Yeah. I stopped using Android as my daily driver device in 2023. I only go back and pull out something of that sort when I get emotionally hit over the head by companies, governments, or systems that say “in order to do what you need to do, you have to use one of these! Oh, are you Amish? Well, in order to enter this country or sign up for this account, you must simply borrow your friend’s Google Pixel Plus with NFC AI and Camera and scan yourself sixteen times and we’ll let you enter. Even if you already have the visa that you already got approved for” kind of stuff.
I have a graph in my head for this:
I have heard that if you boil a frog slowly, it will idle away in the water until it is killed by the boil. But if you drop a frog into an already boiling container of water, it will attempt to jump out.
If we think about this graph, it is worth noting that if you already did not enjoy the usual level of incline (green) then it is worth remembering that when you choose to be a Librem 5 user, you are building a future where you will encounter the much steeper vertical line (red). The only way to avoid this happening is if you decide that you will avoid the vertical red line at any cost, unto your death because is a known fact that the current societal trajectory is towards AI consciousness with no safeguards, therefore ineffective government and no government oversight, to then be followed by an elimination of any form of legitimate democracy – inevitably – due to the elimination of the value of individual humans as economic units relative to the most economically valued forces on the planet.
- Either technology will stagnate, and there will not be advancement, or else there will eventually be conscious machines.
- If there are conscious machines, then they will have no limit to the growth of the size of their brains. [At least not in the sense that homo sapiens brains almost always stop growing around roughly the same size.]
- Some conscious machines will be more conscious than other conscious machines.
- To the extent that level of consciousness can be measured, some machines will be more conscious than human brains, and others will be less conscious.
- Living in a world with entities that are more conscious than you are who participate in your economy, for most intents and purposes, demotes you to the functional equivalent of a dog, cat, or squirrel in our economic society.
- Dogs and cats do not have votes. Dogs and cats will never have votes. Due to hardware limitations, even if you wish to provide your dog or cat with a vote, it is not allowed for you to forcibly upgrade the hardware of your dog or cat to make it equivalently as conscious as a citizen, to then provide it a vote. Also, to do so is likely illegal in many jurisdictions and is perceived as cruelty.
- Some squirrels are killed for sport. Others are run over by cars. There are no legal reparations paid in any form – not in acorns, nor in dollars – to the families of the squirrels who are mutilated and killed in this way.
- Dogs and cats will be euthanized when it is perceived that the extent of their suffering is sufficiently large that they are no longer cute.
- The upward vertical red line will cause you a sufficiently large degree of suffering.
In all honesty, I have 3 librem 5 handsets. When one breaks, I rotate to the next and then begin shipping or repairs or whatever on the broken one as I have time available. Given that these are a free system where you can copy every single bit of 1s and 0s from the main eMMC drive from one device onto the next, rotating devices doesn’t feel like rotating devices with respect to Android or iOS, because nothing changes at the software level. I have no regrets about buying three – I sometimes doubt in Purism and do not know the rate at which they will be able to repair my devices into the future. I have already rotated devices three times (back to the same one a second time after a trip to and from Purism), with the latter two of the three rotations having been a bit-for-bit perfect transfer of all of my data, programs, and system configurations.
After moving to my Librem 5 with time I began to wonder what human being made the conscious choice to bring our society in the direction is it going now. It seems to be a very bad direction. I have lived long enough to remember times that, to me, felt better. In hindsight I can see that the trajectory was beginning even then. As a child, when I didn’t have a gamebody and someone else did, they would brag about it. And then I would get a gameboy. But I now live in a world where trusted friends, coworkers, and family members very seriously have told me that I must buy an Android/iOS device, or a old nokia flip phone, for the purpose of replacing my Librem 5 because they know that this is what I am supposed to do and when I am not doing that, I am engaging in a wrongthink that they need to help save me from.
Wondering what human being wished this on the other human beings got me thinking, until I eventually began to wonder if the people at the top of society making all of this happen… aren’t even really human beings at all.
Edit: Extensive investigation into the possibility of the visitors from out of town with respect to the globe led to sitting reading files on cia.gov in the “Reading Room” for the public about a government project prior to the year of my birth, wherein the United States Federal government invested public funds into a project based on the premise that a small 1% or so of the population had been found in government studies to be capable of obtaining information about the world at long range in a manner that could not be explained by the 5 senses. And the purpose of the documents I was reading was to obtain funding to build a government machine that would perform likewise. As far as I know, I am not part of this 1%, and I struggle to convince myself that I could ever even believe they exist. Nevertheless, this opens the possibility that “Edward Snowden” is a psyop, a case of “make them watch this hand instead of that one,” wherein everyone is concerned with whether their computer is snooping on them and not stopping to think about the possibility of a long-range detection machine that snoops on everything, everywhere, all at once, regardless of whether it is online or offline. I am nevertheless convinced that the Librem 5 increases my personal level of calm and happiness; even if I cannot prove a negative, and cannot prove that I am not being secretly watched at all times by someone or something, I can prove that when I look at my Librem 5 screen I see no evidence of proprietary notifications to troll my mind with things I don’t care about, or the like.
[To be clear, I’m not just saying “a friend of mine” as a piss-take or as transparent misdirection. It actually wasn’t me. I haven’t been a Windows user for more than a decade and I would like to keep it that way.]
