Google and Microsoft "Own Us"

I had a post about some time ago entitled Convenience killed the cat and in that post I was detailing how many of our convenience habits are stealing/killing our liberties and how weak and obedient we've become due to excessive convenience. It's easy to set up a google account, sync your contacts with it, and your apps, save these contacts on your account, use google's cloud services, and so on...

Once done that you will have to realize that you're not actually using a cloud, but storing some of your personal shit on a database. Android used to be a more rebellious version than IOS was. I always hated IOS for somehow locking your phone to a damn Icloud account.

You could not literally buy a secondhand iPhone and factory reset it and start using it right away. I know, I know, it was all about our safety, but screw that. Yeah, screw that when such measures become so intrusive. Android has followed the steps of IOS and it's become the same totalitarian guardian for our gadgets as IOS is.

Let me tell you a story...

My mother had a Motorola smartphone that she used for about for years till this summer. When they came in here on vacation this summer I decided to gift her my brand new OPPO spare phone. I was holding it on a shelf for a good time while she was running the old Motorola. I thought I was doing a good deed. Hence we swapped phones and her old Moto became my spare phone.

I have not touched it till yesterday when I "gave it a factory reset" and tried to log in with my google account and install a bunch of apps that I usually need on my daily driver so I can have them at hand in case I need to quickly swap phones. I couldn't do that, though...

The phone basically didn't allow me to log in with my google account and use the damn phone. It asked for her account and even after providing that it had some more protection measures "in charge", as for example sending texts on her new phone so that she can confirm that it was her using the phone and not someone else.

Fuck that. I broke into pieces. You can't even sell that garbage anymore. Not because it is broken, but because a new user can't do that without my mother's account.

Now let me tell you another story of how software moghuls have gained ownership of our devices. I run a laptop that uses a pirated Windows version. I bought this thing second-hand and didn't bother to buy the license for Windows. I used nonlicensed Windows OS on my PCs and laptops for almost my entire life.

However, Microsoft, although knowing I'm running a pirated version of their shitty OS is still updating the system at will. I have no control over that. None. No matter how much I try and delay the update, after a few restarts of the laptop the update kicks in and I can't do anything about it.

It's like the laptop is owned by Microsoft and not me. I disabled every damn auto-update feature I could, but nothing. I can't break this thing into pieces that I'm typing from right now, cuz I don't have any spare ones...

Such situations make you think about how much ownership we have over our own gadgets. When it comes to crypto it is your decision to use an exchange for storing your coins or a noncustodial wallet, but with these smartphones and laptops we use on a daily basis there's not much to choose from.

George Carlin once said that "freedom of choice is an illusion" and he was so damn right. There are two political parties, two major mobile operating systems, a few banks controlling what we call money, and a few oil companies doing the same thing as the banks, but tons of ice cream flavors and movies to distract us from reality.

I guess I should once again dig into using Linux and consider it an alternative to Windows, but what do I do about android and google?

Thanks for your attention,
Adrian