Libb

Nicholas: Once the system is in place you cannot go back

100%.

Same goes with Digital Euro btw, no matter what the EU says about making it optional. It will be, sure, to begin with but they will also start pushing even more laws to help get rid of cash (in France, we’re already forbidden to carry more than a thousand euros in cash, I think it’s 500 in Greece (not sure about this one). And when cash will be gone so will be our ability to not be tracked when buying stuff. They will monitor every single of our transactions—and penalize whatever they decide is not good for us/the country/the planet/their businesses, be it too purchasing much gas, too much food (because one needs to be fit, unless they agree to not benefit health assurance maybe), too much clothes, or whatever (to just list a few legal things one can buy nowadays). They will also quickly use their (monopolistic) control over that digital euro (and over all our bank accounts) to punish any serious opposing their rules/laws by making said opponents unable to access or, say, to just use their money to buy stuff that would help them organize and contest them. “Sorry, Libb your purchase of Orwell’s ‘1984’ and Huxley’s ‘Brave New World’ can’t be finalized. Instead, you can always scroll some more on social media. Have a nice day.”

What a bright future.

That’s cool too. Like I said I was into ebooks too but decided to shift away for two reasons: privacy & ownership.

I have a small library of my favourite books. I have just started to re-read

Re-reading can be magic. Won’t work all the time but when it does… I fear many readers won’t ever try that.

I think thats called autonomy

I prefer to call this a lifelong allergy to noise. Something I’ve been allergic to since I was a young kid.

It doesn’t mean I hate music or that I can only be happy surrounded by silence, quite the contrary I love music. It just is an allergy to those very specific kind of noise that are devised to prevent you from using your brain and that try to have you always react wit your guts instead.

Exactly like with TV and ads, most politics, most social media and, sadly, most traditional media too. It’s something learned by growing surrounded by a few adults that were in constant anger. Realizing I wanted to never be like that.

Thank you

Thanks for sharing your own experience, it’s great to hear a similar one :)

Have we really forgotten how to press a buttons, twiddle a knob and actually think.

In our home, we have an on/off switch, the kind one actually needs to move their ass to in order to be able to press it, for our electricity and light bulbs. Our fridge does cold and that’s it. It also don’t need no WiFI and never needed any update. Toilets are flushing water just fine with the press of a button, no WiFi required either. Our heaters do… heat when we turn them on (so much work!). Our coffee pot is just that, a coffee pot that’s using good old coffee we dose with a spoon with hot water on top of it, exactly like we do with tea just in a different pot. Our washing machine washes the laundry after the turn of two buttons (thinking about it, maybe I should file for extra-hours for all that work?). We don’t own a dishwasher because most of the time there is only the two of us worth of dishes to wash and I kinda enjoy washing them by hand while I let my mind wander (often get my best ideas like that, like when I’m under the shower). Oh, almost forgot, our doorbell is just that: a doorbell with no WiFi, no camera, no cop to ask to see the footage, no cloud subscription, and no hackers.

And that’s kinda the same with our not so smartphones: no app installed beside the few ones we really need access to (bank, security and shit like that), no social media apps, no email, no games, no Netflix, or the likes (we have quit subscribing to all those ‘services’ a few years ago, moving back to physically owned media). And for our TV, well, we don’t own a smart TV, as a matter of fact we own no TV at all since we’ve decided some 25 years ago that we wanted not to pay good money while still be forced to watch ads (anyone noticing a parallel with what streaming services have started doing in recent years?).

Our books are physical books. And that was the last digital bastion in our home, as I had been almost exclusively reading ebooks for decades, out of convenience, but realizing how we did not truly own them and how they tracked our reading habits, it’s back to print.

In summary: there is a loft of dumbness going on in hour home which suits both my spouse and I, I’m (not) afraid to say so ;)