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@ Jacob Goff
2025-04-18 17:58:53I was happy with my apple devices and conducting my life out in the open. Even when I was conducting quasi-legal retail operations, I always depended on the constitution to protect me from unreasonable searches and seizures. If I ever got busted, I figured I would just force the prosecution to take me through piece by piece every part of law enforcement's evidence gathering operations, which (especially with the local law enforcement in rural Missouri) likely would have trampled my civil rights. In retrospect, I was probably a lot more vulnerable than I wanted to admit, but this was years ago and I think I was tempting fate recreationally. I also imagined that a jury would never render a verdict against me, even with good evidence. And if they did, I would appeal it. Law school taught me to see the system as much more pliable than law enforcement wants anyone to think it is. Lacking shame is also an endearing quality.
One thing I spent a lot of time thinking about during these years, despite my stubborn insistence that everything would work out okay (which it mostly did), was my digital vulnerability. I was careful with what was said, how it was said, who is was said to. But never careful enough, and given the gist of the last few years and Big Tech's coziness with law enforcement, I should have abandoned most of my devices way sooner.
Now, I no longer run an illicit Farmer's Market, but I am endlessly interested in erasing my fingerprints from prying eyes -- government or otherwise. That said, I don't mind having my name attached to my ideas. I recently convinced a friend to join Nostr and when he saw I was using my real name he couldn't believe it. If I was starting social media cold, I would encourage people to maintain a pseudonym. I have pseudonyms in various corners of the internet. They are probably too leaky to overcome basic scrutiny from a moderate hacker, but they give me a little distance. Probably my willful ignorance cropping up here again, but I live by a phrase I heard in a Sherlock Holmes film once: "It's so over: it's covert." I just figure I can say and do enough to obfuscate my activities if someone tries to nail me down at some point. But, deeper than that, I can stop gladly handing over any trust to corporations that have a record of prying and spying.
I don't trust Windows. I don't really trust Apple, although I remember the landmark case with the Sandy Hook shooter's phone, where Apple was refusing to unlock the thing. This gave me a bit of trust, but you can just feel the fingers of the company all over your devices. I also lost a lot of trust in Apple during the previous presidential campaign politics where every headline that was pushed from the Apple news app was overwhelmingly anti-Trump. I am not the biggest Trump guy by ANY stretch, but I found this to be just way too heavy-handed for what should be a politically agnostic news pushing application.
I definitely don't trust any centralized social media. Facebook has burned so much trust over the years it is laughable that they control rural communities the way they do. When the cat is out of the bag on Nostr, I hope there is a mass exodus. It won't be a mass exodus, but even a slow and progressive exodus would be fine. Starve out the big guys. Don't give them the data and the clicks.
Twitter feels better, but not by a ton. There is enough of a desire to be the "everything app" that i don't want any part of it anymore. Also, the free tier is shit -- I had premium plus for a while until the last couple of months when the price went way up, and it was unclear whether I had access to the full AI features of Grok, so I ditched it. About the same time I became active on Nostr, so it hasn't bothered me much.
I'm not full carnivore, but I have eaten more steaks in the last year than in the past. I'm not full open source, but I am weaning myself off the spy-machines.
I will be installing Linux on my PC (once my graphic card gets here from Germany), and it will be slow and probably painful at times, but I am getting away from it. I will also be installing GrapheneOS on my backup phone, so that I am familiar and accustomed to escaping the ivory towers in that realm too.
Little by little, but it's hard to overstate how much more hopeful life feels when you rebel against the digital overlords. Open-source money is better, so might as well bitcoin-ify the rest of my networks, too.