Not attacking you personally, but it's important to keep this stuff in mind when we make choices as customers. Consumers are cattle. Don't be like cattle. Use your money for good.
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The difference between you and North Korea is that nobody is holding a gun to your head forcing you to buy phones you can't root.
Which means that it is very likely that you volunteered for it. Unless somebody else paid for it, like work. Then that is their problem. I still recommend buying your own phone.
Why did you do that?
Is it because the phone is a particular brand that is fashionable and you want that to reflect on you when you use the phone around other people? Is it because it is cheaper to buy because the phone company subsidizes the phone in order to sell you spyware you can't get rid of and to lock in reliable monthly payments from you?
There are lots of reasons people do this. Maybe it's just ignorance. Maybe they tell themselves they don't have anything to hide. Maybe having control over the things in they own seems like too much work or too intimidating.
Because it is extremely likely you actually had a choice and your choice was to sell your freedom in exchange for shiny baubles.
You didn't have to do that. And you don't have to continue to do that. You have a choice. You have the power. You really do.
This is important because you have the chance to financially reward people that want to preserve your freedom or you can financially reward people that take it away.
This is the power you have. It is more democratic than voting. It also matters much more.
> nobody is holding a gun to your head forcing you to buy phones you can't root
The DMCA (and to a lesser extent, CFAA) is routinely abused by software & hardware manufacturers to prevent people from taking control of their own devices, and if you do it at a large scale then you will eventually end up with a gun to your head.
Regulations are short term /high friction solutions even if you had good ones, sooner or later big companies will work around them/regulatory capture , change will only come if people show it by what they buy .
Vote with your pocket , there are phones like fairphone [1] which makes right to repair a central part of their design .
Even if people don’t know or care about right to repair a lot of people care about sustainability , you can’t have one sustainable credentials with unrepairable phones like Apple keeps marketing.
Help others in your life make that informed choice .
We need regulations, and more so constitutionalism, to set boundaries for the free market economy in favor of humanitarianism, environmentalism and liberalism, or those who vote with their pocket will vote us all back into feudalism by selling their vote to their oppressors for short term tangible benefits.
And they looked from their windows at the angry masses and asked: "What do they want?" - "Well they are unhappy that Disney only streams to certified firmware, that banking apps don't work on rooted systems, and that their devices report to the secret police" - "I don't understand" - "They say their bread is moldy and rotten" - "Then why don't they eat cake?"
Supporting ethical companies is a good thing and you should totally do that. But i doubt the emergence of surveillance capitalism can be solved by that alone. By no means stop advocating for it, it does bring change, but some business and government practices must be regulated. And some existing regulation must be changed to favor humans instead of corporations and government agencies.
Note the thread is not about a "right to repair" but a "right to repair democracy"
I mean otoh the market only offers so much choice and often established producers work to make it more difficult for up and comers to themselves be established. We are infact often cattle whose choices are limited to merely where we can stand within a tightly controlled field of very limited size, especially when many of these tools we are reliant upon in modern life can no longer be practically made in the home.
> We are infact often cattle whose choices are limited to merely where we can stand within a tightly controlled field of very limited size
We are if we limit ourselves to act only as individual consumers. But if we act as a collective of citizens, we can compel companies to offer the choices we want.
As long as there is mass media the collective's voice is usually drowned out by the companies interests anyhow. Advertising is too effective to sway public opinion on any topic and just throwing more money works too well. Grassroots efforts are stomped before they are allowed to take flight, unfortunately. There is too much intertia to meaningfully change the status quo in a lot of ways. This is why its better to derive your happiness from other things than the state of the world.
Most people can't be experts at most things. That's how specialization works.
It's easy to blame consumerism and people being dumb when you look at a single market, but there are hundreds of markets and in the other 99 we're the dumb ones.
> your choice was to sell your freedom in exchange for shiny baubles.
Actually, my choice was that Apple engineers with teams, budgets, etc. and a mandate to protect my privacy will do a better job initially and certainly a better job with updates, than I would installing a collection of OSS software on a rooted Android phone. I mean, most people, if they care at all, slam umatrix as an add on with the default lists and call it a day. It's the same outsourcing, but to volunteers.
> This is the power you have. It is more democratic than voting.
I don't know about you, but I only stopped by physical keyboard having phones when the stopped selling them. You can look at dumb TVs, dumb cars, and a lot of other examples where they just don't make some options anymore. I mean, sure I can buy ethically, and try to, but I don't convince myself my money is the make and break difference. Hell, if you look at my purchase habits, you'll see I frequently am on the losing side.
Also, it's kinda bizarre to claim that the free market is more democratic than voting, since voting is the gold standard of democracy.
And I looked down at my phone.
And I made myself sad.