Sven Slootweg @joepie91@pixie.town

@ifixcoinops "competence and frustration are not mutually exclusive"

Where's the magical switch that stops unqualified people from endlessly telling me "you are not going to achieve the results you want" when I have 15 years of evidence that my approach does, in fact, work

Primary offender (but not the only one): spurious claims about supposed 'human nature' that really are just someone's one-dimensional personal belief that they're projecting on everyone else.

Very little pisses me off as much as people refusing to acknowledge the nuanced complexity of the world, and using it to prop up a pessimistic view of others.

@mynameistillian At a small scale, yes, but the magic - for me, at least - was in the relative ubiquity of values like personalizability and agency.

Whether intentional or otherwise, it didn't really matter much what software you were using, you could assume that it would give you those things. You didn't have to specifically seek out software that provides it, and be the weird guy who used the thing nobody uses, so to say.

As an extremely mundane example: in the Windows 98 era, any kind of widely-used software with reasonable complexity was likely to let you rearrange the toolbars in the way that worked best for you. You didn't have to specifically use Dave's Highly Customizable Software Suite Community Edition for that.

I don't think I like computers anymore, because the magic is gone. Not in the sense that I've become disillusioned or anything, but rather because the magic has been taken away by a cocktail of influences that mostly revolves around capitalism.

They're not really personalizable anymore, everything must be in a perfectly 'professional' (read: deathly boring and homogeneous) style. Customizing and personalizing things is now a high-spoons time and energy investment, not a thing you do on a lark in a few minutes.

They don't really empower anymore, instead you are perpetually battling an ever-tightening net of scams, deceptions, data greed, enshittification, and good old exploitation.

They don't really emancipate anymore; the cliff between "those who use computers" and "those who make computers do things" is only becoming bigger, and nobody really seems interested in genuinely changing that, other than to 'make everyone a programmer' (usually with profit-minded purposes like labour cost reduction).

Every new system is more locked down than the last. It feels like anything you do still have control over is on borrowed time; until it gets replaced by something you don't control, which you will have no choice but to adopt (see: eg. companies and governments that require you to use Android/iOS apps).

What is the fun in computers anymore? Where's the magic, the wonder, the discovery? What "computers" are today, holistically speaking, has absolutely nothing to do with personal enjoyment or empowerment, and everything with being a tool of control, a tool of oppression.

Can that magic be brought back?

Responding to this by trying to re-litigate the allegations, when that wasn't the point of the post to begin with, is not how you gain trust with me. This apparently needs to be said.

If nothing else, the response in various communities to the ruckus at #38c3 (basically, a protest regarding CCC's poor response to sexual violence) is telling me a lot about which communities I should probably stop bothering with.

Soon, I'll be receiving a kidney transplantation. A kidney transplantation doesn't just mean that you get a new kidney - it also means that you will have to take immunosuppressive medication to prevent it from being rejected by your body as foreign matter.

How long will I have to take that medication? For the rest of my life, most likely.

Here are some of the consequences that immunosuppressive medication will likely have for me (not exhaustive):
1. I can no longer get vaccinations.
2. I can no longer attend events with high risk of infection - for me, that means eg. hacker events like Congress with no safety precautions, *especially* as long as COVID is a thing (which seems like it will be around for years to come).
3. There are certain medications for other health issues that I will never be able to take because of interactions.
4. I will be dependent on the *availability* of immunosuppressants for the rest of my life. If there is a shortage, there is a pretty good chance that I will die.
5. There are certain categories of foods that I will never be able to eat again; including grapefruits and adjacent fruits, smoked meats, and a couple of other things.
6. An assortment of different side-effects from the medication itself, ranging from mild to pretty serious.

The exact degree of some of these things will vary, depending on the needed dose I end up with.

But however it goes, this transplantation is a one-way street that means I will never have a 'worry-free life' again, from a health perspective, not even temporarily.