Are you tired of being recorded, tracked, categorized, and manipulated by the very device we're practically forced by our society to keep on us at all times?
So was I.
In an attempt to break free, I bought a dumb phone and immediately felt useless in today's world. I felt like a forgotten member of society, an unnecessary exile.
Then I tried a flip phone with WhatsApp (touchflip) and it was a step up, but poor battery life and the T9 keyboard made long-form text still painful.
I almost gave into our overlords and their advertising minions before I discovered Graphene OS. A free and open-source alternative to the Google bloatware that comes forcefully installed on Android phones. So I did the thing.
I wiped a Google Pixel phone's entire operating system, opened the bootloader, and plugged it into my computer. Injected the new OS and started her up.
There's something incredibly liberating about that app drawer. So empty. So pure. So... Mine.
One week in and I'm just as obsessed as I was when I first discovered Limewire as a teenager.
I am not an affiliate of this software. But I am a passionate advocate of the people having the freedom to not be tracked, coerced, and spied on by corporate giants. And I've been convincing my friends and family to adopt this shit ever since.
I was a daily Spotify listener until recently. I even tolerated having ads in my podcasts, despite paying for the service. But increasing subscription fees and an evil business model had me fed up.
I wasn't finding new musicians with Spotify's algorithms as easily as I was finding AI slop music and hearing about true music through my friends in the music scene.
Then I learnt that my money wasn't even supporting who I wanted. If you pay $11 per month and only listen to indie artists, Spotify doesn't pay them the way you think. Your money gets pooled with the rest and distributed at $0.004 per stream, with your underground musicians only starting to get paid once they hit a threshold of streams. Which only happens if they give their earnings back to Spotify to be placed in the 'discovery' section.
So what is this worthless shit that I pay my hard-earned money even doing for me? Or artists, for that matter? Well, it's changing the music itself. Shorter songs that strive to be played as non-intrusive 'background' music is the only way to pay the bills. This is the death of true expression. Fuck that noise.
So I did what any anarchist punk would do. I took a broken iPod Classic from the 2000s. The one I desperately wanted, but could never afford. I hacked into it and threw the 650mah battery and 160GB hard drive in the bin. Threw in a 3000mah battery and adapter to fit 500GB of SD cards into it and loaded the free and open-source software 'RockBox' onto it.
No more iTunes, no more .aac files. Just a killer software with games (even Doom), hundreds of themes and thousands of audio settings that I can now plug into any computer and load thousands of my friends' songs onto like a USB drive. .flac files if I want ultra-high quality, and the battery lasts for weeks.
Any playlists I built in Spotify that I didn't want to lose, I shared to SpotDL. A free terminal-based software that takes the playlist and downloads it from multiple sources as mp3 files into my iPod, with album covers and metadata included.
For the rest, I torrent superstars' music, and pay through BandCamp for the indie albums I like.
Steal from the rich. Give to the poor.