I came across this blogpost/essay on Reddit (sorry). The essay is ostensibly about the Casio F-91W, but also about the oppressiveness of the internet of things and how technology often demands so much of our attention. I thought the Lemmy community might appreciate the sentiment.
I’ll pull from Wikipedia’s article on Google’s reCAPTCHA: “…reCAPTCHA provides little security against bots and is primarily a tool to track user data, and has cost society an estimated 819 million hours of unpaid human labor.” The point I want to emphasize is “unpaid human labor”. The article reads as middle-class whinge that pines for when products were whole and finalized. It’s not honest. It hides behind cutesy metaphors, because it’s not cognizant of the real underlying relationships that would turn it into a critique of capitalism. That software copyright became a vehicle for capitalists to hijack property ownership so that the consumer could never own their computers. They’re your computers, but they run their software: you do as the computer tells you to do. Capitalists want more unpaid labor and capital. Pay up piggy. Stop squealing.