And then I read about someone’s smart bed that got stuck in an upright position on heat mode because of the outage. Makes me feel like all that time sourcing devices that run locally was worth it.
Are we just digital preppers?
Edit: I get it, you aren’t preppers, I’m sorry I said that.
From reading your comments I have gathered that you simply want to be ready (not prepared!) for when a free service becomes paid or they shut something down that you use or you simply don’t like the idea of the gubbermint or the corporations being able to look though your data.
Many of you seem aware that your concerns are considered far fetched or like non issues by the average person.
well you are preppers, I’m sorry you had to find out this way.
The bad thing I mentioned is the loss of our individual control on our lives, things that most countries have enshrined in their constitutions: self-determination, the right to relatively good health, the right to control our lives. These things have eroded away in a terrible and malignant way.
I can, you can, and several others here can… But it is hard fucking work, and it’s a conscious choice we make against the current. Most ppl don’t care.
When you don’t participate in normal activities like Instagram, LinkedIn, etc, you can see the eyerolls.
It galls me very bitterly that I, who once championed Google and other online services, who lived online and used internet services and was at the forefront of technology use, am now forced to actually retreat from these parts of what is now called daily life just so I can live with myself.
The bad thing has happened.
We should not be the ones made to feel out of place for assuming that our data should be ours. We should be more outraged that companies can create apps to control our bed temps and just shut the service down without notice, or go bankrupt and sell the data to someone we don’t know or consent to, or create a new subscription model to heat our fucking car seats.
If there is some ambiguity to you about whether the bad thing has happened, start asking yourself why Signal, the “beacon of privacy” had some services fail during the aws outage.