Ask Lemmy

Honestly, you should just step away. Tech is best when it's viewed as a tool to achieve your goals, not as a goal in its own right.

IT Professional here.

I've been ready to burn it all down for about 20 years now.

Does anyone else feel this way? Have you found ways to reconnect with technology?

I've been stepping away slowly for a few years now. Back to low-tech and analog... and back to privacy/ownership/control. I don't plan on giving up on tech at all, I just put it back at its place which is one tool in my toolbox that contains many more. One tool that, I quickly realized, was not even the most essential (pen and paper would be, for me).

Reminds me of a joke I heard a few years ago.

The "Tech Enthusiast" : My whole home is rigged up with smart systems! I can control my AC and my lights from my phone from 1,000 miles away!

The Tech Engineer : the most recent piece of equipment I own in my home is a printer from 2003 and I keep a loaded gun next to it in case it makes a noise I don't recognize.

i self-host everything i reasonably can and im having the time of my life with it (i am special)

I just keep supporting open source and following the forks as needed. Otherwise, I'm self-hosting what I can and going lo-fi where I can't.

Also: !oldmanyellsatcloud@dubvee.org for all your "ranting about how modern tech sucks" needs.

I agree completely. And I've worked in tech for 20+ years.

I find myself doing more and more specifically to get away from using the internet. It has totally become a tracking service for corporations and marketing. It is frustrating, because it was paid for by the people to disseminate information. Yes, you can still get good information (like Wikipedia), but what are the tradeoffs now? Most of what I see are ads or clickbait or just outright AI slop. I'm so tired of the constant barrage of bullshit. Even ad blockers can only do so much.

So for me is isn't about getting away from tech, per se, but it is about getting away from the internet. In practice this restricts a lot, though some things are fine (I don't mind playing games, for example, even though I'm technically using the internet).

But definitely: I'll play local music files or put on a record instead of streaming anything. I'll read a book. I'll play a (single player) game. But don't make me go online.

And before you say it: yes, I also restrict my Lemmy usage.

I'm not going to give up, but I've really stagnated on upgrades over the past decade.

I used to get a new phone every year back when you could do that for $100 a year. Now I go five years between.

My last computer was built in 2012 and I used it until October 2024, and could have kept using it. It was fully upgraded and played all new games on high settings fine. That said, I'm extremely glad I did a new build in October 2024.

And then you have consoles. One has no exclusives and is dead, the other has two exclusives and is there, and the other is Nintendo and is expensive and has its own lineup issues, depending on who you ask.

Tech is stagnating hard and has been for a while. Buy the mid range or high end of what you can afford and acquire right now, and then sit on it for a decade.

billionaires own the means of communication

Billionaires own PieFed/Lemmy? Damn. Didn’t know that.

Ohhh you mean they own the shitty parts of the Internet? Yeah it’s simple, don’t use them.

So I’m asking myself: what’s the point? Why not just step away?

Video games are amazing and fascinatingly diverse!

Im stuck (deliberately) about the year 2010 ish tech wise.. People need automation to turn on a light switch, i long ago figured out how to open my curtains sans alexa as well.

Alas everything enshitifies.

Not completely, but more and more I find peace of mind in analog and offline spaces. Physical books feel better than e-books, a real bike is more fun than a Peleton (cheaper too), and cooking my own food is better than GrubHub.

I have an educational background in IT, but I've worked as a mechanic for most of my adult life. I'm a tool using primate. Tech is a tool. If a new tool improves on the old and makes life easier, I use it. If it doesn't, it's not worth having around. When your job is fixing things, "ain't broke, don't fix it" makes a lot of sense.

I'm not going to bend over backwards for tech that I don't need just because a rich CEO tells me it's revolutionary. I can flip a light switch, lock my doors, make a grocery list without the help of an AI fridge, and write my own emails.

Not in the slightest.

But, where I used to super interested in cutting-edge tech stuff, I'm now extremely jaded. I used to actively seek out news on new tech companies / projects because it genuinely felt like there were a lot of problems out there to be solved, and tech was solving those problems. These days it seems like tech often is the problem, and it's never going to be solved because they have the DMCA, Section 230, trillions of dollars, and the entire apparatus of the state ensuring that their shitty tech keeps getting in your way.

The thing is, I still like tech. I can't imagine living in a world without it. Whenever I see these memes about people wanting to become farmers it amazes me, because farming sucks. I don't like the great outdoors, the indoors is far greater. I can appreciate non-digital tech. An internal combustion engine is a really cool gadget, for example. And, I'm happy to do my own bike maintenance. But, real world things are greasy, loud, and inelegant. It amazes me when people claim to like record players instead of good quality digital media. It's amazing how record players work, but they're still terrible, outdated things that objectively produce a less accurate sound than a good digital file. I still prefer technology, preferably digital technology. I just don't like the stuff that makes up 95% of the Internet these days.

It sounds like you really feel the same way, because:

get a dumb phone

That's tech.

a CD player

Also tech.

check out books, movies, music, and games

I'm pretty sure any movies and music you check out from the library in 2025 will be digital, that's tech.

Have you found ways to reconnect with technology?

If you don't like it, don't reconnect. Become a farmer or a fisherman or whatever makes you happy. But, I'm not going to join you. I may be veering a lot more towards DIY tech, and offline things than I used to. But, to get me to abandon technology you'll have to pry it from my cold, dead hands.

My aggravation at the people who run big tech companies makes me more interested in hacking than ceding tech to them.

I think stepping back from a lot of specific tools is appropriate. I'm trying to de-Google, and I've left a lot of platforms. I also appreciate unnetworked things like physical media, and music and e-books on non-networked devices.

But leaving tech overall isn't appealing to me. I just recently started getting into mesh radio, for instance. It's dope stuff.

You do realize that a CD player, books, music, games etc are technology too right? Yes modern corpo tech is bullshit but that is not the fault of technology and there are alternatives to everything. Its a question of convenience. Do you want to be spoon fed with a pretty solution that gets marketed to everyone? Well you gonna have a bad time in the long run...

I've gone the other way with it. I feel galvanised to try and help the laymen break free from our digital prisons; attempting to migrate people to decentralisation as a concept; as in my eyes it's the only way we'll ever move out from under this technocratic structure we find ourselves stuck in.   

It's one hell of an uphill battle, but the hardest part (convincing others to try something new) is becoming easier just thanks to the rampant enshittification in every product. My driving force for most of it has been the desire to see my country break free from reliance on American tech; which if you know anything about the UK; it's an incredibly pie in the sky ambition... But I remain hopeful.   

My advice would be to learn (if you're not already familiar ofc) containerisation as a concept and spin up services that offer real alternatives to what people rely so heavily upon.  

The only way the world can escape the likes of Zuckerberg and Musk, is if people like me and you show them how to implement an alternative. 

Not give up on tech, but definitely refocus to resilient local solutions. And trying to minimize the harms of being always connected to the extent possible for living in society.

I look at it this way: me setting up little services for myself and my friends and family, tinkering with Linux and FOSS software, giving money to devs for software I host or use frequently and not corporations, are all ways I stand my digital ground against this "technoligarchy" we've found ourselves in.

Sure, one day they might come for my stuff. But that just means I've won.

I do sometimes, but I always try to recognize that this is EXACTLY how someone trying to bring you down wants you to feel. If basically nobody exists any more that practices and advertises a way that avoids the abuse, then the path will truly become dead until something radically changes. Until that moment, and not a moment later. And tricking you into apathy is just a very effective strategy to accelerate that.

I still remember getting into tech, and just constantly expanding my horizon with new tools and tutorials. Without those, I probably never would have gotten there, and would probably just have been like the rest. Knowing such people are out there looking for that spark, I want them to be able to find it too. Some things you must do without being able to know if it's working or not.

EDIT: Typo

In our local community we have been toying makimg our own meshnet. Like a bunch of houses with mesh net wifi. We may pull the trigger soon.

I started buying physical media again (in addition to data hoarding) because I don't like the idea of just "renting" everything and having some company decide to remove media from their catalog at any point.

Been buying books, manga, Blu-rays, DVDs, CDs, and records so I can enjoy things without the internet.

Hate the that AI is being shoved into everything as well without any ability to opt out. I'd rather just avoid using your product completely if that's the case.

The way I see it, tech itself is still okay as long as you pirate and heavily scrutinize the software you use for quality. I'm at the point where if software is written in JS/Python/Unity/etc or is oddly large (50+ MB) I stay far away. I don't give a single fuck if that offends anyone.

What I've given up on is social media. Even lemmy is fucking atrocious and 90% of its communities need to be blocked. Find a tiny forum that's been online for 30 years with 12 nerds on it and make that your home.

I've had similar thoughts these past two or three years but at least with my current life (family, work/studies, volunteering...) going offline isn't even close to feasible. But at least I have started to move more and more of my online life to FOSS services or smaller or European companies. Finally installed Linux last year, also thinking of dabbling in self-hosting some time in the near future.

But I'm pretty sure the next years will give us a kind of Neo-Luddite movement, because you're clearly not the only one fed up with modern digitlal tech.

Why try to reconnect? Everything you've listed is (more or less) true. If you'd rather not contribute to that shit pile, then don't. You don't need to be in control of a bunch of this stuff. If you'd like to opt out, then you should. It sounds like that would be more fulfilling to you.

It's hard to remember now, but you truly can just step away. I think about it sometimes. Not as a single deliberate act but as a gradient for the next few decades of my life, just like the gradient to this point in which tech became increasingly important...only in reverse. If you can quit social media, if you can go back to iPod/CD/records/radio/humming, if you can be content to share your thoughts in a journal or blog or letters to the editor instead of networked communities, if you can be happy with older cars that don't spy on you and add the safety / guidance features you need for a couple hundred bucks, if you can use a dumbphone and/or a landline, if you can read books and do art and build things and stare at the wall and go on walks and garden and visit with friends (etc.) instead of scrolling and clicking and Discord'ing...

...and on and on, you feel me? It doesn't have to be dramatic. It doesn't have to be baby-out-with-the-bathwater. It doesn't have to be all-encompassing and hardcore. It's just remembering, and learning to return to (where you need it), the fact that we all used to live without all this shit barnacled onto our attention spans and our wallets. We used to live without surveillance capitalism and constant notifications and screens and error messages and just...skinner box shit, you know? It wasn't perfect, but there were a lot of things that felt better...at least compared to the tech landscape of 2026. If you need to turn the dial down on some of this shit, just do it, and enjoy the journey.

I've deleted YouTube off my phone. I've also reinstalled it like three times in the past week. It's hard to break habits. But I find that when it isn't on my phone, I may listen to more music or NPR in the car; I may listen to an audiobook, but also, I am finding more and more that even these things are too overstimulating, because AirPods make it seem like you really should have headphones in at all times, even though you absolutely should not...and your entertainment (even mild stuff like instrumental music) is just often at odds with things that deserve your full attention like (debatably) work. I love a lot of content on YouTube but it's a firehose and it's never ending (just like all content on the Internet) and anymore it all just tires me out. It tires me out that it's in competition with real world considerations like work. It tires me out that I always feel like I'm missing out on things and I have to check to find out what they are and then figure out how I'm going to cram into my daily schedule catching up on them all. It tires me out that the algorithm so transparently thinks I just want the same ten themes ramrodded down my throat forever; it's insulting that the system thinks I'm that simple and easy to satisfy, you know? And so it's not that I'm anti-YouTube. It's that I'm anti-how-much-YouTube-has-become-embedded-in-my-schedule-and-my-consciousness.

I feel similarly about the Apple Music service and app. I don't want a playlist to curate my own tastes in a random order and serve them back to me as Heavy Rotation. Anymore I don't know what I want to listen to, I just feel like I should be listening to something. What kind of a way is that to feel about music? I'm trying to use my iPod more, and the wired headphones are more of a pain in the ass than I thought they were for the first 30 years of my life, and I can't do it all the time...I just can't. But that's okay. I'm at least in dialog with myself about when and why I want to do things like listen to music, or listen to music through a specific convenience device, instead of just moving automatically out of impulse and routine.

I could go on. I have typewriters. I don't use them for all or even most of my journaling and writing, but sometimes I need or want to slow down and hammer out my letters as deliberately as possible, in a medium that is not connected to the Internet or indeed anything that plugs into the wall at all. I'm trying to revisit anime and video games from the past and especially with the way computers and hardware manufacturers are heading in the age of AI (fuck your thin clients, Jeff Bezos), it's just a reminder that I've got more old, wonderful content to catch up on than I could ever know what to do with, and there is no reason to stress about whether I'm up to date on all the new stuff.

I'm just rambling now, but you know what I'm re-learning to enjoy lately? This goes back to YouTube, Music, headphones, all of it. Just silence. I think I mentioned it earlier. But just...silence. Or whatever is closest to silence. The sound of the cars driving down the road outside. The sound of the air intake for my central air system when it spins up and tries to keep my old house warm. The (horribly irritating) sound of my animals licking themselves. Not everything has to be "content". Not every moment has to be entertaining and informative. Good Christ, but I could stand to have less information coming into my perception all the fucking time, you know?

Just do what you gotta do for you. Don't apologize. Don't rationalize it. Don't get strangers on the Internet to sign off on it. If you gotta get off one service, ten services...if you need to see x% less screen illumination in the course of your day...if you need to redefine your relationship with any part of the technological world, it's your thing to do, and you've only got one life to live, so go ahead and experiment. I think a lot of us are re-learning that it's entirely within our control to do. We've just been so habituated that it's like flexing an atrophied muscle or bending a stiff joint. It doesn't feel good. Not right away. But you know it will, and probably sooner than you imagine.

Yeah im currently on a sabbatical and I dont think I will go back to working in tech.

But ive been working with it for 25 years in different roles. Im just tired of seeing the same thing being reinvented again and again under different names.

I dont feel excited about micro services or AI or blockchain. Its just more and more complexity all the time and its exhausting, not interesting.

Also the culture has changed. It used to be a fun profession for figuring out how to write the code to solve something. Now its telling agents what to do, and pressure to always work hard.

It wasnt like that before. The company needed your skills and they couldnt push or replace people very easily. Which meant they treated you well and didnt stress you.

It's OK to touch grass.

Accepte the grief. Then, turn it into rage and fuel the post cybercapitalist revolution.

And/or, connect to my Tor bridge. It somewhere here 👇 https://bridges.torproject.org/options

Also, yes to everything you said about the "analog" stuff. I'm all in. :) Too bad my country has removed 2G :( (except for it being insecure)

Finally, do not have tech as a main hobby. Make it a side project tops.

I felt this way over a decade ago when I first started working in IT. You see how the sausage is made kind of deal and don't want much to do with it. I love the internet and video games still, but I visit far less sites, with more privacy tools. I'm at the point where I might try Linux for gaming if not at least my workhorse PC that just browses and stores data.

Even open-source projects are being pulled under corporate influence (ex: Firefox adoption of AI).

It's open source... just fork it lol (or use a fork someone else already made)

get a dumb phone

Dumb phones have less privacy and security compared to Cheap Moto Phone + LineageOS

a CD player, and check out books, movies, music, and games from the library as my entertainment?

If you don't own a house that you intend to live in permanently, like if you are a renter for example, its much more painful to move when you have an entire bookshelf of stuff vs just a few hard drives that can fit in a backpack.

(Edit: Also, if you can get "free" stuff online... if you know what I mean... 😉)

Tech is here to stay, tech is not a bad thing, we should direct the effort to be "how do we retake control?"

The future is: FOSS, Open Hardware, etc...

Don't relinquish control and go amish.

Don't bring bow and arrows to a gunfight.

Not really, no. In fact, I feel that free and open source tech is the only means we have of fighting back against big tech corporations and technofeudalism.

I think about the fact that I can use tailscale (or headscale, or even a DIY wireguard mesh network) to create a WAN that allows me to log into my home server and access an entire collection of music, shows, games, utilities and projects that I care about from anywhere in the world and I realize that I actually don't have much use for the "world wide web" anymore outside of work, shopping and social media.

Corporate social media, I should add, is becoming increasingly useless as it fills up with more bots, slop, and unhinged people, making the importance of the fediverse and self-hostable FOSS alternatives that much more important. While it's not always easy to get people to move away from corporate social media, the first step towards a more healthy future for society is, at least, the existence of an alternative.

The web itself is poisoned.

Why do you need "the web" at all? What websites and services are you using on a daily basis?

For me it's mostly the fediverse, a little bit of browsing reddit (i no longer comment or participate), github/gitlab, youtube, youtube music, twitch, amazon and the occasional other online store.

I have a script running on my PC which "backs up" all of my favorite youtube videos and music. I clone interesting repos to my home gitlab. I'm weaning myself off of reddit more and more all the time. I use the *arrs to through a VPN to get access to shows that I want to watch. I play some online games, but mainly ones that work peer-to-peer or have self-hostable servers. Unlike most people, I have basically zero subscriptions.

Reddit is already garbage and gets full of more and more AI slop every day (i really only continue to check it out of addiction/habit, and only to read from a bigger pool of comments when some fucked up shit happens). The minute youtube becomes useless to me for discovering or acquiring new media, I'll be done with it. I only check twitch for the network effect of the few small streamers that I like there, and usually only once a day.

I don't find that I need a lot from the corporate internet anymore.

Browsers are turning into tracking engines.

The great thing about FOSS is that there will always be someone who rips out the AI slop and tracking shit, even if that person ends up being you.

Sites rely on manipulation and dark patterns. Social media is full of misinformation and ragebait.

Stop going to those sites.

It feels exhausting to route around a web that’s already been captured.

The part I don't understand is why you feel that the problems of the WWW are at all relevant to your WAN?

So Facebook, Reddit and Youtube are a disaster... but what implication does that have on your private technology stack?

Why not trade the illusion of digital control for actual peace, get a dumb phone, a CD player, and check out books, movies, music, and games from the library as my entertainment?

Sure why not? Nothing wrong with that...

But why not also take those things from the library, rip them into a digital format, and store them on your server?

The "internet" is certainly in a death spiral. But I'll be fine because I understand that technology isn't the enemy, large corporations are. FOSS technology belongs to the people and we can wield it for our own benefit without any corporate or government gatekeepers other than our ISP (and maybe not even them...).

I don't know if I've checked out of technology, I just only use the stuff I want. YouTube can be insidious for me but yeah unless it's for work I just do some hobby Linux or programming stuff. I prefer e-readers, I access lemmy over the web instead of an app, I mostly use my phone for it's GPS and communication.

But I get a lot more enjoyment from hanging out with my friends doing outside stuff. Why not get involved in the maker space, do electronics and stuff.

I have been stepping away, but I just love the good parts of tech too much. I still believe in the good it can do for my life and others. I do, like anyone, hate how it's been monopolized over time by solely profit-driven groups and interests. Unfortunately, that stuff is rewarded by society over genuinely useful applications.

I've found a threshold of usefulness with every piece of tech I have. Once I can identify that it's bullshitting and trying to make itself seem useful through manipulation (ex: Twitter, overpriced subscriptions), that's when I cut it off. Too many things that manipulate you and try to take your attention or money while providing little in return.

Other stuff like my self hosting solution, game consoles, etc. are set up in ways that are beneficial. It's not perfect, the AI industry will invade where they can, but I feel fortunate to be in a position where I am aware of ways I can have more control over my tech and therefore can dodge some of the predatory practices. Still though, sometimes I just give up on the endless YouTube videos and read a book instead. Full analog living isn't the way though.

I'm halfway there and not really sure if I want to go the full way. I left social media, bought a bluray player and borrow movies from the library on the regular. It's been a real bodning experience for me and my boyfriend. He even joins me on movie-hunts in the library now.

I have considered heavily to get a button phone as well, but I literally can't due to how the social system is set up in my country. It's all built around the idea that everybody has a smart phone.

My 2026 goal os to get back into reading more and start gardening now that we finally moved somewhere with a garden.

Since January of last year I have felt a lot of stress leave my body by leaving social media and canceling subscriptions for streaming services.

I have been considering taking the plunge into Linux as well and probably will do it eventually when I overcome the fear of fucking it up, but much like you, I have long since accepted that the part of the internet I liked and engaged with is long dead and gone and it will not come back either. I don't know what the death nail potentially will be for me to go off grid completely. I don't know. My job is heavily digital and built up around Apple and Google. Can't really escape it there, which is fine. But at home, I'm slowly inching toward a more unplugged existence and I really like living like that.