I've always had good experiences with maintaining my machines.  I mean I won't pretend I haven't had issues with them from time to time; either hardware related (like those bad usb-c cables), or software related, but in general, they serve me well and they serve me for a looooooong time.  My laptop is from around 2012 (same as my car...) and it's still carrying on just fine.  Admittedly I don't use it on a daily basis, but it's still running peppy as it can be and I still run all of my mac/iOS Rhythm Quest builds on it.

I've wondered at times what goes into it; like why do I seem to have friends who always talk about needing to replace their laptop that's taken a turn for the worse, or all that stuff.  Not even thinking about the older folks who have a billion shortcuts on their desktop and antivirus nags and all that, I mean my peers who are (ostensibly) just doing normal things (??).  Maybe even using their phones more than their computers at this point, who knows?

I thought back on this as I read a blog post the other day about how the ceaseless need for growth and short-term capitalistic shareholder profits has led everything everywhere in software and on the internet to devolve into a shoddy mess of predatory applications and systems that are all out to garner your engagement at the cost of pretty much everything else, including functionality and user experience.

I think there's been a sneaky, easy-to-miss shift in the space where before, you could keep yourself "safe" if you just knew what to avoid.  You know, don't click suspicious links, don't open spam emails, don't go looking to download those .exe files that claim to be "free photoshop" downloaded from a sketchy domain.  If you got a ton of popups and advertisements cropping up on your screen, it's probably because you were visiting some XXX site or clicked on some fake "download" button, yeah?

At some point things evolved and the predatory agents, adware, malware, intrusiveness started leaking into other parts of the ecosystem.  When you installed genuinely useful programs, they started asking if you wanted to also install this "free offer" to add "Ask Toolbar" to your system.  When you wanted to play your favorite game you had to do it through an online "launcher" program that showed you ads while it was patching your client.

Ironically enough, antivirus software was one of the first culprits I saw starting to become more and more intrusive.  "Overdue for scan now!" I saw it prompting on someone else's system.  Along with a big docked icon that prominently displayed its name on the taskbar.  You know, kinda like a big ad banner.

We began to see advertisements in new ways.  Not just banner ads that we scrolled through on sites, but now free mobile games had clickthrough ads.  Before long enough YouTube started introducing mandatory video ads, bringing us back to what we thought we'd escaped when we migrated off of cable TV.

But the thing is, things have shifted further and further now.  The predatory agents aren't "on the outside" anymore, they're literally bundled together with your system.  "Want to install Cortana from the Windows Store?" your system would ask.  "Sign in to unlock Windows".  It's not enough that I forked over however-many-hundred-dollars for this machine, of =course= it's not.  Apple wants me to register my email with them, so I can be engaged with their services.  Because they're not done with you once you buy their product.  No no no, that's just the beginning.  Use our cloud storage, use our payment system.  Sign up for a family plan!

Do you get what I'm saying?  The advertisements aren't from spyware or malware or some nefarious fake program you downloaded from a shady corner of the internet.  They are part of your =operating system=.  They're part of the service that you're using.

It's a different ballgame now.  The scale keeps on shifting and yet we keep on walking downhill, beholden to these services and applications, because "oh, that's just the way it is".  Is it really, though?  If you asked yourself in 2000, whether it would make sense to stop your music every 15 minutes to force you to listen to an ad, what do you think they'd say?  Do you think they'd pay $12 every month to stop those ads, or would they just look at you incredulously, because we already had a culture back then where we had 500 hand-curated DRM-free MP3s at our fingertips?

Your dating apps are engineered for engagement, gating interactions behind microtransactions.  Your code editor prompts you to try installing their AI solution.  =Google search=, supposedly the pioneer of featuring a clean "no-nonsense" interface, now shows you "helpful AI query answers" along with sponsored advertisements as the first few results.

It's not stopping here, either.  Nothing in your life is immune, not if they can help it.  Your car will show you recommendations for "trending restaurants" in your area.  When your internet service goes out, you'll still get ads while you navigate through Comcast's customer self-service flow.

There is a sort of arms-race going on and a lot of the time I take it for granted what it actually takes to stay ahead of the curve.  The last time I installed Windows 10 it was the LTSC version, which is "designed for specialized devices that require stability and minimal updates, such as kiosks and medical equipment."  I block and filter more and more content that websites try to throw at me.  I have more and more open-source solutions.

Sometimes you feel a bit of a culture shock moment if you're someone who regularly uses an ad blocker and then you go to or witness a setup that doesn't have any such thing.  All of a sudden you realize that there are people who are just living in a whole different experience than you are.

"And if I haven’t made it completely clear, this means that millions of people are likely using a laptop that’s burdensomely slow, and full of targeted advertisements and content baked into the operating system in a way that’s either impossible or difficult to remove. For millions of people — and it really could be tens of millions considering the ubiquity of these laptops in eCommerce stores alone — the experience of using the computer is both actively exploitative and incredibly slow. Even loading up MSN.com — the very first page you see when you open a web browser — immediately hits you with ads for eBay, QVC and QuickBooks, with icons that sometimes simply don’t load. "

I'm struggling to put into words any sort of big takeaway from all of these feelings and such, other than to be cognizant of how the digital world is these days and how different of an experience it can or can't be based on the way you navigate it.

You know those movie scenes where it shows some super-savy independent-yet-scruffy protagonist skillfully navigating the perils of some local outdoor market as you see countless tourists and unsuspecting victims get scammed, ripped off, or even pickpocketed?  Yeah.  That's sort of the image I want you to frame your interactions with the digital world from.  There are those who are actively getting totally conned, and there are those that are kind of passively getting ripped off because they just shrug and say "this is just how it is".  But then there are those people who understand that the corporations vendors are really out there to monetize and scam you and know how to "play the game", so to speak.

The more of your life you spend online the more important I feel like this sort of thing becomes.  I had a good friend who kept on complaining that they had way too many email subscriptions and notifications coming into their email inbox every day and I asked them "Do you ever bother just unsubscribing yourself using the link at the bottom of those messages?"  And they just blinked at me because this was just a totally new concept for them and they didn't realize that it was even a common practice to include something like that with an email.  Now, I'm not saying that that's the answer to everything (you can just use a disposable email address when you can get away with it), but it just goes to show you, right?

So just remember, the next time that you tell your friend to use Spotify to find music, or that they should try using dating apps because "that's how people do it these days" -- that all of these digital spaces are out to increase the time you spend on them at all costs, including actively getting in the way of what you were actually there to accomplish.

Looking at it again, I guess maybe all I did was poorly rehash the article that I linked to.

"In other words, internet users are perpetually thrown into a tornado of different corporate incentives, and the less economically stable or technologically savvy you are, the more likely you are to be at the mercy of them. Every experience is different, wants something, wants you to do something, and the less people know about why the more likely they are to — with good intentions — follow the paths laid out in front of them with little regard for what might be happening, in the same way people happily watch the same TV shows or listen to the same radio stations. 

Even if you’re technologically savvy, you’re still dealing with these problems — fresh installs of Windows on new laptops, avoiding certain websites because you’ve learned what the dodgy ones look like, not interacting with random people in your DMs because you know what a spam bot looks like, and so on. It’s not that you’re immune. It’s that you’re instinctually ducking and weaving around an internet and digital ecosystem that continually tries to interrupt you, batting away pop-ups and silencing notifications knowing that they want something from you — and I need you to realize that most people are not like you and are actively victimized by the tech ecosystem."

I'm probably (hopefully) just being cynical here, but the whole idea of "growth and increased engagements at all costs" (including making an inferior product) really gets hammered home when I think about just how many things you can attribute to it.  Why did your favorite website get a horrible redesign that made everything unintuitive?  Because they need to do something new to bring up their metrics.  Why did DDR World ship with terrible menu navigation?  Why did Link's Awakening get remade with the worse color schemes than on the original Game Boy?  Why do we keep getting shitty remakes of old games?  Is it to foster more artificial engagement with the same thing for longer?  Why did ThatGameCompany go from creating Journey to creating Sky, a game whose fans complain about constantly being prompted by limited-time events and cosmetics to grind for currency?  Isn't it obvious?

This is why we have such a strong contingent of people who enjoy playing old games -- it's because, despite everything, they're just better a lot of the time.  Or even when they aren't, they're at least free of this sort of stuff.

Save everything you can, because it's all going to go downhill, whether you like it or not.  That version of you from 2000 didn't think that they'd be watching mandatory ads in order to watch SOMEBODY ELSE play a video game (twitch), or listening to audio ads to listen to music (spotify), or paying money in order to MAYBE chat online with someone who may or may not be human (dating apps), but here we are.

Your cloud storage will play an ad for you as it fetches your data.  Your VR games will make you watch 3D ads before you can keep playing.  Uber's new rider agreement will have a clause where you agree to listen to your driver pitch you on various products.  Your generative AI pornography will offer you microtransactions.  Your flashlight will come with a phone app asking you to register with your email in order to unlock full integration.  And perhaps all the while you'll just say "that's just how it is".