Why I've gone from a tech enthusiast to a luddite
Growing up I was always obsessed with tech. Computers and video games and various gadgets. I used to read the Sharper Image magazine just for fun to see what kind of new gadgets and gizmos they were selling. I had a very privileged upper-middle-class childhood, and owned a lot of cool tech too. Atari. Game Gear. Talkboy. PS1. Game Cube. Game Boy. (yeah its a lot of video gaming stuff) I had a very very early version of what would later be referred to as a PDA (Personal Digital Assistant) . I had one of the very earliest MP3 players from Rio that couldn't even hold an entire album. My father owned a business and would bring home broken computers (they had sensitive files) and I would figure out what was wrong with them and Frankenstein them back together.
These days I'm basically a Luddite. I don't want anything to do with almost any new tech. Why? Back in the early days tech was meant to make your life better and work for you. Today tech works against you. Collecting data about you to sell to databrokers. Cameras absolutely everywhere filming everyone around you and aggregating it into a more and more centralized database in order to move closer and closer to what was dystopian only just a few years ago. App and cloud dependencies that rope you into completely unnecessary ongoing fees in the form of subscriptions. Our TVs have become billboards. Our communication devices have become tracking devices. Devices are arbitrarily limited in capability and their lives are made increasingly and intentionally finite. They spend an exorbitant amount of money to extoll their "green" views on decarbonizing but then turn around and make this disposable garbage. Realistically any one electronic device is capable of so many different things but often you'll find the middle-class house to be full of dozens of redundant hardware because their capabilities are artificially limited.
The exceptions are basically computers with which I can install Linux, and little projects from the hacker community. This is why I'm such a big fan of the Steam Deck and also very excited for their new hardware lineup.
Communications with friends and family have been displaced by social media. Much like tech, I actually really like social media, but what it has become its just horrendous, and it's become normalized to the extent that every platform more or less does it the same way. I've extricated myself from those platforms and am now a pariah. I can't even find public events anymore because they're simply not listed anywhere outside of social media. All promotion of anything I may want to participate in is shared on social media. And this is not a technical problem. There are dozens of platforms that are more or less "free" but...good luck getting anyone to use them.
I've grown resentful of the entirety of humanity for this reason. Because no one cares about themselves, there are little to no options for those of us who do. We're forced to either be complicit in the tech surveillance oligopoly or ostracize ourselves from society. Well, I've chosen the latter.