26-SEPT-04 - Technological Freedom

I think I have finally reached a terminal stage, pun intended, of nerdhood: I want to start using Linux.

I've been increasingly interested in "degoogling", the process of removing as much of my data from and dependence on Google's stranglegold in order to reappropriating the tech in my life.

When I started, I was under the impression that it would a difficult, months long process, but the truth is that it's mostly just inconvenient. Google, Samsung, Microsoft, Meta &c have managed to dominate in this way in part because they are incredibly streamlined and easy to use. Anyone with the basic tech literacy to turn on a laptop and log into a website can effortlessly download programs and apps in their ecosystem and utilise the native features implemented by these corporate 'techno-managers'. As a matter of fact, anyone with nothing more than basic tech skills will have to resort to their ecosystem as simply the path of least resistance.

Everything from virtual wallets for contactless payment to AI shows how much effort is put in making not simply idiot-proof products, but products that actively discourage end users from seeking the opportunity to learn. The goal is to make end users into passive consumers: to be blunt, those companies are training us to be dumb, stacking incentives and opportunities against the democratisation of tech skills to more easily hold their already captive market.

And indeed, the most difficult part of this 'degoogling' process so far has been their weaponisation of convenience of use: putting data and permissions into the Google ecosystem is effortless, whereas erasing data and removing permissions is met with obfuscation and resistance in a way that will dissuade a lot of users, if they are even made aware of the very important reasons why they should stop relying on megacorporations to hold onto their data.

That is the impetus behind my wanting to learn more about the technology that I'm using every day, on top of the security and privacy concerns, bloatware and constantly tightening restrains on the freedom offered to developers and users in the ecosystems of these giants with enough power to alter legislation to not be held accountable for anything they use our data for, such as training AIs or building surveillance databases.

Another set of driving factors behind my approach is the constantly narrowing window of opportunity to escape their grasp: Chromium-based browsers (Chrome, Brave, Opera &c.) are phasing out ad blocker extensions; Google is about to single-handedly destroy the user freedom behind Android ; the ability to download off of YouTube without Premium is actively hindered by the enforcing of DRM and copyright; paywalls are enforced with more rigidity than ever before; search engines actively smother their search results to hide some information and websites ; Meta is fully compliant in the Israeli government's request to basically dismantle Palestinian journalism and activism off its social media platforms.

We are rapidly approaching the point where these private entities will have not only the incentive but also the ability to rewrite and erase history as it is being written, censor anything on the internet, and to challenge any threat to their power, up to and beyond the reliance of governments' web infrastructure on their tools.

So, in short, this is both a measure of resistance and also a matter of personal safety for anyone who is part of marginalised communities and engaging in non-TikTok-based, actually tangible left-wing activism.

Here is a brief summary of my progress so far regarding my de-monopolising efforts for my daily tech ecosystem:

• Installing Firefox 6+ months ago: higher privacy, basically a non-profit, ability to choose search engines, and a bunch of other awesome Mozilla features such as integrated VPN and email relays/aliases.

• Phasing out of Gmail, using Proton Mail instead.

• Using NewPipe as a Youtube client for privacy.

• Using Proton Drive & Obsidian for storage and organisation (thanks to you sexy)

• Reducing the use of Meta products (Insta, Facebook, WhatsApp) to strictly necessary interactions

• Trying (and failing) to get people around me to use Signal as a privacy-focused replacement for Messenger

• Starting to rely on local storage over cloud storage (noting that an efficient way to share localised data between devices would basically make cloud useless ; I'm considering looking out into LAN options or some ways to build a private server, but I'm not a network engineer)

• Getting more efficient with piracy, including the use of yt-dlp (note: finding a way to retrieve and save files directly from browser cache would allow me to download basically any file that my device has access to with no ways of bypassing it)

• Installing GrapheneOS as a privacy OS

• Using F-Droid rather than Play store

• Trying to find alternatives to Google Pay for online transactions

I've been feeling very hopeful, especially since installing GrapheneOS and then yt-dlp, and learning to use them. I've realised that, while lacking the discouraging UI comfort and feature convenience of pre-built apps, there is a large amount of information out there which makes the installation of customisable programs specifically built for desired functions as easy (or complicated) as assembling IKEA furniture: following instructions carefully, and in the case of failures, finding the already existing solutions to the problems, and following those instructions.

I've also realised how incredibly efficient it is to learn how something works by actively putting it in practice, and then immediately running into the beginner mistakes and the assumptions made about how it works. Making mistakes and encountering problems is far more conducive to understanding why and how a solution came to be than simply learning that information in a vacuum with the possibility of it being relevant at a later date. And, of course, the process of learning through problem-solving makes it easier to infer how other parts of a system function, and to extrapolate similar solutions to the ones we've encountered before. Wow, learning is fun.

And so, I want to install Linux. It's something I've always considered as very distant, mostly because the volume of information to learn seems enormous: trying to pick up on something that has been evolving for THIRTY-FIVE years is bound to be very opaque, as it's literally impossible to synthesise or summarise all the knowledge available on the topic, and functionally impossible to simply start from the beginning and go chronologically up to modern features and ideas being implemented. However, the fact that those systems are long-running are also a massive advantage: the number of participants who have already built tools to simplify or "intuitify" the use of Linux means that there are easier entry points than learning from scratch, and there is also the guarantee that nearly any error, problem or failure I might encounter has already been encountered before and solved, potentially in more than one way.

And I think it highlights the difference in design ethos from locked operating systems such as Windows and iOS : the overwhelming part, the steep learning slope, comes not from trying to navigate narrow, consumer-friendly pathways as intended but from figuring out what to even do with the disorienting breadth of freedom given to the end user.

Similarly, I've been meaning to learn to program, and I've been equally dissuaded by the variety of programming languages, the specific applications for each language, and the same feeling of opacity in trying to integrate decades of knowledge with no way to judge of the quality or pertinence of that information in foresight. However, I think that approaching things the other way around, that is, by picking a project that is realisable and finding the list of skills, tools, instructions and solutions needed to achieve it, is a potentially more efficient way to build a rudimentary understanding and knowledge base that can be applied later.