There was a golden age when computers were something you owned, not like before when they were big machines your employer or university would give out access to, nor like after when they went to the cloud, you bought what was essentially a thin client and every software became a service.
At least in the olden days the computers weren't forced into every single damn part of society!
Now in order to talk with most of your friends and family, you have to sell your soul to every one of the thousand ToS's. It's impossible to meaningfully use your personal device you bought with your own money without the internet, as every app and their mom needs to call home for some reason. For some reason, it is morally acceptable for a company to prevent you from being able to have someone you pay to replace parts of your device with third-party components you bought with your own money!
Now, of course, you can simply install some Libre operating system and use Lemmy, or Mastodon or whatever. But computers are so embedded into society that it is simply impossible to go without these services unless you want to get yourself isolated (and potentially in trouble with the authorities).
Besides, from prior experience, most people are unwilling to use technologies unless it is physically placed in front of them, whether through social influences, advertising or word of mouth, which generally corporate services do better than Libre alternatives.
It used to be that computers and programs were made for the end user. Now they are simply tools for ad and data-collection companies to extract every byte of personal data and force every second of advertising on others.
I've been seriously considering to remove computers from most aspects of my life, but as paper slowly disappears from our lives, this becomes harder and harder. Now you would likely be fired if you refused to use Teams or Slack or whatever your company uses. No one uses fax or writes mail or watches live TV anymore.
The only other alternative is to take back computers and make them personal again.
I hear what you are saying, but I'm not sure why you aren't doing what you want to do.
If you have a computer not provided by work, why do you have Slack or Teams?
Use ad blockers and/or Pi-Hole to avoid pesky ads.
Watch live TV.
Write a letter.
Stay away or use sparingly, data hungry services.
I know I feel better for it and I don't feel as if I'm missing much.
I'm mostly concerned about the general public as many are either ignorant or lack the knowledge on how to use these.
Ads have become the new normal
I haven't seen an ad in ages on the internet. Also, ducks in the park are free.
They are slowly creeping back in. Once ad blockers became mainstream (I blame Apple), the war on them began in earnest. I already see them reappearing on YouTube and Reddit.
You can scoff and declare that no one should use these platforms, but both have captured whole swaths of discourse and content online. And they will just keep chipping away at making sure the ads appear. Cat/mouse, all that.
sometimes the 'content' itself is an ad nowadays
brb, pirating ducks.
The general public is ignorant and has the lack of interest in their privacy or in general in the internet. They just want to know whats the weather or funny cat videos.
The companies make their software so bloated because they want to sell you the "ad free"/deluxe experience for extra money.
They dont have the morales of you buy it you own it. See the gaming industry, the movie industry even the car industry all subscriptions, ads, data hoarding and telemetry all of what it is not necessary for any industry, if they did a good job and a good product. But as they just make a "warranty" hopping hardware/software, that just gets you over the warranty/refund period and then spontaneous dies because of some electronic that was especially not there just to destroy the product after x years. See "The Crew" from ubisoft, users "bought" the game after few years a sequel came out and ubisoft just did most terrible thing you could do and just unplugged "The Crew" and made it unplayable, and even had the audacity to remove evidence by removing them from players playstation libraries and no refund possible.
They deliberately made that game a online only game (even this could and should have run perfectly offline) and then kill it after few years to force users to play newer games. Imagine this in the N64 era, the publishers would have gotten sued and defamed for this crap they would have done.
Then they ask themselves why is piracy back and even stronger than before, they just need to open their eyes and do their job.
In short: Dont be afraid to live in a futuristic dystopia, we are living in one already.
In my country (Australia) live TV is ad-infested and most programs are reality TV garbage, so I stay away from it. I use a combination of Freetube + Peertube and it works for me.