I miss the days of VHS and DVD shelfs in homes, for example. If you bought the tapes and had them in your home, no corporate entity could alter those tapes without your consent, monitor how many times you watch them, sell your data to whomever they please without your knowledge, roll out new mandatory conditions to a ‘user agreement,’ or remove them from your library if/when they like.
I noticed some dumb change in how Dictionary definitions are shown in the Spotlight (ie, overall search my computer function) in MacOS this week. I’ve turned off all auto-updates, and I didn’t make that change or consent to it. But despite paying the full price all by myself for this machine, I clearly don’t have 100% control over it. It seems very clearly to me that consumers having control and privacy over their Internet-connected devices is a bygone era.
After Blizzard, the video game company, replaced copies of Warcraft 3 that I and others had paid for in full and installed on our computers that we could play without connecting to the Internet with a lower-quality copy that prohibited offline play - I swore I’d never pay for a video game again*, and 3 years later I haven’t backslid on that. I felt so angry, cheated, and robbed by that. (*Edit: my criticism and frustration is really more with larger developers/companies/creators - I appreciate and am happy to support smaller, more independent and libre ones.)
Many people probably won’t be bothered by these things, but I am. I don’t want to pay full price for something that I don’t truly own. I miss the familiarity. I miss the reliability. I miss feeling like it’s mine. Dependable. Trustworthy.
Picking my old guitar up again has never looked so appealing. I think I want to go back to investing more time, money, and energy into things that aren’t connected to the internet
I understand and relate to how you feel and I hope these changes feel positive to you and not forced. Please remember that these values do not have to be absolutist in their implementation and that there is a place for “hypocrisy”. No human is perfect and it’s okay to make concessions if you are struggling with a complete lifestyle transformation. Too often I see people start down this path of full on zealotry only to rubber-band weeks or months later because it was just too difficult for them to maintain that level of commitment to whatever their cause was. Instead of readjusting to find a better balance, they give up entirely and then feel really miserable about the experience because it seems like the things they valued in life were completely unattainable. This is all just a long way of saying take care of yourself on the journey.
Great advice, thank you!! What you said applies to me quite a bit