leaving big tech has ruined me for big tech
In the first week of January 2025, someone on one of my social media feeds shared a link to The Opt Out Project:
https://www.optoutproject.net/
I read the first few posts and thought, "well, I'm already not using Chrome, Safari, or Edge, and it is pretty creepy to think how much Google knows about me from my email and Drive. Let's click some of these links to alternate email providers and see where they lead."
Fast-forward fewer than 60 days, and being forced to use a work computer that runs on Windows 11, has Google everything, and won't even let me install a basic ad blocker has me experiencing Ed Zitron levels of rage.
I will never forgive these people for what they've done to the computer.
I used to read in between classes working in the library or students appearing at the checkout desk. Sometimes I read stuff related to work; sometimes I just read stuff that interested me, as long as it was stuff I didn't mind my boss asking about. Usually, those two thing overlap.
Today I tried and had to quit. Without ad blockers, every damn Internet 2.0 page looks like the advanced levels of Stimulation Clicker:
https://neal.fun/stimulation-clicker/
I found an online tool that extracts the texts from web pages. I used it to extract the text from a C++ tutorial. It's not great - it's missing the examples, for one - but it's a damn sight better than the actual page was.
At home, that would not have been an issue. At home, I would have loaded that page in Lynx. Then I could have read it in peace, knowing that neither that site nor the text-extraction one could possibly be tracking me.
It's like this with everything. I got a notice from the state education association; their page had fewer ads but still loaded a bunch of Taft-test-failing graphics. Nothing about the American Library Association's pages are bad for Web 2.0, but everything about them is uncomfortable when I've been reveling in basic responsive HTML, Geminispace, and Lynx all weekend.
this is what I'm talking about
you haven't lived until you've read the news in this thing
And I really, REALLY miss Cloud Firewall and OpenSnitch at work. I miss them SO MUCH. I want to know where websites are coming from and what they're trying to get my computer to tell them!
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/cloud-firewall/
https://github.com/evilsocket/opensnitch
No one in this universe or the next will convince me that I am wrong, unreasonable, or somehow spoiled for wanting to read plain text on a plain background with no one watching me as I do it, AND NOTHING ELSE. I am right. It's the current state of the Web that is the disaster.
Honestly, in just two months, my relationship to my computer and to online life has changed so much. I still have one social media account - counter.social - but I'm very close to closing it. I kept it because two months ago it didn't feel like social media; now it feels too much like social media for my comfort.
I no longer have any patience or tolerance for sites that take dozens of seconds to load, fill in a crapton of ads, or otherwise try to make my life online more difficult. I don't understand how I let them waste my time and patience for so long, honestly.
And I don't feel deprived. I've had several friends and family members express the opinion that I must or should. I don't. Computers and being online are FUN again, in a way they haven't been for me since the Y2K bug was a thing.
If anything, I feel deprived now when I have to deal with commercial Web 2.0 in any of its forms. Because I get to play with what online life and computers can be, and the corporatized Web takes that from me.
One person suggested I change careers again and become a Web developer. No thanks. From here, coding looks a lot like writing for Web 2.0 does: The only jobs that pay enough to live on are jobs in which one's core task is to make the Web worse. Besides, I have a library full of teens who deserve to learn how to make their own Web pages.
/gemlog/