It's difficult being true to onesself
Apr. 20th, 2017 08:11 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
jptbI waffle a lot on operating systems and my tech environment. I know that, given my view of current world politics and social organization, I should be using Linux and LineageOS instead of MacOS and iOS, contributing to open source, making open source products better, etc. I should be doing my best to get off of cloud-hosted systems where possible.
Doing those things is relatively hard, in that they remove convenience. But, in my view, an obsession with convenience combined with the death of regulation is part of what got us where we are: a small number of people with large piles of money doing their damnedest to increase those piles no matter the social cost. Facebook, Amazon, Microsoft, Apple, many others. [1]
Since doing these things is hard, I spend mental time trying to justify not doing them. Any machine on the internet is easily hacked -- why worry about whether it's Windows, MacOS, or Linux? Apple is one of the few companies who actively fights government agencies' attempts to require phone makers to crack their phones. (At least sometimes.) C# and .NET are really handy! Microsoft isn't too horrible and, in some ways, is improving. Subscribing to Apple Music at least puts some money in some artists' hands, vs not buying music at all.
But these lines of reasoning ignore the underlying problem: huge firms with little competition that attempt to lock users into restrictive environments[2] work as funnels that take money from a large audience and give it to a tiny one. Add in little to no regulation of markets, laws locking out competitors in many markets, and the decision (in the US) that corporations are political entities means supporting giant corporations is a political position. A political position that, when deeply examined, is one many customers may not actually support.
So I'm trying to do better. First step: minimize my use of Apple's ecosystem.
[1] This isn't the first time society has reached this point. The current situation is, at least in the US, in terms of haves/have nots and regulation, worse than it was 25 years ago. In many other ways, things are better, at least for now. No one has threatened to kill me for being perceived as gay for over 15 years, for example.
[2] This includes Android. Google makes using AOSP harder and puts more restrictions on device makers each year. Android, as installed on the vast majority of phones, is one giant data collector for Google.
Doing those things is relatively hard, in that they remove convenience. But, in my view, an obsession with convenience combined with the death of regulation is part of what got us where we are: a small number of people with large piles of money doing their damnedest to increase those piles no matter the social cost. Facebook, Amazon, Microsoft, Apple, many others. [1]
Since doing these things is hard, I spend mental time trying to justify not doing them. Any machine on the internet is easily hacked -- why worry about whether it's Windows, MacOS, or Linux? Apple is one of the few companies who actively fights government agencies' attempts to require phone makers to crack their phones. (At least sometimes.) C# and .NET are really handy! Microsoft isn't too horrible and, in some ways, is improving. Subscribing to Apple Music at least puts some money in some artists' hands, vs not buying music at all.
But these lines of reasoning ignore the underlying problem: huge firms with little competition that attempt to lock users into restrictive environments[2] work as funnels that take money from a large audience and give it to a tiny one. Add in little to no regulation of markets, laws locking out competitors in many markets, and the decision (in the US) that corporations are political entities means supporting giant corporations is a political position. A political position that, when deeply examined, is one many customers may not actually support.
So I'm trying to do better. First step: minimize my use of Apple's ecosystem.
[1] This isn't the first time society has reached this point. The current situation is, at least in the US, in terms of haves/have nots and regulation, worse than it was 25 years ago. In many other ways, things are better, at least for now. No one has threatened to kill me for being perceived as gay for over 15 years, for example.
[2] This includes Android. Google makes using AOSP harder and puts more restrictions on device makers each year. Android, as installed on the vast majority of phones, is one giant data collector for Google.
