It feels like all the joy I used to feel from being an enthusiast has been completely voided as computing has become the modern vector for fascism and surveillance. I find myself recoiling from all online spaces, even independent and open source ones that I’d loved and supported in the past.
It’s been an exceptionally strange impulse to go from having an elaborate online presence to now feeling like the only acceptable way to engage with the network is to have as minimal of an online footprint as possible.
This especially hurts when it feels like an issue of skilling, where I know how to do certain tasks with computers, but have to teach myself for the first time the analogue alternatives that my parents and their parents likely already knew well.
How have you chosen to deal with it? Do you find yourself moving away from computing and the internet, despite formerly loving it as a hobby? Have you replaced things that computers used to do for you with analogue replacements?
I’m curious how other people are experiencing this.
Personally, I think local AI will make computing far greater than it ever was. You can use it to recreate niche software like Stars!, you can play tabletop D&D without having to deal with human issues like scheduling or infighting, you can have original software created to do whatever you need, you can have manga from the 80’s fully colorized.
There are many possibilities, and it is one of the few things for me to look forward to as I get older. As someone without friends nor enough wealth to explore the world, a home AI server will be the closest that I can get to having genuine autonomy and happiness in my life.
Who’s going to train those models and with whose data?
I am opposed to IP copyright, so just about any published work would be fine by me. Ditto for public discourse, be it open chat rooms, Reddit, Lemmy, Youtube comments, or Twitch. Private things, such as personal medical records, diaries, and so forth shouldn’t be trained on.
As to who: ideally, government with public consent and money. For example, Switzerland’s Apertus, as an open model that can be free to be used by the public.
Currently, most local users of AI rely on corporately open weights, like Qwen3.6. This isn’t ideal, as companies will retract their offerings at whim, and aren’t working for the public interest in the first place.
How does this even work? Why would any creative person willingly feed the very same tools that are being used by companies as an excuse to lay off thousands of workers? If anything, this kind of policy would push people to ask for increased copyright protections.
Also, in this scenario, we would be handing both private corporations and governments our labor.