On the heels (and psychology) of yesterday's intersection of a 300-day carnivore diet with a 150-day beard, I write...

It only takes a precursory glance at my post titles to recognize how in recent years, music played a pivotal role. Spotify sat in the driver's seat basically ever since I talked with a Norwegian woman about the service and I've looked forward with a Santa's coming to town expectation for its United States release.

In parallel to my take on many tech firms, I have an on/off relationship with Spotify in an endless pursuit of optimization, yet curiously, for the last couple of months, I just cannot seem to climb back aboard. Its podcast and playlist suggestions aren't so much helpful as they come off as flailing attempts to shape me. And this in a context where Spotify literally has YEARS of data aggregation on me, a treasure trove of material for suggestions! Worst still is its recent model of handing out randomized character logins that look like generated passwords and lacks all the fuzzy feelings of "our customer is a unique, valued individual" and instead makes me think I can be pulled off the rack at Costco in bulk. There are few contexts where I don't feel more like a battery jacked into the Matrix.

I'm just in a place in my life where I just don't want to be tracked and manipulated. I just want to take in a long breath of freedom in a place far from the City. Maybe I'm alone in this, at least as someone who switched out the LCD screen of his laptop and replaced its default Windows install with Linux—I mean, I'd have to think that someone with a predilection toward tech would run toward the blinking lights instead...but, I'm not that other guy hanging out in the duck blind...

...why do I feel that I am?

Cue Jo Dee Messina's Bye Bye...

Likely not surprising my reader in context to my recent posts, I laid the accelerator to the FLOOR and COMPLETELY lost Google and Microsoft in the rear-view mirror of my Linux Mint Cinnamon rig! I mean, there's nothin' but miles of dotted lines falling off the horizon behind me.

I feel WONDERFUL to leave all of that spycraft behind as I open my throttle wide in these open-source waters! And believe me, it feels GOOD to not be subjugated to the political rhetoric of Big Tech! Crank out some Steppenwolf!

The funny thing is that I really didn't tell anyone of my new email address—oh, sure, I pointed service logins and updated my password manager in kind, but socially, I didn't do anything. And yes, I did make a reference to the address in a prior post, but not in a direct manner. Hey, I don't know how good AI is these days; while it's generally meat-like, Spam has sugar, so along with its absence from my Inbox, it's off my carnivore list! (Sadly, because of the carbs that slither into the dehydrator, this is also why I cry over beef jerky.)

I've made the realization that for me to turn this year into a series of wins, I basically got to treat it like it's 2020 all over again. It is a wild world out there where emotions have trumped logic; it's just not a healthy place for the NT rational! To my knowledge, I haven't reacted with 2020 nightly teeth grinding as I slept, but that can't be far off!

How do I envision closing out this year in applying 2020's lessons?

• Continue this strong push with book consumption in my Blade Runner, Fitness Guru and Entrepreneur paradigm;
• Ignore pop news and the politicization thereof;
• Eat and train;
• Breathe purposely.

Perhaps as I close out this year, it'll mimic the prior year and I'll make another run at Facebook...HOWEVER, the world's gotta SETTLE down for me to be willing to hand a wedge of my freedom over to Zuckerberg's website and all his cookies that are akin to Stranger Things Season 2's underground labyrinth! Honestly, I think I'd just run his place in a closed-off virtual machine if I did!

The other day, a great idea struck me immediately after I was mass-emailed by a race organization expressing how they were no longer interested in my participation: why not just create my own series of races? ANYBODY can throw together a route! And it is LITERALLY a sport where you intrinsically do it by yourself! At the entry price of these things, I can even get a t-shirt printed up for each one! I was wondering how I was going to get those seven 5K's in this year to resolve that New Year's resolution...this just might work! It's definitely something I want to steep in some creative juice.

"...I don't know why I run away"

In my last post, I spoke of my activities in response to the undercurrents of distrust I tread in the dark waters of Big Tech. I don't have to pull too many books off the stack of books I've read on the topic to recognize my guard is warranted; despite how the literature might so desperately persuades, it's not all "shiny, happy people holding hands." As Zuboff argues in The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, perhaps we're not even the product, but in conjuring to my mind the universe of The Matrix, we are the raw materials. Shiny, happy conduits, indeed!

And while a part of me throws my hands up in the air and longs to wipe my hands clean of the whole thing as I give up electricity entirely to embrace the ways mankind has prospered for all the millennia before—perhaps, I'd thrive in a remote cabin in the far-flung reaches of northwest Alaska—my less adventurous and pragmatic self recognizes that the milieu of cybernetic tinsel, an amalgamation of uncanny valleys shaping thought and fortune, is the context of today's world.

THIS is what the world thinks is good. No wonder the first world is frakked up.

My one-foot-in / one-foot-out approach through encryption, fails for while I can very much make my life a black box, I cannot control the externalities, that is, the inputs/outputs. Take for example, email: YES, this ABSOLUTELY ought to be private and is trivial to do from a technical perspective, away from the advertising agency of Google's goggles and the not-my-kind-of-party 3rd party creepers. But, to whom do I interact with? Folks with Gmail addresses! It's like locking a freestanding door in a field.

...and while sensitive docs and copies thereof can be safeguarded into a Veracrypt volume for cloud storage, it's an impractical solution for media and not applicable for things like Google Sheets, something that can be easily shared to intended recipients, yet remain queued for daily reading by Google's AI to further shape the world's dataset of all things me!

And I'm not naïve to believe deletion policies in thinking I can shove everything back into that Pandora's box—it's out there; there's no going back! I'm pretty sure everything I've ever interacted with in some semblance of tech can reasonably approximate future behavior—or Future Me! There will come a time when I can be replaced with a cleverly crafted piece of code that can serve up me tanning beneath a heat lamp that can be "your way, right away" configured to the recipient's preferences...of course, I might argue that Proper Me can be already be shoved into a fast food carton with respect to Facebook's emotional contagion experiments—OS pre-installed!

What's the big picture, though? Oh you, bullet of butterfly wings, "despite all my rage I am still just a rat in a cage."

Why do I make things so hard on myself? Instead of distancing from Big Tech, the approaches I take to pull away only sinks me further...Sun Tzu has GOT to have a chapter on this!

Thus with arms wide open, I jump back into the fray, while partitioning my core from prying Cylons.

YouTube Link

In the meantime, lemme at LEAST rip Cortana, Edge and Bing Search out of Windows 10. "Geez, M$, stay in your lane! Google just called and said they want their whiteboard back!"