You've got an idealized version of humanity in your head. Don't get me wrong, there are many real things to be deeply worried about (e.g. overshoot, nuclear proliferation and the relegitimisation of eugenics) but the monetization and commodification of 'private spaces' are not historically unusual, not worsening and not inherently wrong.
Some suggested reading - Bataille, Foucault, Negri and any social histories of the 1800s.
Personally the despair isn't from bad things happening on their own.
Rather it's from a sense of alienation from how those results suggest most other people in the clique/industry/civilization didn't appear to have the values or priorities I thought we were all gonna use.
New business models come around very rarely. In the mean time, existing companies optimize everything they can relentlessly - that's why people own their stock.
First you should really think about it. Check if your depression is really from corporations, and monetization. Maybe you lack self-confidence, or are overworked, etc. etc.
I am to disappointed with companies, sure. I have not yet surrendered. I do not use facebook at all. I seldom use google, when I have to. But I am also disappointed with people trying to monetize everything. Blogs are on substack, so even smallest amount of their creativity can be milked.
Not everything is doom and gloom. There are many open source projects. It is really simple just to host something by your own. Self hosting is really booming.
Changes are done through mental attitude. If you are tired of being spied, then stop using such services. More often than not, you can change your life. People do not choose such life because they want smart vacuum cleaner that has a camera. People want to see funny pictures on TikTok. If you don't want to be surveilled, then do not use services which spie and track. It is that simple.
For me, the method of coping was to create my own rss/news client. It gave me a feeling that I control my information flow. Google may try to moderate the Internet, but maybe I will be able to resist some more. Being self sufficient gave me a feeling of freedom. Nobody is stealing my attention. Nobody redirects me to ads. Nobody rewrites my search queries.
Ok maybe not nobody, but to a lesser degree.
> corporations trying to watch and make money from everything we do.
I should have added that it’s not even that the monetization/spying makes the products any better: It actually makes them WORSE.
Like YouTube not allowing background playback, even artificially gimping OS features like Apple’s Picture-In-Picture.
Facebook tracking your phone even after you delete the app and wipe the device!
Or Tinder etc artificially and mercilessly crippling even the most basic features such as charging money for Read Receipts!!!
I truly despise what Microsoft has become. I rarely even use Windows but the amount of monetisation that has occurred has degenerated a somewhat acceptable product into something that is bloated spyware trash.
I’m honestly surprised that there isn’t more government intervention - the productivity loss of the useless features, constant prompting to update to windows 11 or mode to edge and potential data spills caused by OneDrives absolute persistence is mind blowing.
If anyone reading this works at Microsoft as part of a team complicit in this behaviour: fuck you.
I spend as little time as possible interacting with these systems. That’s all I got.
Feels like there's more depressing stuff than that going on in the world. Sure, it's a constant struggle against government overreach and most of us live in a capitalist society, but it's not war or famine. On the other hand I'm optimistic about the fact that there are a lot of people out there--in software and otherwise--who do stuff just because they care about it.
Take notes of what annoys you the most and get even.
Find a phone number or email the company must answer. It can be billing support, legal, or investor relations. Then fill it in on forms in all the worst parts of the Internet: gambling, porn, and hacking sites easy go-tos. Use an immutable OS and go through a VPN. They will give up answering it, and this will kill them.
Get even enough and a Fortune 100 company goes bust from a few dozen hours of ine person's determined effort. I killed a company that everyone on this thread has heard of, and that 2/3rds of you did business with this way.
There are those who would say this is wrong. They would argue the companies never asked to receive phone calls about gambling apps. I reply that I never asked for the spam they forced on me either.
Some would say this is an attack on our electronic communications infrastructure. I reply that the real attack on our electronics infrastructure comes from call centers full of telemarketers and scammer. If you want to stop spam, do it. Ycombinator companies run most of those call centers. Shut down your outbound call centers, and go after every single telemarketer and scammer. It will not take long to shut down the few scumbags that make all of our lives hell.
Some will argue the call centers are outside our legal jurisdiction. I reply: That's why we have the Air Force.
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For the most part I have adopted the trope of 'the only way to win is not to play'. By that, I mean checkout of online life as much as possible.
The issue is that if 95% of folks decide against building these systems of oppression, that 5% remaining will still build it. And then the other 95% will justify it as "If I don't, they will". The sign of moral corruption at work. And those that do it will always have a 'claim to virtue'. They are innovating this that and the other under the disguise of progress. The real question is, was it worth it?
The weirdest part is that Richard Stallman essentially spelled it out in full back in the late 1980's and almost nobody listened.