I don’t like computers
This article was very touching.  I&#x27;m 28 and I feel exactly the
same way. I have spent quite some time thinking about the topic.
I have even used the same words in conversations with friends.<p>There is a generation of people that got into computers because
they were a tool for empowerement and creativity.  When I was a
child, my younger sister would create movies editing frame by
frame in MS Paint while I would learn Pascal to make a sequencer
to play &quot;melodies&quot; using the PC speaker bell commands. Her friend
would learn HTML to create a manually updated blog where she
would post fantasy short stories.  In the Internet, we all hang
around with nicknames in chat rooms and learn to make flashy
websites and get through the chain emails from relatives.  We
needed no Netflix or Facebook to share stuff, we had P2P and
email and IRC.  Then we learnt about GNU&#x2F;Linux: the ultimate tool
to get control of our machines.  It was all organized chaos,
instant communication that no one could control, limitless
creativity, the ultimate dream of a post-capitalist anarchist
society...<p>At some point, some got to believe that if only these tools would
become mainstream, the mainstream would adopt these values.  A
techo-revolution!<p>This overestimated the transformative power of technology. What
happened was otherwise: technology is now mainstream and has
become a tool for social control and the ultimate frontier of
consumerism. Tech didn&#x27;t change society, society changed tech...<p>I still want to believe in these utopic values.  But I understand
that it is a long way traveled in little steps whose significance
is hard to see while at it.  In the meantime it&#x27;s often tiring
and lonely to live in the computing underground.  One has to
explain people why you don&#x27;t have a smartphone (and it gets
harder to reach people without having Wassapp and so on), one has
to explain relatives why you don&#x27;t want to work for BigTechCorp,
while tryin to stay &quot;up to date&quot; one has to go through the angry
rants of Apple users on HN [1] or the celebration of the new
Micro$oft facelift, and the collective systemic submission in the
startup world in this new gold rush...<p>The hardest part for me is to find stuff that I can do well and
that I find valuable to the world... and still get paid for it.
And I am an Software Engineer, the profession of the future!  How
can I be so obnoxious to have plenty of well paid jobs around me
and not be interested in them? This makes me very sad and makes
me feel deeply alienated...<p>---<p>[1] You are not angry because of the design of a computer, you
are angry at the realization that you are so personally invested
in a technology that you have no control of, but has control over
you!