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How can we return to techno-optimism?
(loveofallwisdom.com)
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this post was submitted on 01 Sep 2024
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Technology
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The users already have a lot of control; many just don't use it.
Can any of you live without Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube for one calendar month? 25 years ago, millions of Americans did, and their lives were hardly the poorer for it. 25 years before that it was over 150 million Americans, including the 12 who walked the Moon.
The kind of control we are talking about are different. You look at the law, in which I have only little trust, while I look at the ability to manipulate the hardware.
So no, they do not have control over the hardware, they just don't care that much. They do care if they are inconvenienced in any way, say by a service that disallows some parts that were previously offered. They don't understand and don't care, but they do win from some more control over their stuff.
I already live without any of the services you mentioned, I suspect most of Lemmy do. Well, not without YouTube (for me), I guess, but that gets more and more replaced by stuff like peertube.
Millions of Americans would still only occasionally visit those things if they had more options to plan their recreational time. Those options are mostly limited by less free time available while also having less money available. In that regard, and mostly limited to that regard, was then better than now.
If we are going to wait for the right legislation, then we are probably going to wait a very long time.
You're not on Facebook and Twitter? Good. It's entry-level stance, but nonetheless a good one, particularly if you are under 40 years of age.
YouTube is more difficult as it is, for me at least, mostly a replacement for television, videotape, and DVDs. My search for alternatives haven't been too fruitful, but I often go to Vimeo, Archives, niconoco (they're back in service starting early August), occasionally RuTube and vk (I support Ukraine in the war, but I'm not going to hate Russia), for a while the Chinese sites (though there seems to be less selection these days, too many ads, and some of it is YouTube embeds), Jamendo, and WikiCommons, and yes PeerTube (I suppose searching in time will get easier). (I'm also thinking of going back to P2P a bit.)
FWIW, I have this https://lemmy.world/c/musicnoytnosnofbnoff on Lemmy, and so far I might be the only contributor. The one I have on reddit https://www.reddit.com/r/musicNoYTNoSNoFBNoFF/ I can no longer access as the account I used to create it has been suspended (and yes, suspended for no good reason). I could be the sole contributor for the next few years and I won't give up.
Yes, many Americans, many people, are stuck in shitty jobs that take too much of their time, and a lot of it is nonessential. However, over a trillion hours (e.g. say over 250 million people x over 4000 hours in less than 10 years) have been spent on FB, Twitter, and YouTube. If 1% of that time was spent on alternatives, choices could improve dramatically. But they might not, it might be that they probably won't, at least not for most of the Fox and CNN viewership. No matter: the search for alternatives continue and if people like us remain a small minority for years, maybe decades, to come, then we will nonetheless continue. We will be our own 1%ers.
I've been living without the first two for years now. I could live without youtube if I really needed to, though I do watch a lot of stuff about farming that is really helpful. Most of my youtube watching is educational with a slight smattering of games and entertainment and a tiny bit of news.
FWIW,
wc:Category:Videos of agriculture