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.
Speaking for myself, there are many things that I couldn’t ever hope to do before AI became popularized. I don’t speak Japanese, can’t draw, lack the money to hire humans, let alone give them a fair wage. Any dreams I wanted to fulfill, simply are not possible without skill, social connections, and wealth. I lacked agency long before the rise of AI.
With AI tools, I can translate or retranslate foreign games, which is quite nice for me. There are quite a few niche games that won’t ever receive much attention, being only of interest to a select few humans. Hoping for the good luck of another person to donate their time and life to such causes, isn’t practical.
Plus, I don’t particularly like the nuts and bolts of computing. I am having a hard time getting the .git of DevilutionX to build, because it is missing SDL.h, and the repository instructions seem dated. An AI would likely understand how to fix that issue, any other weird technical problems. Learning the dependencies, console commands, and so forth is just something I don’t want to do with my lifespan. I want to just enjoy my media, without technical hurdles getting in the way.
Lede: buried.
Up front you say you don’t speak Japanese and can’t draw, two things people have been doing for hundreds of years and millennia respectively. It seemed a little odd, since there’s maybe never been a time when resources to learn to speak or read a new language or draw are so universally available.
Then it’s down at the bottom: “learning … is just not something I want to do…”
That’s not a judgement of you. Everyone makes this choice all the time. It’s just an observation.