cross-posted from: https://sh.itjust.works/post/69844421
No one warned me, when I became a parent, about all the apps that would colonize my phone: the app for the baby monitor where I could gaze at my daughter, even when my husband and I finally had a night out. The app for the Snoo smart bassinet we rented in bleary-eyed desperation, which logged her sleep by the minute. The app where I logged her sleep manually because the Snoo was not accurate enough. And still, I remember thinking that I had been quite restrained. I mean, I didn’t buy the $299 Owlet smart sock, which would send her pulse rate and oxygen saturation directly to my phone, or the $290 Nanit monitor, which would track her every breath.
Every single capitalist venture in the digital world—at least in the US—is in one way or another, simply trying to extract as much data as humanly possible. The sale of that data comes first; the products themselves are secondary vehicles for it.
There’s no goddamn reason my electric toothbrush should have Bluetooth capabilities, but it does (and I will never pair it to anything). But because all of these capitalist parasites are focused on extracting wealth from us like meat from cattle, it requires an account tied to an email to even use whatever companion app pairs with it.
I’ve been slowly self-hosting my way to freedom. If you want to do the same and you don’t have a massive budget, eBay is filled to the brim with Dell OptiPlex towers that can easily become a home server. I have one on the way to replace my old-ass Mac Minis running Linux and it only cost me $360 USD.