As my disgust for all these companies skyrockets, I seek alternatives. I’ve become exponentially aggressive in taking ownership of my digital life, because I fear if I wait much longer, I’ll never be able to escape. Facebook technicians will break into my house and forcibly graft a device to me that announces whenever I move my bowels (and publicly shame me if my movements are not regular enough). I could become some crazy old coot and go live in the woods for the rest of my life, but I quite like everyday society. I’d like to participate in all the wonders life has to offer without being “branded” like a cow. Are you a Google Person or a Microsoft Person or a Facebook Person or a Samsung Person or a Verizon Person? It’s as gross as factory farming, except we’re the cattle.

I decided to start disentangling my life from G-Mail, once Google announced their grand unification scheme. I can’t axe it completely, unless I want to delete all my youtube videos, lose touch with people who don’t know I’ve switched emails, have every copy of my resume go to a dead email address, etc. I set up my own personal email server. It was time-consuming and difficult, and it still doesn’t work 100%, but it’s mine. All things considered, G-Mail is incredibly slick, handy, and accessible. Yet, I’ve gotten so incredibly pissed off at Google that I’m essentially willing to become an old coot living in the woods at this point. I’m a techie, a computer nut, and that’s why I was able to set up my own email (build a house in the woods). But what about everyone else? It really bothers me. It threatens to kill what makes the Internet wonderful — anyone can pile on to share, learn, and create. But now, huge walls are being built. Google and Microsoft don’t play nice; neither of them want you to leave their little theme park. So they build bigger walls, and add barbed wire. Welcome to the internet concentration camp….

There is no silver bullet for this problem. The only answer is for millions of individuals like myself to step up and clean up the mess: once I get all the bugs worked out of my own email system, I’m setting one up for my parents. Then maybe another for a friend, in exchange for a case of beer. Linux (Ubuntu in particular) is getting really good. It still needs a bit more elbow grease before it’s grandma-proof, but the days of beating your head over Xconfigurate are starting to end, and not a moment too soon. Become a free agent, or risk being stuck on the same team forever.

If Microsoft were a pizza delivery place, it would go something like this:

1. You see an ad for a delicious pizza. It looks real good. Price is reasonable. You decide to give ‘em a ring and order a deluxe pie.

2. The person answering the phone sounds young, hip, enthusiastic. Your order is quickly taken, and the anticipation starts to build.

3. The pizza arrives after 29 minutes of the promised 30-minute delivery time. So far so good. But you open the box, and….

4. The pizza is raw. Uncooked. What’s more, many of the toppings you expected aren’t there. Angry, you phone them up…

5. “Please hold for tech support. For increased priority, you can sign up for the Gold package…”

6. Finally, you get someone on the line. They explain that they won’t be able to deliver a baked pizza until third quarter 2016, and if you want the rest of your toppings, you can have a handful delivered each week for a monthly subscription fee of just $10 ($100 if you pay for a year up front). Furthermore, by ordering a pizza from them you agreed to a binding contract full of long legal words you don’t understand.

7. Disgusted, you hang up the phone and put the pizza in the oven yourself. It turns out like crap. You don’t have one of those brick-fired pizza ovens that pizza places have, and half the toppings are missing.

8. You eat, but you don’t eat well. You feel distinctly unsatisfied and more than a little screwed over.

9. Next week, you try to order a pizza from somewhere else — screw those clowns after last week! — only to find there is no one else. Microsoft, in the middle of the night, has gone around town and burned all the rival pizza places down, captured the managers, and held their families for ransom; their chestnuts to the fire, etc.

10. You’re left with a choice of A) Willingly get screwed over B) Make the pizza yourself (Linux). Obviously, you pick B.

11. Annoyed that you’ve chosen B) over A), Microsoft buys out the Pepperoni manufacturer (Office Software), and the dairy that makes the Mozzarella (Video Games). “Can I get half a pound of pepperoni and a bag of mozzarella for my pizza?” “That’s only available by subscription when you order a Microsoft Pizza. The cows won’t be milked until third quarter 2016, so you can expect your mozzarella sometime in 2017. Meanwhile, please pay us $10/month.”

12. Microsoft takes all the money they’ve strongarmed people out of, and uses it to corner the Pizza industry in the next town over.

More below the cut.

Microsoft has never been a very good company, just a powerful one. Their is general strategy is to bullhorn their way into newer, fertile markets while bankrolling the effort off the tolls they exact from markets they’ve already cornered. Sometimes it takes them years (X-Box) and sometimes they simply give up (Zune). Once they have a market, they hook people into a never-ending stream of “updates,” many of which serve no purpose but to squeeze people that have already paid for their nonsense (Windows, X-Box).

Windows 95 was heralded by Microsoft as revolutionary, amazing, etc. and it certainly looked different. I rather approved of the interface change, actually. It could have been nice. Instead, it was slow, buggy, and…. well, rude. The more interesting bits of the computer got buried in ugly messes. For example: Windows 3.1 used .INI files for most of its internal configuration. The files were unhidden, and plain text. You could go in with a text editor and mess around, if you felt so inclined. You got no help in doing so, but people like me that like this stuff don’t need any. We just enjoy tinkering and exploring.

In stark contrast to the simplicity of .INIs, Windows 95 introduced the registry, a hairy, dark-magic mess that requires a special tool to edit. While I agree that things were becoming too complex to manage with .INI files, Microsoft’s solution simply traded a small problem for a larger one. Then they charged people for it. Then they charged people again to fix the bugs in their flawed design.

It’s not just the poor design decisions — mistakes that some freshman comp sci student would make — it’s the general lack of quality. Windows 95 was buggy and aggravating! It took Microsoft multiple versions of Windows to nail it down. Windows 98, then Windows ME, then Windows 2000, and finally Windows XP. I’ve purchased licenses for all of these, and not once was it by choice. A Dell laptop I bought around 2001 came with Windows ME (which, by most accounts, was actually worse than Win98), and I couldn’t opt out of buying it. The Microsoft Bully Monopoly made sure of that. They also made sure the buggy piece of crap I was forced to pay for was unusable on any other computer. If, for some reason, I wanted to take my copy of Windows ME and use it on my desktop, it wouldn’t let me. The install CD was keyed to the laptop. It was at this point that I started more seriously using Linux, simply because I was starting to get pissed off. Not because Linux is better (we’ll save that argument for another day) but because I resented being pushed around; being treated like cattle.

What’s changed since Windows 95? Not much. When I bought my Thinkpad in 2008 (having had my Dell for about 7 years) I had to buy Vista with it. Six months after I was pressed into buying Vista, Microsoft came knocking again, suggesting I should upgrade to Windows 7. Meanwhile, both Vista and 7 are the same old crap — ship it out the door this quarter; never mind that it’s not actually finished. It takes Microsoft a year or two of “software updates” (internet connection and legal copy required) to actually finish anything they release.

Then there’s the X-Box. I was in college and I saw people with the first X-Box (not 360). They were using them as media servers; storing music and video on them in between playing Halo. Cool! I’d like one, please. I buy a 360. Since I intend to store media on it, I splurge for top model — the 360 Elite — with 120 gigs.

Then it arrives. Right away, I’m presented with disappointment after disappointment. From watching all my friends with the first X-Box in college, I assumed I could copy some MP3s to the X-Box’s hard drive via Windows file sharing (which I have also paid for) and then play music on my TV with pretty visualizations as I cook dinner.

But, the answer is no. Even though I’ve bought their top-of-the-line console, I still don’t own it. The hard drive is dominated by Microsoft, and I can’t put anything on there that Microsoft doesn’t want me to, even though I’ve already paid for the hardware. I can’t copy my own content to the drive. So what do they want me to put on the hard drive? Anything that costs money. Microsoft points, Disney Dollars, or whatever. The hard drive exists purely to hold “licensed” content, which is really more like “leashed” content. Never mind that I want to have a legal mp3 of my friend’s band playing when I cook dinner, because Microsoft can’t make money off of that.

I wound up having to buy 3rd-party hardware to get what I wanted. A little fileserver box with a pair of RAID’d 2TB hard drives stores my media with redundancy. It acts as a “media server” and streams content to the X-Box. It runs Linux. Finally, I can play an MP3 while cooking dinner…. but that giant hard drive I sprung for in the X-Box was a waste. Even then it’s still infuriating — the X-Box has no system for 3rd-party codecs. You can’t play MKVs, along with any number of other formats.

Since that stupid overpriced hard drive is empty and just sitting there, I figure, “Oh, I can copy my games to it and not have to switch discs….”

Nope. Even when you copy the game to the X-Box’s hard drive, it still requires the disc. I still have to go rustle through the shelf and find the disk I want. Why? Because someone could copy the game to a friend’s hard drive, unplug the ethernet, and the friend could play your copy of the game forever. And Microsoft would get no money from them. How terrible.

Halo 3 is the killer app for X-Box, and it’s a pretty good game. But then they pull the same nonsense, recursively. Pay $50 for Halo 3. Pay $50 for Halo ODST. Six months later: NEW MAP PACK! Buy it with Microsoft Points, or you won’t be able to play Halo 3 online anymore, even though you’ve already paid for the game twice, in addition to paying a $10 monthly subscription fee for X-Box live.

$300 for something that fails to deliver on its promises and locks you into contracts, $100 to buy a game twice and still not own it, $5 for new maps every six months, all while eternally paying a $10/month fee for multiplayer. $500 for 3rd-party hardware to actually do what you need to do.

Meanwhile, my roommate Dan subscribes to Netflix. He held a weekly “Anime Night” with a friend a few states away. The X-Box/Netflix combo was actually quite nice at first, aside from the usual piss-poor interface. Dan would crash in bed in front of his TV with a headset, and the anime was synced with his friend many miles away. It struck me as a beautiful way to keep in touch with distant friends. The movie is synchronized on both ends, and you can chat as if you’re on the same couch, thanks to the headset. It’s not quite being in the same room together, but it’s good enough to be almost magic. This is the core of what is beautiful about technology.

Then it was gone. Poof. Stolen. Software update. Microsoft brings you the “Metro”! The update was forcefully applied to Dan’s X-Box. It kicked him off Netflix, and physically removed the Party Watch feature. It didn’t even let them finish the episode they were on. There is no more anime night now. Microsoft blew it to pieces.

Meanwhile, I fire up my own X-Box, apply the update, and see ads everywhere. 3/4 of the screen is advertising some movie I have no interest in seeing, and I have to hunt around to figure out how to play a video. I didn’t even want a new dashboard; the old one did just fine. Is there anything good about this? Let’s see… I read that there’s voice commands now, like Siri. Oh, that sounds nice…… wait, never mind, you have to buy Kinect for that. Kinect costs $100.

Another $100? And then you want me to buy a Microsoft Phone, too? Pardon my french, but fuck you. This is a scam; a pyramid scheme. Mafia/mob tactics. Economic slavery. Whatever you want to call it.

Now I spy Microsoft astroturfing — paying off journalists and manipulating bloggers — to try and build “buzz” about how great the new Windows Phone OS is. The one that just raped our X-Boxes, and took away things we’ve already paid for, over and over and over.  Microsoft’s conveniently-owned media outlets like Slate.com pump out puffery saying how delicious a Microsoft Pizza is…….

The Windows Phone OS will be buggy and disappointing, even if it does look nice. Features promised on delivery will remain unfinished for months (did you know copy/paste still doesn’t work?). Then you’ll have to buy a new phone to get features you were promised on your current phone, and never got. You won’t get all of them on your next phone, either, and some stuff you already had will have gone missing.

This goes back to the very beginnings of Microsoft. Microsoft has never actually invented anything; they’re just very good at being a middleman. Remember MS-DOS? It’s what made Microsoft an economic powerhouse. You think they wrote MS-DOS? Wrong. They licensed it!! From the very beginning, their strategy has been to steal something valuable from the population at large, hold it hostage on the top shelf, and then charge access — domination. It’s akin to the feudal landlord that builds a grain silo and offers to store everyone’s grain for free; then turns around and says they own the grain once everyone’s put theirs in the silo.

In Microsoft’s wet-dream future, the X-Box will cost $500, the games $100 for a six-month license (plus $20 every six months for map packs) and then you’ll have to pay $50/month for X-Box live on top of that. Your Microsoft Phone will cost $500 in addition to the $100/month plan. You’ll buy a copy of the latest Microsoft Bieber single for $5 on your phone, then you’ll pay another $5 to buy it on your X-Box, then another $5 to buy it in your car. Then they’ll decide they can squeeze a bit more out of you, and it’ll go up to $10. Don’t like it? Too bad. They’re the only game in town. And next year’s platform will be completely incompatible, meaning your three legally purchased copies of the the Microsoft Bieber single are now worthless.

To this, I say: I like Halo, but it’s far from the most important thing in my life. There comes a point where it won’t be worth the price. Microsoft is very close to that point.

Email is a wonderful thing for people whose role in life is to be on top of things. But not for me; my role is to be on the bottom of things. What I do takes long hours of studying and uninterruptible concentration. I try to learn certain areas of computer science exhaustively; then I try to digest that knowledge into a form that is accessible to people who don’t have time for such study. 
– Donald Knuth

I’m not quite as extreme as Eco or Knuth — I check my email quite often. No, I’m merely terrible at answering my phone. I only have a cell, and I tend to leave it on vibrate… in the clothes hamper, in the pocket of a pair of pants I wore yesterday.

Let me explain: It’s not that I don’t want to talk to people, or anything like that. Really, it boils down to establishing some boundaries in order to protect my ability to concentrate. The things I do for a living require a lot of concenctration, and so do many of the things I do for fun as well. If I can’t concentrate, I can’t get anything done, and I certainly don’t have any fun. When I’m deep in thought about some piece of code I’m working on, ringing phones are frustrating and aggrivating. Often, I have to backtrack a few steps and rethink the last bit of whatever I was mulling over. Putting this in comp sci terms — a context switch is expensive.

A few decades ago, people weren’t expected to get anything done on an airplane. There were no TV ads in taxicabs. Now, we’re bombarded with all sorts of stimuli. I may not be able to get away from everything, but I can bury my phone in the clothes hamper. Email is much more tolerable because I can ignore that for five minutes while I finish up what I’m doing. Obviously, by this rationale, if you tell me when you’re going to call, we have absolutely no problem. Since I know you’re calling, I’ll be sure not to be in the middle of something.

Otherwise, I’m sorry to be a mule-headed New Englander, but… I’m unlikely to answer your call. It’s nothing personal, and rest assured that I’m working on something important. Or playing Grand Theft Auto….

I started more blogs, for more specific topics — programming, music, and so on. I became friends with people I’d never met. Once, riding home from school on the subway, I hap’d upon gentleman wearing a t-shirt with a blog URL I recognized. I chatted him up, and it turned out to be his blog. We knew each other, even though we’d never met. It was a very charming moment, and the epitome of what I feel blogging should be. Blogging can foster a fun, serendipitous sense of community with people you’d otherwise never know. It can turn an anonymous face on the subway into a friend. It let me rant and rave about things that bothered me, and hear back from other people — often strangers — that felt the same way, and made me feel less alone. It filled in a yearning for a sense of community, and community is all too hard to come by these days.

Unfortunately, that turned out to be the high-water mark. As “weblogs” turned into “blogs” and more people got on board, ugliness started to creep into the picture. I saw stories in the news about people being fired for badmouthing employers on blogs, or getting in trouble for unpopular political sentiments. Blogs were starting to chomp down on the forbidden apple, their innocence and openness under attack. Still, I didn’t worry too much about it, and kept blogging. Most of what I wrote was just the ins and outs of my day, weird dreams I had, and random topics I’d been mulling over. I didn’t think anyone would have any problem with any of it, to be frank. I was wrong.

The drama began one cold winter evening when some high school friends of mine complained about one of our teachers on their blogs. It was pretty tame — the language was polite (though critical). There were no threats, merely griping about his, er, uneven classroom conduct. It was just venting, teenage angst, and not anything the writers thought to be of any real consequence. They were blogging about the teacher along with all the other things in their lives — friends, commuting, politics, whatever. We’re talking about one or two blog entries out of a hundred. None of them thought it would kick over an anthill.

It turned out that a school secretary with too much time on her hands had found the blogs, and was actively following them. She wasted little time informing the teacher in question, and the next day a few of my friends wound up in a disciplinary meeting with no clue as to why they had been summoned. The school administration demanded that the posts be removed. My friends complied, yet they were still punished, simply because the teacher in question felt the need for revenge (ironically, this is the sort of behavior they blogged/complained about in the first place!) It made me angry. I felt my friends’ freedom of speech had been curtailed, and their privacy invaded. They felt the same way. My emotions overrode what little degree of political savvy I had at the time, and I posted an entry to my blog calling the school faculty fascists. Childish, I know, but this was high school. I guess I felt I should fall on the sword along with my buddies. The school obliged, and I got in trouble too. There was talk of calling the ACLU, but we realized it wasn’t the sort of case that would light the ACLU’s tits on fire, so to speak. We bitterly let it go, and went on with our lives.

After that, I got a lot more paranoid about blogging. You never know who will find your blog. I deleted certain entries and removed my name from the blogs. I disallowed the spidering of my blogs by search engines. Most importantly, I wrote less, and less freely. As I went through college and eased into the life of an employed adult, the paranoia only deepened. I became nervous about the consequences of employers finding my blogs. I ascribe to the hacker ethos that information should be free, wants to be free. It pained me to do it, but a man has to eat. Finally, eventually, I pulled every public blog entry I had. I started new blogs with absolutely no ties to my real identity. So it’s been for the past couple years — I feel that the only way I can speak freely is to remain anonymous.

It’s not that I’m a political firebrand liable to incite a riot with my prose, or anything. At the end of the day, I’m just worried something I write will be taken out of context and be used against me. I’m not a bad person, and my views aren’t that out of line with mainstream society. I get up every morning and try to do the right thing. I work hard. I’m kind to animals. I donate to charity. I think Hitler was an evil jerk.

Recently, though, I’ve started to feel somewhat hampered by the anonymity. I’ll awkwardly rehash some point from memory for a co-worker, while knowing I have it elegantly phrased in a blog entry I can’t link. It might put my blog “on the grid.” I can tell a potential employer that I’m a great writer, but I can’t show them.

So, I’ve decided to try exposing a little of myself again. In a brash all-or-nothing approach, my real name is right in the URL, and I will allow spidering. Please don’t make me regret it… or this, too, will promptly vaporize.

no, i hate sesame bagels because the seeds get everywhere.