I miss the days of VHS and DVD shelfs in homes, for example. If you bought the tapes and had them in your home, no corporate entity could alter those tapes without your consent, monitor how many times you watch them, sell your data to whomever they please without your knowledge, roll out new mandatory conditions to a ‘user agreement,’ or remove them from your library if/when they like.

I noticed some dumb change in how Dictionary definitions are shown in the Spotlight (ie, overall search my computer function) in MacOS this week. I’ve turned off all auto-updates, and I didn’t make that change or consent to it. But despite paying the full price all by myself for this machine, I clearly don’t have 100% control over it. It seems very clearly to me that consumers having control and privacy over their Internet-connected devices is a bygone era.

After Blizzard, the video game company, replaced copies of Warcraft 3 that I and others had paid for in full and installed on our computers that we could play without connecting to the Internet with a lower-quality copy that prohibited offline play - I swore I’d never pay for a video game again*, and 3 years later I haven’t backslid on that. I felt so angry, cheated, and robbed by that. (*Edit: my criticism and frustration is really more with larger developers/companies/creators - I appreciate and am happy to support smaller, more independent and libre ones.)

Many people probably won’t be bothered by these things, but I am. I don’t want to pay full price for something that I don’t truly own. I miss the familiarity. I miss the reliability. I miss feeling like it’s mine. Dependable. Trustworthy.

Picking my old guitar up again has never looked so appealing. I think I want to go back to investing more time, money, and energy into things that aren’t connected to the internet

  • SkyNTP
    511·
    18 days ago

    Reject the temptations of short term convenience and adopt sustainable consumption.

    Demand ownership of goods. Demand offline-first.

    • JubilantJaguar@lemmy.world
      334·
      18 days ago

      IMO the “ownership” thing is a red herring. It has its roots in a specifically American obsession with private property.

      If everybody “demands ownership of goods”, that means we share nothing. Hardly a model of “sustainable consumption”. There are loads of examples of redundant private ownership of goods. My favorite stat: the average electric drill is used for 7 minutes in its entire life. All because every household in every building on every street must have its own one, instead of us finding a way to share them.

      In the context of digital “goods”, “ownership” really just means control. I wish we would use that word instead.

      • brbposting@sh.itjust.works
        12·
        18 days ago

        “How many of you own a power drill?” Rachel Botsman, the author of the book The Rise Of Collaborative Consumption, asked the audience at TedxSydney in 2010. Predictably, nearly everyone raised his or her hand. “That power drill will be used around 12 to 15 minutes in its entire lifetime,” Botsman continued with mock exasperation. “It’s kind of ridiculous, isn’t it? Because what you need is the hole, not the drill.”

        TIL

      • streetfestival@lemmy.caOPEnglish
        9·
        18 days ago

        Great points! Ownership, control, access, possession - these might apply differently to different things. I could see ownership being more relevant than other concepts in digital documentation of one’s genetic information, for example. I think a public library model (ie, access) would work pretty satisfactorily for entertainment media. Our language might have lagged behind the privacy, consumer, and legal concerns of today. My knowledge certainly has, but that can be changed ;)

      • Possibly linux@lemmy.zipEnglish
        41·
        18 days ago

        Ownership is control at the end of the day. If you can’t control something you generally can’t own something.

        I want to own something and control it fully. I don’t want backdoors.

      • Blisterexe@lemmy.zip
        15·
        18 days ago

        You can get games on gog, it let’s you download the game files and play it with no DRM and no launcher.

        And for the os part it sounds like you want Linux.

        • streetfestival@lemmy.caOPEnglish
          5·
          18 days ago

          I appreciate the rec’s! I did check out gog a bit a month or so ago and thought it did look refreshingly different

          • Blisterexe@lemmy.zip
            4·
            18 days ago

            yeah gog is cool, also, if you do want to have your OS do the things you want it to do, you should use linux, i could help you switch if you do decide to

            • streetfestival@lemmy.caOPEnglish
              4·
              18 days ago

              Thank you very much, kind Lemmy! I think it makes sense for me to postpone that a bit due to other things going on at the moment. But it was really helpful to vent and to hear words of empathy and support from people like you :)