Computers Are No Longer Used

I believe that most people are suffering from computing illiteracy, this, however, was not the case through the history of computing.

The main reason for that is the way that things are introduced to modern computer users, like mobile phone users. It’s so limited, in FOSS conferences these kinds of software are notorious of using their users, not the other way around. If we are to get back in time and tell some computer user in the 90s that people are going to pay for getting machines that will execute uncharted instructions, they would be surprised just as telling a Jew in the 40s that people are going to pay to visit Auschwitz.

So what did happen? People were misled to believe that they are having the same computing quality in much less learning curve, which was a lie. A lie that has proven itself to be very useful for corporates whose interests are being reinforced by the ignorance of users. Proprietary software serves a good example for that, people now run their life totally on someone’s else machine, providing it with all information not only about themselves but the closest people to them as well.

The misconduct that software companies perform is another example too, let’s take the Windows 11 upgrade as an example; please pay us $130 for the new version which will ask you to pay a higher-resources machine, which also we are going to use to track everything we can about you, selling information about you as much as we can, bloating your experience with ads everywhere and we will provide you with one of the worst malfunction software to use that barely work (sorry we can’t afford fixing it because of legacy support) compiled on the most unnecessarily complicated operating system ever to existed.

At some point of history, that in which people who experienced old computers interfaces and new one, there was that sector of people who knew what was really going on and how this new method of computing is engineered to use people, not computers. However, after this kind dominated, it’s now the default way of doing computing.

The way things were always required people to understand what is going on in their machine, yes, it required sophisticated understanding and it was time-consuming for some, but how did it yield? Users understood computer very well and their computing experience was way much better than mostly any average modern computer user.

Here are some tips I wrote to my friend:

• A good smart phone is a dumb phone. Smart phones are nothing but tools to collect information about you and let you deluge in and endless consumption series (or at least most applications there are designed for so). You can not achieve anything on a smart phone. You can not study, you can not read extensively, you can not produce any useful content, in fact you can not even consume useful content, but short stupid videos. Ask yourself when was the most recent time that you did something useful on your phone? Yes you are probably consuming something and not doing anything useful at all. This kind of social engineering is useful only for the people who are running your phone, whose interests are in keeping you for as much possible time using it as they can.

  Throwing your smartphone away is the first step in doing computing the right way.

• Learn programming. It is not hard, it is not only for computer scientists and software developers, it’s easy and everyone should be able to do it, and it’s the way to achieve magic on your machine.
• Ask questions. I knew some software developers who never knew how the tools that they were using actually worked I remember one time I was showing a C# developer something on my machine, and I split emacs screen showing two files, one of them is Julia and other is C#. He was surprised that my “version of Visual Studio” can run programming language other than C#. He didn’t have the basic understanding that anything is just a text than can be compiled by a command, and edit by a text editor. He never questioned himself how things like Visual Studio even work. . To understand computers well, always ask questions and seek answers for them. Recommended questions to start with: Do I know what are things that my machine is executing? Is my machine invulnerable? How does my operating system work?
• Understand what is computing capable and incapable of. See Computer boundries.
• Many people would recommend using a free operating system such as Linux, I think this is good thing however I don’t think people would feel comfortable to do it out of advise, but out of a need. Use whatever you like until you understand why you should use Linux.
• Follow this great tutorial.