1:21

I am a computer toucher.

you knew that already, probably. the nth-to-last post is a detailed explanation of my mailserver setup, I don't keep my cards that close. still, the extent to which I am and have been fascinated by and with computers cannot be overstated.

my mother tells this story, about when I was a toddler: that I would walk around stores, playing, "Plugs-in/Does not plug-in". the game is exactly what it sounds like: I would point to the objects that had power cords, and declare, "Plugs-in!". I would point to those that did not and say "Does not plug-in!". self-explanatory. at around the same age, I had been given a spool of copper wire, and I strung it through the house and imagined that there was some form of power going through all the objects, connecting them. yes, when I was younger I roleplayed a network admin.

this early fascination stayed strong as I grew up, and a passionate-yet-superficial interest in technology drove me to learn more and more. my passion has, over the years, grown from superficiality into skill, deep knowledge, and at times even -- dare I say it -- expertise, in various computing and technological topics.

there are people in this world for whom computers are instrumental. they are tools to solve a problem. to such people, they have no value of their own, instead serving as means-to-an-end. I quite frankly abhor that sort of disrespect and dispassion in most cases, because "most cases" are attempts at turning profit or exploiting people.

I am an individual for whom The Computer is a kindred and respected sort of thing. the act of computing, of programming, of Interfacing With The Machine, is deeply satisfying for me in a way I do not know how to fully articulate. As far back as I can remember I have always been this way.

An industry predicated on exploitation

it's no secret that Big Tech Bad. there are plenty of people who would disagree, but, especially with my audience, I don't think I need to spend much time justifying that point.

it's easy to not think about, though. it's easy to have a vague sense of "I shouldn't do this" that you push past to get work done. since my privacy-related breakup with Google some years ago, I had been firmly in that state: aware that there were larger issues in tech, but unwilling or uninterested in looking deeper. I am by no means dispassionate about social issues, or about the environment (you're looking at the failing board prez of a conservation group!), it's just very easy to not consider it.

a couple months ago, I ended up reading about permacomputing, and I considered it.

we are, right now, seeing exploitation on a scale pretty much inconceivable. of workers, of professionals, of the public, of the planet, of the poor, of the middle class, of artists, of programmers. pretty much everyone except for the handful of shitheads ostensibly orchestrating it, though I'm not entirely convinced they're all that happy either. the world, and all its splendor, and all its people, and all its land: it is all being ravaged for no real purpose. we are producing and producing and producing, and we don't really even care about the things produced.

if you've been anywhere at all that sells anything, you've seen cheap junk. products made questionably, usually in China or Indonesia or Taiwan, mostly plastic. objects that were created poorly, break easy, and really only exist to be thrown away. objects that literally only exist to overflow landfills. think about that, genuinely. that we would create things whose sole purpose is to cause the transfer of funds, be broken, never fixed, and forgotten.

trash is a myth: these objects don't stop existing when the garbage truck comes. how many tons of plastics are just taking up space somewhere, forgotten? and we keep on producing.

the average smartphone is roughly 180 grams. roughly 300 million americans have smartphones, and the average replacement time is 2.5 years. so, doing a rough estimate, that's 21,600 metric tons of waste annually. every second, just in america, 4 phones are thrown out. the product of exploiting the miners of the various metals, exploiting the ecosystem where the chips were produced, and exploiting hundreds or thousands of others along the way, thrown out 4 times a second. in just one country. and most of them still work.

it is fucking depraved. "new" is one of the most vile and sickening fucking words in the dictionary in this modern age. in pulling up the above statistics, I came across a number of sites instructing their reader to replace their phones every 2 years. as I write this, I am still nauseous.

Getting back to the title...

so, given the modern economy is a shitshow, and even then tech somehow manages to still be the problem child, what do? I can't really sacrifice my deepest passion, so...

fuck it! fuck everyone! I'm not buying new ever again! no new computer! no new phone! no new gadgets! I don't care how "repairable" and "sustainable" it is! I don't care that it's cool and shiny! we have produced enough, you can stop now, it is time to care for what we have already made. from now on, unless it's something that would be questionable to source used (microcontrollers, parts, whatever), I am only buying used tech. I recently got a Framework, and it will probably be the most recent bit of kit I own for the forseeable future, if not forever.

if you check my uses-this page, you'll know I have a Google Pixel Fold, running Graphene. this gives me a timeline of about 3-5 years before software support wanes. that's my deadline. by then, I don't want to be relying on anything that I can't use performantly on 25 year old hardware. in a lot of cases, I'm going to end up writing custom clients, and I will probably write a lot about doing this, and I hope that I will help you to do the same.

in conclusion: fuck discord. fuck signal. fuck youtube. fuck tumblr. fuck apple music. fuck matrix. fuck gmail. fuck box. fuck asana. fuck bluesky. fuck steam. fuck github. fuck patreon. fuck twitch. fuck pixiv. fuck chrome. fuck it all.

3 years left. let's do this shit.

P.S.: dreamwidth works perfectly in shitty web browsers and on old hardware, im not going anywhere from here!