@shoutcacophony @garbados this reminds me of a quote from Conflictual Wisdom I've been finding inspiring:

“I don’t do what I do because I think I can save the world. I fight because I know that the whole
world will be destroyed, it will be consumed by the sun, leaving only ash, and when that day comes, I want the story that comes to an end to be a story of beauty and tragedy and resistance, not a story of stupid, pointless suffering, but a story of joy and courage.”

@polymerwitch @garbados amazing quote, ty

@garbados see, *this*. the iPod is a really good example -- with the exception of how unopen (and wasteful) they were even back then, its proof that in some if not a lot of cases, "things are even worse now" has a flip side, namely, that things back then were actually better

not perfect, but better. the iPod for all its flaws was sort of a wonder, the more recent iPhones in particular, not so much (or at all)

@garbados the concept of a media player isn't that complex, like you said. neither is "let's establish a tax on media devices, and use it to create an economic commons for musicians and performers"

@garbados both of which were respectively real and on the table, until things went off the rails: 9/11, "rebuilding" the tech industry in ways that only gave lip service to reforms, re-re-building after the subprime crash in ways that barely even tried to do so, or seriously overstated their importance while gentrifying the heck out of everything, etc

but that's all fixable. so...good point, ty

@garbados

@shoutcacophony

I think to truly free the system you would need more than that. The cortex A57 chip in the rpi3 is certainly not free in the sense of speech, and I have seen no truly libre SSDs. On the bright side v-risc is on the horizon.