Everything seems critical when you haven’t tried living without. Meat eaters can’t comprehend living without meat. Car drivers can’t imagine living without cars.

I wondered how people pass their time without phones. Then my autistic son started demanding holding onto my phone for every waking minute he is not at school. Now I spend my day without the phone.

Now that YouTube has stopped working on NewPipe, I’ve stopped watching it…and it felt a bit uncomfortable to miss my videos before bed, but now it’s not a big deal. None of these things are critical. There’s a near infinite world of choices available to us now. We just need to pick something else.

People don’t know and don’t care. Privacy isn’t an issue on anyone’s mind (just like climate wasn’t 20 years ago). People don’t know or care about digital media ownership issues.

The most important part of this is:

the vast majority of people never cared

We make our happy little bubble here to be outraged in. The world at large carries on without caring. Just in the past few years, there’s been the Reddit API change, the WhatsApp ToS change, the YouTube dislike button removal, etc etc. A small minority (like us) complains endlessly. The rest of the world shrugs and accepts enshitification.

Every eventuality can’t be covered by regulation. Sometimes you realise something can go disastrously wrong after someone is hurt. I wouldn’t be surprised if this never happened to other mechanical cars to never need regulation. Sometimes you need to wait for a stupid product to exist for someone to make a rule saying “stupid products shouldn’t exist”.

Starvation and homelessness are quite powerful motivators.

Remember people: the thoughts in someone else’s head can’t hurt you

I’m 6 months into fulltime OpenSUSE Tumbleweed and love it. KDE is amazing. The Steam Deck converted me. Linux users rise.

I have no idea what I’ve missed… Till I go to someone’s house and watch raw YouTube and it’s unbearable.