What's sad is even if you retreat to retro computing/gaming or only listen to old music, you'll likely still run into people online or at meet-ups vibe coding, making ai remixes of songs or generating music videos. Not even the old stuff is safe unless you do it offline by yourself. So you go out and try to find like-minded individuals and these spaces are still infiltrated and tainted. It reminds me a bit of radiation, how everything was just tainted decades ago, they have to salvage low background steel from sunken ships to make Geiger counters because everything else is irradiated.

I still use IRC on the daily, but someone mentions Discord at least once a month on there, and sometimes tries to whisk people away to that side. There are also people hooking up LLMs to IRC bots and joining them to channels without permission, then when you complain or kick/ban their bot you're somehow treated as the rude one. It's very hard to entirely get away from all the crap anymore.

I’d say it’s still possible in niche areas of the web. eg hn - clearly they have an agenda but it isn’t tracking you

So I’m not writing off tech as a whole just the adtech companies being a lost cause.

We are the standing reserve

I ditched my smartphone nearly 7 years ago now. I quit online gaming before that. I described it like this to the head of AI for the state of Montana: "I'm airgapping myself against how this technology will be abused."