Who needs socialism now there's Joplin* 🤷🏻♂️
Celebrating my lived reality
The latest personal project in my world is to migrate my website (24thcavrecon.org) from a rent-seeking annual subscription platform to Wordpress dot org. This will save 204€ a year, for no loss of utility or quality.
Last week I cancelled the note-taking app, with which I run much of my creative and work life, installed a free open-source equivalent, imported ten years’ of notes and saved a £79 annual subscription. During the same life admin session I also cancelled a 35€ annual password manager service, exported every password and set up a free open-source password manager.
In both cases I now spend no money while also taking control of my own data. This is pleasing, especially since my personal notes are no longer sitting on someone else’s servers and my passwords are no longer vulnerable to the kinds of data breach suffered by my previous password security provider.
A month ago I used Claude AI to guide me through the process of having 24thcavrecon.org translate into French and German at the touch of a button, again at zero financial cost. I needed minimal technical nous to achieve this. Just typing request prompts, copying output, pasting it somewhere and a bit of patience when things initially went wrong.
The historical material I work with - now thousands of documents and photographs - had become impossible to organise without a professional archive tool and I baulked at the cost of those. But then I found a free open-source archive organisation tool, built by academics for academics, sucked up the learning curve and never looked back.
If I hadn’t been short of money I’d have bought various services and would now be paying north of 1,000€ a year for the privilege of using tools that I’d then feel locked into using, the more useful they became. Because that’s how subscription platforms work. They become woven into your life to such an extent that losing one is like losing a metaphorical limb.
Having just achieved the lifelong dream of assembling a studio at home, evenings are spent learning and making music. You already guessed that much of the software I use for this is free and often open-source. Some of it is so valuable to me that I donated money to the projects by way of thanks, but I didn’t have to do that. These tools are freely given for anyone who wants them.
The remarkable thing is that all of this feels normal. It’s just life as usual. And I have to step back to reflect on what teenage me would have thought of the power and utility freely available to older Mike.
And yet, if you engage in common chit chat, consume bogstandard news media or dwell for long in Substackistan, there is a relentless mood of civilisational decline.
Everything is broken.
The popular ‘discourse’ is familiar.
Modernity is spiritually empty. Technology is enslaving us, stealing from us, misleading us. Men and women mistrust or even hate each other. There is a ‘loneliness epidemic’ due to social atomisation and those pesky little screens. The algorithms are ruining everything. Institutional trust is at a record low.
