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.
I grew up as a computer nerd kid in the 90s with my first computer being a 386 DX 66mhz off brand IBM PC clone with 8mb ram.
I was put on this earth to do computer stuff no doubt about it. I was the first on my block with dialup. I was the first on my block with DSL. I was the first kid on my block with cable internet. Taught myself C when I was 15 and and a software engineer professionally over a decade without any college education.
With that being said, what we call “AI” (LLMs) completely exhausts me and I have absolutely no interest about AI garbage. I am depressed because AI exists to cheapen literally everything I have a passion for.
When I was young I always wanted to be at the head of technology and always stay up to date with it I’d read books and news daily. Always had a genuine passion for it, but I can’t stand it now.
I just stay stuck in the 90s and play old consoles like PlayStation and N64. That gives me comfort and I know there’s no AI slop in those games.
We have similar stories! Except I was way out in the country where the fastest internet available was 26.4kbps dialup (the phone lines were too old to support anything faster and there was no cable). Mine was an overclocked 486 IBM clone with 8mb ram and like 600 or 800 MB HD.
I recently saw a colleague post on that one professional network that “he guessed he wouldn’t get to write code himself anymore”. That’s depressing as hell to me. Everyone’s minds work differently. I find that writing code gives me new ideas that I wouldn’t have come to otherwise. It’s a loss of creative process. And it’s tragic. Like sometime saying “I guess we won’t paint any paintings ourselves anymore”. What an incredible tragedy.