I happen to have grown very tired of the modern world and its problems, mostly those related to internet, and how it relates to capitalism. This blog post will mostly be a gathering of my thoughts on the matter, and a complaint about capitalist feudalism.
Here are my biggest complaints about the state of technology in 2026.

Everything is so fast

For some reason I am very drawn to old things. They invoke a sense of calmness, they remind me of a world that I’ve only glimpsed at for a few years when I was younger.

I am sure that those of you that used to play Minecraft back in the 2010s and went back to it as adults felt that something changed. Surely, part of it is just nostalgia from my side, but Minecraft is now faster, you can fly, you build ice paths in the nether to travel… fast as fuck. The world is huge, mega builds populate it. This is not the same vibe that Minecraft used to have and that I seek (or rather used to seek) when I play it.

Everything now is fast, our attention spans are fucked, and when you browse you have this sense of anxiety. Nothing ever stops. The internet, the tool that was supposed to democratize knowledge and creativity, is now the biggest source of stress and depression.

You have no freedom

Your computer now needs 32 GBs of ram (that now costs hundreds of euros because of shortages to create data centers, more on this later) to basically do the same shit that it was doing in 2010, browsing the web and running a simple OS. Why? Because Microsoft and Apple are putting ads, spyware, bloated software that you don’t need and AI on your computer, and you have no control over it.

This really shows how the world works now. You own nothing. You decide nothing.
I happened to be very disappointed by the latest iOS version on my now 4 years old iPhone 13, so I googled how to revert the update. Guess what, it’s not possible. Apple knows better than I what software is supposed to run on the device I bought with my money. You buy a new computer? You have Windows 11 with copilot stealing all your data without your consent for Microsoft’s profit.

You own nothing

This is more or less related to the freedom part (of course, you do not have freedom over things you do not own). We are used to subscriptions now, where you don’t own the media that you consume. But I would argue that you don’t even own the experience that you have on those platforms. The algorithm decides everything, and we are slaves to it. I used to love YouTube, but now I don’t have the feeling that I see anything of my choice. Subscribing to a channel is completely useless.

This is true in software, but what I find even worse is in the hardware. You used to be able to upgrade your laptop, add RAM to it, sometimes even upgrade the processor. Even simpler things are now impossible to repair, and some outright stop working if you cut their wifi signal to the servers they are running on (like smart vacuum robots, even though they have no need for wifi to work).

This is not only bad because we’re stuck with either giving our data away to use a product or paying monthly fees for it, but as consumers it also means that we are exposed to whatever choice the company makes. You buy a Tesla and pay monthly for autopilot because it works for you and the price is reasonable? Guess what now 3 years have passed and the car you bought requires you to pay a monthly fee that doubled.

A little note on techno-feudalism

What I described above is closely related to techno-fedualism or capitalist feudalism. When I learnt about the concept I found the association quite nice (though for a concept that most people are aware of). During feudalism, the lord owned the land that they would rent out to vassals, who would then own serfs that would farm it. Those serfs got a small share of the food, just enough to survive. The vassals would have a bit more, while the owner of the land would basically have unlimited food without lifting a finger.
Platforms today do exactly the same. Uber doesn’t own a single car, Airbnb doesn’t have one house, Apple doesn’t create apps, Spotify not one song. Those companies make money by taking huge cuts from people.
There is no capitalism left, all there is is a brand, and a walled garden to make sure that their network can’t be teared down by someone replicating the advantage they have. There is no production, no innovation, just the brand.

So, what to do?

Luckily, there is still hope for us to take back some control. Personally, my MacBook Air M1 has served me very well in the past 5 years, and still performs incredibly, but I can’t load Linux on it without severe battery life tradeoffs. I am seriously considering switching to a computer with great Linux compatibility and wave the middle finger to the tech giants.

Whenever I will buy a new device, I will aim to buy from companies that tend less towards those practices that forbid us from taking control of our devices, or devices for which jailbreaks exist. For example I own an old Kindle that I bought used for 40 francs and that I jailbroke. I gave no money to Amazon, and I have a device free from the shackles of a big corporation. I pay for the hardware, I control what software goes on it. As it should be.

I am also completely off of social media (save YouTube, though lately it has been testing my patience, and LinkedIn for obvious reasons). I’ve found that disconnecting from those platforms designed to exploit human behavior to keep you glued to the screen and addicted has led me to have so much more free time for things that I actually enjoy, such as sports and reading.

I’ve also partly started this blog inspired by a way of creating content that doesn’t rely on big corporations and algorithms. I basically see it this way: there is the old internet, the slightly connected one, where small websites and blogs dominated it, equivalent to the period of human history where we used to barter products that took individual skill to craft, complementing each other, and the new internet, where big corporations own everything and the users are sacrificed for profits, to capitalism, where the few get richer and richer and the gap with the poor gets bigger and bigger.

So this is an invite to you my dear reader, consider the contents of this blog, and if they resonate in some way with you, think if there’s something you could do to change this. Say no to social media, jailbreak you kindle, do something to gain your freedom back… Or if you don’t care don’t, when we will not have any ram anymore because of data centers, I’m sure you will be very happy to rent it for 20€/month, and I’m sure that those companies will be very careful not to sell your data 🙂