a life with no social media and phone, having more DIY, Punk, hacking style and stuff, how is that possible in current years? my ideas are having so low or no use of social media, using Linux or BSDS, having a custom rom at phone (or dumphone) and using alternative sites like image boards, IRC, old/niche forums, going to punk gigs and raves, learn music instrument, learn about cybersec, download music and movies, piracy in general, dress alt, make a personal webpage, using less javascript and using alternative’s to crapitalism.
Step one: don’t fucking ask us. You wanna be punk, go do shit and remember not to give a fuck what the people around you think. No plan you make will survive first contact with the dirt.
All the stuff you’ve listed seems fairly easy to achieve, except “using alternative’s to crapitalism”. Using dumb phones, quitting social media and using open source software is cool and all, but it isn’t going to help you escape capitalism.
using alternative’s to crapitalism
I think about this a lot so here are some ideas. I don’t do most of them…
Alternatives to rent:
- Squatting
- Camp permanently (climate permitting) *Big flop house with your friends
Alternatives to car:
- Bike (climate permitting)
- Walk/urbanize (possibly not compatible with alternatives to rent)
- Moped/ezoomeramabob (some upfront capitalism)
- Public transit (pay what you want usually unless some fascist shoots you over it)
- Rideshare/share a car with friends
Alternatives to food:
- Freeganism
- CSA
- Gardening
- Foraging (some places have mushroom enthusiasts you can learn from)
- Hunting
- COOPs (region specific)
- Everyone in the flophouse shares a Costco card and eats pb from an industrial tub
All of these things are still subject to either persecution or influence by capital; capitalism is a government and economy defined by bourgeois control, you can’t just escape it, it needs to affect everything around it.
Okay
Those things are fine, but that’s not avoiding capitalism. That’s trying to live cheaply. You don’t defeat capitalism by eating less avocado toast.
Sure, but that’s not what I understood the question to be. The question about the phone was “how do I use a phone while feeling the least amount of gross about it” and I took the part about capitalism in the same vein. Cutting google out of your life is good. Cutting exon and Monsanto out is also good.
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This sounds like trying to live an aesthetic.
they’re mixing material goals with aesthetics and I understand the impulse. it is effectively all lifestyle shit but as one bizarre early youtuber who lived in a DIY geodesic dome on a landlocked piece of forest without road access put it- the only way out is through the bottom, the lie we’re sold is that the only way to be free is to climb to the top.
that guy has since lost the plot in my opinion and is borderline doin a settlerism lately, but I don’t blame him for buying a tiny island in a warmer climate and going the direction he did, I just think internet attention + IRL isolation + genius mind resulted in some pretty sketchy thinking and cult-building impulses. no theory havin ass mufucka that he was.
I cut my own hair because I’m poor but also it is an inherently punk thing to do, ditto my ancient DIY repaired clothes etc. it’s hard to avoid contemplating the social signals I send out aesthetically. the lines get blurry. their impulse comes from the right place. I think the aesthetic stuff is more about signalling and finding community than being purely performative alternative. It’s a messy post but I get it
either that or Gibson’s The Peripheral TV adaptation finally dropped and I don’t know about it yet. lol
learn to do things
join clubs and learn from others mistakes too. I’d probably be dead working under an old car by now if I hadn’t absorbed the wisdom of others who’ve come before.
TALK TO PEOPLE
You gotta meet people in the meat world. They will be imperfect, they will be frustrating, but a surprising amount of them will be receptive to you and if you listen more than you talk you can stay learning all the time and build a support network by accident.
what?
most stuff you can just do, as the only thing stopping you is you… weighing the convenience of doing what’s easy vs the slower, energy intensive process of researching, learning and changing.
i will say i developed a lot of DIY skills being broke, underemployed and living in different parts of what Phil Neel refers to as the “far hinterland” of the US for a number of years. more or less the places on the map nobody drives by or conceptualizes as existing, but none the less contain pockets of humans in the shadow of current or former extractive processes that made our glittering metropolises possible. basically by having the option for convenience eliminated as a characteristic of place, i had to confront most tasks myself and connecting to the support networks of those similarly placed. nearly everybody knows a little about keeping a lot of different things working and effortlessly shares what they know to anyone interested, as the interdependence of people in proximity is a lot more obvious when there are so few.
counter intuitively, some of the most creative older tinkerers i’ve met with information technology and home brew/DIY gadgetry are people with deep rural ass roots. it took me too many years to see that it’s all just tinkering, time, and access to materials.
it’s all just tinkering, time, and access to materials
often recycled or street found materials if you’re in a city. you can go a long way these days with the shit people don’t see value in anymore. I have a wall of dormant computers, I paid for maybe 2 of them in the ~20 years I’ve been collecting and scavenging them.
that said the newer shit, middle-gen raspberry pi type arm boards etc are fucking fantastic for low power devices. certain types of old android tablets and phones are especially useful for repurposing as control interfaces. when stuff breaks I take it apart and salvage shit. I just launched a street-found nano drone that had been discarded because of its dead battery using a logitech wireless keyboard’s lipo into my wall and broke a prop because I was being careless. but it was funny so it was worth it. the personal self defense drone project will continue lol
the real battle is in the mind. do you really want to do something COOL in CURRENT YEAR and not document it, monetize it etc. Obviously yes, but my point is there’s a lot of implicit pressure to be visible, to gain recognition, to make money, etc that make the hegemonic platforms attractive and fighting those base impulses is fucking hard when money is a potential (if, tbh, unlikely) outcome of joining the masses in the walled gardens.
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yeah fr fr
I’ll speak to the phone bit as the rest of list feels somewhat subjective/ specific to your personal wants and desires.
Personally I would go with getting a used pixel device and stick graphene OS on it giving you a much reduced risk to your privacy while still allowing you acess to some of the nicer conveniences that smartphones allow.
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I can’t speak on the aesthetics or social scenes you want to break into, but the best way to get into using all that open source, anti capitalist, anti consumerism, anti big-tech type tech is just to use it. There’s nothing stopping your from installing Linux unless you have special software needs, it’s available. Same goes for Graphene or LineageOS. Piracy and building a website have more of a learning curve but are also both very accessible, just do it lol
Look up DivestOS. Graphene is strictly for pixels and lineageos does not do enough (big respect to the project, divest is a soft fork of it.) There’s another one I’ll think of later that’s halfway between the two. I think DivestOS is completely deblobbed.
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fuuuck
I used to recommend divest all the time but the project very suddenly shut down last month. I suppose I should start recommending calyx instead for people who can’t run graphene but that also only runs on a small set of devices, hence my lineage recommendation
wtf I’ve been on the site within the last two weeks how did I miss this. I know it’s one guy’s solo project and a huge undertaking but NOOO.
placeholder/reminder comment for an inevitable effortpost later.
I have lived like this on and off for large sections of my life.
It is a “goal” of sorts of me and another cypherpunk to lean heavily back into this in the coming year(s,) we’re fucking sick of the web but the internet is OUR home turf. these corpos are taking our third spaces and we will have to create new ones.
like the other poster said it’s because we chose convenience and slowly (in our cases) ceded ground because other life stuff felt more important. It feels now like I didn’t realise the war of attrition I was fighting at the time, so i lost.
sorry for the scrambled and not very useful words. I’ll think on this and try to bring some energy and thought to this topic later when my meat is rested and my mind has finished defragging.
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That’s a long ass list sentence. Congrats.
This is all cool and all but keep in mind that these are only just lifestyle choices at the end of the day and don’t affect the system in the slightest.
You can try to leave a cheap life and avoid supporting monopolies etc, but only a massive organized movement can achieve real change. “Alternatives to capitalism” when referring to personal ways of living is only a matter of aesthetics, often used by opportunists to slow down the formation of a real and fierce social movement out in the streets.
If you want to fight for the end of capitalism, join an org and/or a union. Go to protests, join strikes, organize your co-workers etc. It’s much easier said than done, but only collective real world action can move history forward.
btw there is already a new years resolutions thread
Wait I have the best answer
Build a doohickey and do the funny thing.
