It feels like all the joy I used to feel from being an enthusiast has been completely voided as computing has become the modern vector for fascism and surveillance. I find myself recoiling from all online spaces, even independent and open source ones that I’d loved and supported in the past.

It’s been an exceptionally strange impulse to go from having an elaborate online presence to now feeling like the only acceptable way to engage with the network is to have as minimal of an online footprint as possible.

This especially hurts when it feels like an issue of skilling, where I know how to do certain tasks with computers, but have to teach myself for the first time the analogue alternatives that my parents and their parents likely already knew well.

How have you chosen to deal with it? Do you find yourself moving away from computing and the internet, despite formerly loving it as a hobby? Have you replaced things that computers used to do for you with analogue replacements?

I’m curious how other people are experiencing this.

  • crashex@crazypeople.onlineEnglish
    2·
    1 day ago

    I feel this. I used to find computers and the promises of the internet exciting. Then things slowly turned into what they are now, and these days I often can only see everything computer as a layer of bullshit that has been put on top of the real world to keep us in a trance and not engage with reality anymore. But a lot of good things came from being connected as well. Maybe it’s like growing up and finding out a beloved parent was after all slightly abusive. And then see them decline in old age and have their worse traits worsened even more.

    Another image that comes to my mind frequently is that of the internet as the haunted shopping mall: It was once a shiny place, everyone went there, it was all the rage. Now most of the shops are boarded up, the few that are left seem rather dodgy, and the only visitors seem to be a bunch of drug addicts hanging out at the bottom of the out-of-service escalators.

    Currently I’m a bit lost trying to return to my analog hobbies. I draw, I paint, I play music, I scratch the donkeys. I often don’t have the energy I wish I had to do things other than sit at a screen. Takes time to get used to it again I guess.