I think it’s easier when as an elder we saw the stages of the internet. We built it. We know it does not have to be like this but big tech has seduced a lot of people with convenience and they pay for that with their money, their autonomy and their privacy.

We know there is a credible choice it just takes some effort and some critical thinking.

I have never seen the need to utilize every tech trend going nor embrace my life overtaken by app after app…but I like to keep my control close.

I certainly agree we have two versions of ourselves a real one and a virtual one, and a lot of people can’t distinguish between them or when the crossover happened.

What can you do?

-Become more analogue, pick up some cds from the charity shop, don’t skip, learn to listen and dance again.
-Remind people of the happiness they can find offline.
-Support indie movements and tech rather than commercialised products.
-Buy less so you don’t keep pouring into the pockets of the rich…to use against you.
-Teach your young ones about control of their tech and how to regain privacy.

Please feel free to add to this list. It’s good to have suggestions.

Have you considered teaching? People will need these skills moving forward. Change can start with education.

It’s the way forward, and a somewhat comfortable one at that for people who would rather start a homelab than talking to random humans (including myself). Internet is bound to be corrupt because of it’s inherent lawlessness and political power through mass propaganda. I would advocate for a ban of centralised social media, but that would only be a temporary solution since bots and trolls creep everywhere and communities online might still have a hard time surviving.

But to fight against the shit flooding, it’s hard to see how you’d do without meatspace option and evidently (as dumb as it may sound) you might want to get involved actively into associations or political activities around you. The high individuality (by that I meant the social atomisation) of the US is why it’s been so susceptible to false information and the far right online propaganda. Real life social fabric is what makes resilience against trolls and AI, and ultimately you’ll only be able to fight the root cause when you’ll be free of that dictator of yours.

So I am with you, and it’s hard to see at first but you’re not alone thinking like you do and finding groups around where you live to talk and think together is the best thing that can be recommended to anyone.

Teaching like another comment says would be such an option to consider.

Sorry, I just noticed your reply. I think you were replying to my other comment, right?

I’m 24, unemployed, job searching in tech. Most employers require LinkedIn, GitHub, email. My actual community - the people I game with, the friends who get me - are scattered across the continent

I’m aware of how intricate everything is, even more so for people your age. And it seems obvious it will be even worse for the next generation.

Your cross-referencing and source verification advice is solid, but it requires people to first recognize they’re in an algorithmic environment

Not really, what it requires is to accept that not a single source not even the ones we agree with should be treated differently. All sources must be double-checked. This requires a little effort most of us are just not willing to do. Much simpler and quicker to Boost or to Like that message we just read.

I hear you on offline community being the real answer. But for those of us who can’t or won’t fully disconnect, reducing the attack surface and building privacy-respecting alternatives feels like the next best thing.

Sorry, it seems I have not made my point clear enough.

The solution is certainly not to move back to offline or to stone-age like tools. But the solution is also not in thinking that some new or different type of tech will be the solution. To me, that is falling from one trap to the next. In French, we would say “tomber de Charybde en Scylla”.

Blind faith in tech put us in that dire situation. Tech won’t get us out of it.

The solution needs to include both online/high-tech and offline, low-tech and even no-tech. It needs to encourage us to rekindle our interest for IRL communities and activities, to care about our surrounding and the people around us. Even if they do not share the same interest and ideas as us.

That solution needs to focus on us, not on the tech itself.

Like educating children never was about having them do homework or get good grades (that’s a by-product) or it should not have mattered ever _provided teachers were still taught how to properly educate kids. Obsessing over the homework (and the grade) like obsessing with tech being the solution is most probably a mistake. Education is about transmitting a certain knowledge and a certain know-how to the kids (the ability to rely on themselves, for example).

I remember, years ago, reading an interview of the late Steve jobs in which he explained he and his spouse refused to allow their kids unlimited use an iPhone/iPad at home and they would not even use one themselves, and that it was forbidden to being a phone/tablet at the dining table, no TV either. They wanted them to have activities and conversations, with other kids, with the family and they wanted them to have time by themselves. Steve Jobs probably knew a thing or two about those high-tech device, right?
(For the very, very young among us, it may be worth mentioning Steve Jobs was the co-founder of Apple and the one who introduced the Mac computer (1984), the iPod (~2000}, the iPhone (2007) and the iPad (2010) among a few other similar piece of tech that no ones cares about)

Alberta doesn’t exactly have the densest scene for the communities I’m part of.

I can’t argue on that but I can make a remark: how many people do live in Alberta and how many do you think would there need to be for you to able to meet one you may find interesting to date? And then, why do you think your potential next partner needs to share the same interests as you?

(my spouse is writing computer code, she is kinda good at it while before I met her I had never considered even writing a simple script to automate the boring repetitive tasks I liked to complain about. We’re as different as night and day, and not just on that point, but we also managed to find each other and it has been going fine for 25+ years and counting, being different together is great ;)

All I will say about dating today (at least what I can witness of it as, if I don’t really obsess about dating young women myself, I’m still able to see what’s going on) is that contemporary dating looks like a full time job, with business-like expectations. Heck, it’s even treated like a marketplace with offer and demand! And I think you, I don’t mean you I mean all of you young people, you should all stop running around like headless chicken (you would realize you’re running like them, if you stopped long enough to look around) and ask yourself two simple questions:

• Why has dating turned into a full time job? With all those silly expectations, the ranking and the body count non-sense, and all the absurd requirements (money, status, body height o

This hits hard because Ring is the perfect example of how convenience gets weaponized into a panopticon. People think they’re buying a doorbell but they’re actually building Amazon’s privatized surveillance state, block by block. And yeah, you didn’t consent to being filmed every time you walk past a neighbor’s house - that’s the insidious part. The “I feel like I’m losing against the tide” sentiment is real but you’re already ahead by even asking the question. Most people never consider the trade-off. Building your own infrastructure is how you refuse to be legible to their system. It’s more work, but that friction is the point - it means you’re outside their automated extraction pipeline. Worth it? Absolutely. You get security without becoming part of the problem.

You are exactly right. It's going to require more work. You are going to have to run your own network cables through your house and use commercial hardwired IP cameras and learn to program them and also set up a local DVR to record the footage. You'll basically have to build what a retail store uses. You're not going to find what you're looking for in residential garbage tech. Stick to commerical equipment, because commerical IT is usually not too fond of installing crap that arbitrarily phones home and tend to run way more locked down networks than what you find in a typical home.

I think Ubiquiti’s doorbell can be local-only.

Yes, very possible. Cheaper even…but will require some elbow grease.

tinyurl.com/FUTOguide

There’s a lot there. Feel free to skip to the security cameras section (linked above), look at the intro, watch videos etc. Rossman is GOATed for putting all this together. It’s written for the layman willing to roll their sleeves up.

I’ve never been comfortable with ring cameras specifically because even if it isn’t a tool to be harnessed by the state it’s still a tool to be harnessed by anyone holding a grudge. The vast majority of IoT users don’t know the basics of securing their network or their cameras. They connect things to the internet for the convenience and that’s it. And the cameras pick up the comings and goings of people who don’t really have the ability to not consent to having someone record when they leave their house or return to it. My neighbor doesn’t need that information. And why yes they could sit in their house and watch at all hours through the curtains, there would still be a physical limit to what they could see.

For the same reason I don’t want drones constantly surveiling my home, I don’t want camera footage I have no access to but that can be used against me by someone who doesn’t like how I take the leaves in my driveway.

Anyone who’s been in a dispute with a neighbor who’s got a ring camera knows this struggle. And the advice you get, by and large is to get one of your own. No thanks.

Buy IP PoE cameras like Amcrest or Reolink, hard wire them to a detected hub that is either disconnected from the internet, or firewalled to only allow direct access over your own personal VPN.

Lmao yeah there’s a beautiful irony - the slop machine is eating itself. Models trained on synthetic data degrade over time, what researchers call “model collapse” or “Habsburg AI.” Each generation loses fidelity like photocopies of photocopies. Kirkification specifically floods datasets with corrupted representations. When the model can’t distinguish real images from AI-generated variations, its accuracy breaks down. You’re injecting noise at scale. This is accidentally accelerationist - the error becomes the virus. The machine chokes on its own output. Tech companies are terrified, desperately trying to watermark and detect synthetic content, but it’s too late. How much of Reddit’s “authentic conversation” sold to Google is actually ChatGPT from 2023? It won’t stop slop generation, but it might render the whole system useless enough that people abandon it. Strategic failure at scale. Kind of poetic honestly.

You’re right - you’ve successfully built an infrastructure that keeps you outside the slop machine. Kagi, Whoogle, fediverse, HackerNews - that’s strategic refusal working as intended. The slop is concentrated on mainstream platforms where people haven’t opted out. Instagram, TikTok, Facebook, YouTube - my friends still using those are drowning in AI-generated engagement bait, fake historical photos, GPT-written content. It’s not subtle anymore for people still plugged in. The kirkification angle is trickier though - it’s not just what you see, it’s how you’re represented in spaces you’re not in. Someone can generate deepfakes of you and you’d never know. Your digital body gets remixed without consent. Your “maybe I can’t recognize it anymore” point is real. The aesthetic tells are getting harder to spot. Five years ago it was obvious, now it takes active effort. Platform rules banning it would help but verification at scale is nearly impossible. The only reliable defense is what you’re doing - removing yourself from spaces where slop is profitable. But that’s also a technical barrier. I can set up Whoogle and fediverse accounts, but my friends on Instagram? That’s where their community actually is. Opting out means losing access for most people. This is why municipal-scale infrastructure matters - if a town runs its own services, suddenly opting out isn’t a technical hurdle, it’s just where the community is. You asking “where is the slop?” while others drown in it proves we’re already living in parallel internets. The bifurcation is real.

Is there somewhere I can follow to see this if you end up open sourcing it? Sounds pretty interesting (personally I’m looking into a k3s-based setup but it’s always interesting to see how others do things)

Possibly a dumb question, so I tentatively pre-apologize: is LXC “Linux Container?”

Wait how did you set it up to avoid haloucinations? Is there a guide you followed that you can point me to?

The cloud? You mean someone else’s computer? 🤣