I have found myself in a mental hole of tech-nihilism. Maybe even on the road to tech-fatalism. Long, rambly, Sunday night post, heads up. But I think I touch on the risk posed by even using privacy tools, something which I don’t think I see discussed here because of where most of you live (Global North, where you have the right to tell a policeman to get a warrant for the most part). This is kind of about two things at once, they’re related though.

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Different events bubble this feeling to the surface but it’s always there in the background. When I (and you) defected from Reddit cold turkey after they decided to cut off the API, I had this feeling. When I started having to use a VPN permanently, I got it again. And when I had to “move” my exit country because the UK started verifying identities online, I got it again. Can you guess how I felt this week, following Microsoft’s bullshit about making it even harder to set up their OS without signing in? Or when I tried to use my trusty YouTube downloading scripts, only for them to seemingly require I feed them login cookies now? Or this whole Google Play dev verification thing? I don’t even use Android!

I’m sure this is the case for most of you, but being anonymous online feels like more of a challenge and more of a necessity now. I don’t want YouTube to log 900 music playlists under my account. I don’t want to log into every Windows mini PC I set up for family. I know most of you obviously do not, and Lemmy being Lemmy there’s this culture of saying well fuck the corporate internet altogether. Can’t rip from YouTube? Fuck YouTube! Don’t want to give M$ your blood type to set up a printer server NUC? Image Debian on it. etcetera etcetera. I know. I use Lemmy, I avoid Google search, I most definitely avoid most big tech products when I can. Don’t need em.

But like… The corporate internet is still there. I quit Reddit, even though it was my online home for over a decade. But YouTube? That’s a completely different beast. This just is where the videos are. I can host Pixelfed for my family and friends but I can’t host video, much less expect everyone to. Most people aren’t very computer savvy and YouTube is just where most people will post videos.

And since I use their service quite a bit, I did look into actually paying for their service. The folks you watch get a little kickback, and you no longer get ads on your TV and phone. I can stomach paying, even the uBlock Origin and piracy advocate that I am, just because I use it so much. But I use a VPN. And their FAQ explicitly has a page for this: you can’t connect from outside of where you’re paying, if you’re paying. But it doesn’t clarify whether it uses the country of your payment details, your IP, your location in Google Maps, or the country your account’s settings are set to. In my case, those are four separate countries lmao

These are little complaints, but I don’t think this is some “first-world” problem nothingburger. I suspect the UK identity verification scheme, or something similar, will start becoming more common around the world, regardless of how many data breaches happen. And not because some stuck up politicians are scared that a teenager could see a woman’s penis online, oh no, I totally think the true purpose is to tag “unwanted” ideologies and prevent their spread. Wouldn’t want anyone to type in ultra evil extremist words like “Palestinians have human rights” without consequences now would we. The fact that everyone is using their spin euphemism, “age verification”, instead of what it is, “identity verification”, gives them too much credit, even when being critical about it.

There is some irony in calling this a first world problem, because I live very decisively in the third world. Lebanon. Our internet speeds are shit, but for the most part, the internet here is pretty unrestricted. Combine this with most people’s service coming via legal gray area local “”“ISPs”“”" with haphazard IP ranges and messy CGNAT, and you have a plausibly anonymous and relatively uncensored connection. Beautiful, besides the 2Mb (yes, lowercase) speed.

But. But.

I was looking into setting up a meshtastic/LoRa/whatever network, that would link up my home with a few relatives who live nearby, as sort of an emergency backup. You probably only see bad news from where I live, I promise good things do happen here, but an emergency comms network in case something happens and services go down seems like common sense to me. Especially since these services go down when there isn’t an emergency. But setting one of these up would definitely get me on a list here. I’d probably get an unpleasant “interrogation” for setting up a parallel communications network. Best case scenario I get asked to take it down and to keep my nose clean kiddo. Worst case, I’m accused of espionage and thrown in a cell because it’s hard to explain what this stuff is to people who don’t care about understanding it. I do not live in a place with consistent rule of law, or even the thin veil of it. Staying out of trouble is paramount.

Further, along the same topic. I remember seeing an article about some countries in the EU raising an eyebrow about GrapheneOS, where police are associating its use with drug dealers. Perhaps I would need such an OS in the future, as someone who is not a drug dealer but who hates what is going on with commercial tech. And so I started thinking about what using it would look like. The same concerns with my local police are there, but there is a worse one: I have been flying internationally into countries with much more strict security than Beirut’s sticky, comfy little airport. I’ve been to Abu Dhabi in the past 24 months, what happens when I land in that airport with a “drug dealer phone”? I doubt Lemmy would even be allowed there if they knew what it was. I wonder what kind of shady deals Reddit had to crack to get approved, with how that place’s culture and content was.

I wonder about this a lot. The VPN I use in Lebanon isn’t blocked in the countries I visit for work, so I’ve felt relatively at ease so far. But I feel these tendrils of surveillance and data collection, of deanonymization. And it kind of terrifies me. I have to stand in the pleb physical stamping line in these techy airports, but I see people just walking through the electronic gates with nothing but an iris scan. It’s weird. I can make a burner YouTube account to yoink cookies and download videos, but I shouldn’t have to. I can log into a Microsoft account on a machine I’ll be logging into their email from every day and connecting to their Minecraft auth servers from twice a year, but… this is not right at all. We all know what’s downstream from tying your files to your identity.

I don’t know. The rise of tech-induced willful ignorance and authoritarian regimes is scaring me. The fact that people’s pensions are tied to AI companies that facilitate the terrorization and mass murder of innocents in the south of my country (and unquestionable genocide south of the border) fucking terrifies me. And it should, even if I wasn’t a working-age Lebanese man. Even if I wasn’t in those fucking databases.

I’m going to hold myself back from ranting about the fact that tech has come to almost exclusively mean predatory products and bullshit slop extruders to most people. About the cruel summary execution of our dream of cyberspace that we glimpsed on the early web. About how infuriatingly, nonchalantly shit almost every young person is at solving tech problems now. There is an immense, crushing powerlessness. I almost wish I didn’t care about tech, about privacy, that I could give Glaxo-McUberzon my mother’s maiden bone marrow and carry on with my day.

Almost.

I am 100% on the way to becoming a forest hermit with the way tech is going. And I’m a tech guy. I’m the tech guy to most people in my life. And boy howdy is a life of making coffee, chopping firewood, and screaming into the valley between commits to projects-that-go-nowhere looking real, real good right about now.

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I should probably cross-post this to Tech Takes. But I don’t think I’ll be putting it on my personal blog. Doesn’t feel right.