Man, I liked it when the default for software was not to spy on you.

When was that ever a thing? Seriously, software has been spying on you since the day the Internet became ubiquitous sometime in the 1990’s.

Zooming out a bit, it’s fascinating to see how personal computing has shifted from being this hacker playground (computers you’d have to configure and instruct to do stuff for you) to being this consumer experience (of being served somebody’s product) with planned obsolescence built in.

The leading OS (Windows) comes bloated with tons of software that people don’t need, to the point that there are GitHub scripts for decluttering it.

The hardware on many desktops and laptops, and on most mobiles and tablets, comes as a monolith you cannot open and tweak.

Much of software is subscription-based and you just buy a license to rent time using it. And as you pointed out, much of it is adversarial in the sense of actively spying on you.

And most of our data is hosted on somebody else’s “cloud”, which we somehow celebrate as liberating.

It’s crazy how much we’ve lost control over our digital sovereignty and yet still call it personal computing

I disagree but I am not able to type long replies on my phone. Definitely not everything that's going through my head right now.

So I'll point you to @aviationdoctor.eth's reply 😉

I do think there's a huge difference between the times you mentioned (and even 20 years ago) and current day practices.

Aviator, diver, Etherean, nexialist, PhD in aviation and climate science, host of /diving /ethfinance /forteantimes /geopolitics /science /singapore /thomas

Software engineer, creative coder, aspiring generative artist, fridgebuzz.tez/.eth

I disagree but I am not able to type long replies on my phone. Definitely not everything that's going through my head right now.

So I'll point you to @aviationdoctor.eth's reply 😉

I do think there's a huge difference between the times you mentioned (and even 20 years ago) and current day practices. 

https://warpcast.com/aviationdoctor.eth/0x39ec9b7f

As a nerd you can see things that are socially and / or technically a bad idea but people will just YOLO into it because of convenience or hype.

They will come to their senses hopefully later.

Still, it is convenient to have others host stuff and sysadmin for me but if I pay for the service I should be able to trust them with my data.

I definitely agree we don’t have much control anymore. I saw “the cloud” as a bad idea and started a company to offer an alternative, but when it came right down to it: people did not want to back up their own stuff. It’s not the only reason we failed but that was a big contributor. People *wanted* to give their photos to Google (and now Apple). It was hard to buck that trend and maybe impossible now.