I'm a Consum-ee, Not a Consum-er
I don’t have a healthy relationship with consumer products. Or consumer content. I spent a lot of time on World of Warcraft back in the day. I’ve spent a lot of time fiddling with apps on my iPhone. A lot. Candy Crush…nuf said. TV shows keep getting better and better. There’s so much amazing content, I could just stare at these fonts of great entertainment all day long, wasting away, if I was so inclined.
I’ve noticed all my stuff isn’t my stuff anymore–Apple decides which software I can run on my phone, Amazon decides which books to delete from my collection, most computers I can buy from retailers come with malware preloaded. Intel and AMD put backdoors on all their chips, which means pretty much any computer I get has a backdoor. Almost all the email I sent to friends and family goes through Google whether I host my own email server or not. And they dip into my email to sell me stuff, sell my friends stuff, and comply with secret government requests to do whatever they like with my emails.
Online ad networks use my IP and browser to fingerprint me and follow me around wherever I go, so they sell my data to whomever wants it and chase me to all corners of the web with their ads. Criminals are constantly scanning my computers for holes they can exploit in order to recruit my laptop into their zombie DDoS armies or so they can steal my credit card info and maybe charge $10 to me without my noticing before they get away with the money.
I’ve turned off my phone’s ringer (whitelisting certain people) because over half the calls I get are someone trying to take up a few minutes of my time for their purpose. I’ve gotten pretty fast at deleting email spam. 95% of the snail mail I get goes directly into recycling, but it still takes a couple seconds each.
I’m not so much a consum-er as a consum-ee. I am what is being consumed.