I used to spend hours as a teenager underneath my bed or in crawlspaces listening to music and audio books. Do recommend, it got me through. Hang in there, my friend. It really and truly does get better once you have more control over who you spend time around. Until then, take care of yourself as gently as you can. Try to give yourself small kindnesses. You matter a lot.

Didn’t know there were drones just wandering around the us. Could it have belonged to a nature photographer? Creepy af for sure

Where do you live that has surveillance drones on hiking trails?

Daylio is great.

Yeah, agree. The venn diagram of right wing people and people eager to prove their correct behavior in front of the authorities is a very depressing circle. As you say here, slow and steady. The small steps count.

Edit: Wanted to add a caveat here to clarify that I am only making fun of conservative jerks, not people who for various financial or accessibility or life reasons can’t do the things that are most usually recommended re: privacy.

I think people who say this are having a very human panic response to something that none of us should ever have to deal with and that none of us can personally control.

It has significant mental health and social effects, too. We need to start seeing these behaviors by governments and corporations the same way that we see similar actions by abusive people. Stalking and monitoring someone isn’t wrong only because a regular individual is the one doing it, it’s wrong because it’s fundamentally wrong. Such behaviors are designed to intimidate and control someone. It is absolutely unjustifiable on every level.

I have no issue with disruptive and inconvenient climate actions, I think they’re one of many valid ways to draw attention and put pressure on the people who actually make decisions about such things.

Every activist or charity type of group is going to have a person who tries to tell you that your way of participating is wrong or not enough or that you have to do exactly the same thing they do or else you don’t care enough about whatever you’re fighting for. This is toxic bullshit and should be ignored. You’re not doing anything wrong by engaging in the way that is the most effective use of your energy.

I feel like positioning the ‘average person’ as always disengaged or never doing enough reads more like an attempt to define in/out groups than a genuine effort to actually do anything about the problem.

Disagree. I think everyone deserves a reasonable degree of privacy and interoperability and choice as a protected right, within the markets and services we already have.

I don’t think this is true. Most people do care, in my anecdotal experience. I am not in tech circles. It is not a niche thing to be concerned about these days.

Actually, good news, they have! Google just lost its search monopoly trial with the US government, and they seem to be about to lose their advertising monopoly trial too. The US FTC also just released a report (not a legal action) concluding that all the big companies have abused data collection and recommended that the government do something to make those practices unprofitable for companies. I know the EU has also been doing some significant stuff, both against apple specifically and big gatekeeper companies generally. You can certainly argue it’s not enough, and I would agree with you - but it’s given me some optimism that more action and real enforcement might be in the near future in many countries.

People always say shit like this as if people don’t have a multitude of different life circumstances that affect and coerce how they interact with technology. That’s just how capitalism works. It’s not a matter of willpower. Privacy Bootstraps Theory is unhelpful. Being able to completely opt out of entrenched tech monopolies is a privilege. It’s great that you can do that, not everybody can.

It’s excellent that alternatives and ad blockers do exist but we need regulatory action to hold companies accountable for things that are designed to worsen user experience to pressure people into paying. It’s also a serious accessibility issue, to increasingly have everything be bright and loud and motion filled and unpausable all the time. This trend goes beyond YouTube and it sucks, we need to regulate this nonsense.

It’s subscription based, but Nebula is creator owned I believe. Sucks though that everything free gets acquired by some extractive company.

I have memories of different therapy words that my divorced parent and others used to disparage their exes in the 1990s. It’s an awful circle. Nobody can just have normal conflict.

Clarissa-Jan Lim wrote a great article which called it ‘Panopticontent’. That phrase lives in my head forever now.

And not for the better. I think people are actually much less kind to each other when they are aware of being observed. Or worse, deliberately performing for content.

What’s the potential consequence of using an out of date app?