It's amazing how like all tech is enshittified now under capitalism.
Forced to use my phone during a windows update which breaks my computer. My phone is shitty and slow. Google is full of unhelpful results. Youtube is showing nothing but political ads about ms-13 killing white people.
Truly 2024 is great.
man someone should write a book about how all this stuff tends to happen and why
Speaking of; what’s the best place to get the essential reading? Feels fucking weird to get them through Barnes or Amazon lmao I’m not SO opposed to it, it’s just the way things are now. I just am curious if there’s better options.
If you don't want physical books: https://www.marxists.org/index-mobiles.htm
And if you do want physical books, they also sell them. I don't actually know anything about MIA as an org, but their site is great for research and feeling like it's 1999 again
most college libraries have a great collection and sometimes offer a free card to the general public
bookshop.org for new books. abebooks is probably best for used books, but even they are owned by Amazon. Sometimes you can find books on there and then go to the listed bookstore's own site, but more often than not they'll just be using the abebooks engine there, too.
If you want to support the author, there is always the option to pirate the book, and see if he or she has pages to receive donations (paypal, bitcoin, patreon, etc) or you can just email then money.
I recently bought a cool looking 1920's copy of State and Revolution from eBay for $15. I've had good luck buying used leftist books from there, especially the ones that were printed in large numbers.
To add to the ebook recommendations, Anna's archive has the biggest pirate collection of ebooks online.
thriftbooks is really good as well
Death to America
For Spanish-speakers, I think that the biggest editor of communist literature in the Spanish language is the Fundación Federico Engels
Pfft. Reading is for losers. 😎
FOSS is getting nicer and proprietary software is getting worse. Things are looking up, IMO.
Each update that almost kills my pc is driving me further and further to linux.
At this point my busted old laptop is like Son Goku who gets a powerup each near death fight he has.
The realization of this was one of the things that started my journey of radicalization. When file sharing was recuperated into paid services (iTunes, Spotify, etc), it really made some things clear to me. I didn't have the theory knowledge yet to contextualize it, but it made me very hungry for explanations.
To be fair, not all tech is enshittified, I'm an electronics enthusiast and there are insanely cool open source devices made by the community or by Chinese companies that blow my mind, like the NanoVNA vector Network analyzer, the Pinecil soldering iron, or the meshtastic LoRa-based wireless communication between phones
made me feel like a boomer with all those gizmos
To be fair, those gizmos are pretty niche and hobbyist (NanoVNA and Meshtastic is ham radio shit, Pinecil is a soldering iron)
There is a great video from a year ago about how business interests stole the internet from public investment and control, I highly recommend it https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oLLxpAZzy0s
https://tailscale.com/blog/new-internet
Definitely check out this and some other entries on the tailscale blog to see how bullshit connecting computer A to computer B has become. I had to shut down my minecraft server for friends because my ISP won't allow port forwarding or static IPs anymore without an extra $100 a month. When I asked them why it's "because of piracy"??!?
Back in my day when your friend had DSL you had to use Hamachi to play on a friend's server
I found a YouTube link in your comment. Here are links to the same video on alternative frontends that protect your privacy:
As cool as I find the YouTube one, I already hear way too many stories about that from my friend's cousin who's in MS-13
I love being right but also hate being right
I wish I was just a panicky chicken little dumbass who doesn't understand that the powers that be have it all taken care of. Instead I keep getting hit on the head by lab-certified pieces of sky
I own a smart phone, yet I am stupid as hell. Curious!
Debating seeing if I could get one of those twenty year old spring loaded phones they made for the Matrix sequels and getting it compatible with a service now as a bit
De-googling (FOSSifying?) my digital life has been very costly, not in money but in time, effort, and loss of convenience. I make it work for me just fine, I just wish it was easier to bring my friends and family with me.
Do you have any recommendations on how to effectively do this now that you've gone through it?
The one thing I'm struggling to get rid of, eventhough I hate it to high heavens, is google messages. The features I do like are great but they keep adding crap I will never use(Gemini) and I'm naturally concerned with privacy. But if everyone in your life is still on one platform, it's so hard to switch.
My Nokia cost me $35. Or are you talking about other costs?