YouTube has finally gotten wise and is testing out adblock blockers. This is the wealthiest company in the world and they still want to scrape a few quid off people who just want to watch decino hundred-percent a Doom WAD. Well, whatever. I mean, the people who make uBlock Origin lists are going to find a way around that in short order, and it's not likely to affect Firefox users anyway, but it just got me to thinking about how intertwined our lives are with the internet anymore. And, increasingly, Google is in control of the tools that we use. Take internet browsers as a standout example: there used to be loads of browsers, each based on their own code, and, while some were more common than others, it was a diverse field. Chrome, Firefox, and Edge, sure; but there were also Brave, Opera, Vivaldi, Internet Explorer, and some smaller-time projects that were less of functional browsers and more of final projects in software engineering. Now look at the field. Internet Explorer is gone (no great loss there), and everything else except Firefox is based on Google Chromium. Brave? Chromium. Vivaldi? Chromium. Microsoft Edge? Chromium. Opera? Chromium. "Open-source codebase" says you, "Big Brother's telescreen" says I.
This turned into a complaint about Google. It really wasn't supposed to be. The point is that we're online all the time now, having content flung in our faces left and right every moment of the day that we're not sleeping or working. Even when we're offline, we're online-- our phones keep track of our whereabouts, comparing them to other people's whereabouts, extrapolating our routines, learning our sleep schedules. The smartphone was a fabulous invention, but it was the last one. "Download our app," says the grocery store. "You'll have better results on our app," says Tumblr. "Get exclusive discounts on our app," says the fast-food place. All of that is just an excuse to mine your data and sell it to some corporate feudal entity for a quarterly percentage. Millennial and teenage parents are letting tablets and smartphones babysit their kids, to the point that pediatricians are starting to see a causal relationship between smartphone use and lower capacity for fine motor skills. I've read anecdotes where children say "remember to like and subscribe", instead of "goodbye" or "good night", because the only "other people" they have to interact with are YouTubers and influencers.
While it's a bit beyond my purview to critique anyone's parenting style, I can say that I, personally, am trying to cut as much of the corporate feudal content machine out of my life as possible. After my dollar-store A2D converter box broke down in 2011, I decided to stop watching commercial television. This was made easier by the fact that Hulu and Netflix had WiiWare apps, so I was able to alternate between free trials of both and watch basically the same stuff on there as I was on TV, only without any advertising. Believe it or don't, Netflix and Hulu both had ad-free options up until 2020. As I was deciding what to watch, I realised that I had only been watching these 4 particular police shows on TV because they were there. They were also on Hulu, but I didn't feel the need to watch them. Then, I found that the public library had a lot of older stuff that I liked to watch in the '90s and the turn of the millennium on DVD, so I transitioned to DVD only when my free trials ran out. I dropped those streaming services and never looked back. In retrospect, that made the transition away from Facebook and Twitter easier; I wasn't being suckered into useless memberships and things by watching inane advertising anymore, and that's really what I want to talk about first.
The first, longest-lasting thing we can do to disconnect ourselves is to deactivate our social media accounts. Facebook, Twitter, MySpace if you've got one, TikTok naturally, anyone whose terms and conditions explicitly state their M.O. is to analyse your browsing habits and sell that information to marketing firms. Apart from the obvious privacy considerations, there's also the whole "fake news" thing that you can just sidestep without much effort, as well as the phenomenon of "doomscrolling"; getting fed a constant stream of depressing and provocative content, designed to goad you into engagement. I would direct you to that Megamind meme at this point: "There is no Tooth Fairy, there is no Easter Bunny, and there is no legitimate news on Facebook!" When it comes to news, there's really no feasible way to completely extricate the AI-generated stories and human-concocted hoaxes. Even the Associated Press has accidentally published this kind of content. But, the further away you get from social media, the amount of blantantly fabricated "news" will diminish significantly. Yes, a fake story may get through the cracks occasionally, but going to directly to the sources of news stories; AP, NPR, and Reuters; the risk of encountering one gets reduced to a miniscule percentage.
The next thing-- and I touched on this briefly a couple paragraphs ago-- drop our streaming subscriptions. This will be made easier by the current WGA strike, inasmuch as the studios will not be putting any new episodes of current series on their streaming platforms and may even cancel some series out of spite against the union, so you won't be missing anything. 10 years ago, I would have suggested to switch back over to normal broadcast TV, but there's nothing there anymore except cop shows and Young Sheldon, and it's about to be overrun by writerless "reality TV" shows, so, no. Do not switch back over to normal broadcast TV. However, most of the older content on streaming-- say, from 2018 backwards-- will probably be on DVD. Star Trek, M*A*S*H, Law & Order, The Office, these were all released on DVD box sets, so the likelihood is pretty high that your local library will have them. Also, Target and Walmart are trying to deprecate their DVD sections, so you can probably get entire sets of these shows at bargain-basement prices.
For a large percentage of us, de-networking also means dropping Nintendo Switch Online. I already talked about emulation in a previous entry, so I won't go a great deal into it here; but consider the personal computer for a moment. Consider how many years PCs and laptops have been in use. There are huge, great, heaping piles of games that were made for computers over the past 40 years! One may need Dosbox to play some of those again, but there's a wider world of videogames beyond the pittance that Nintendo, Microsoft, and Sony mete out every couple of months, just begging to make our acquaintance again. There's Steam, yes, of course, but there's also GOG and MyAbandonware, to say nothing of physical copies of games on DVD-ROM. I hear they made The Sims 4 core game free to play and, if you fancy expanding it, I know this chappie called Anadius.
I know there wasn't a proper mic-drop in here, but I've had this damned file open for 3 hours and I'm starting to get tired of looking at it.
--15 May 2023--