Just Say No to Microsoft

So, I took my first steps into true nerd-dom this weekend. After a long discussion with family, I decided to move to Linux and give up my Microsoft account. I am writing to you from my brand new System76 Pop_OS! Ubantu Linux machine. Made in Denver, with love, for yours truly.

This is a big deal. Maybe most of you have already made the jump, but I didn’t realize how deeply Microsoft had infiltrated my data and my rights as a creator. TEAMs, Copilot, and MS360 permeated everything I did with updates I didn’t want, data usage I didn’t need, and cost that seemed exorbitant for personal use. I get it for my corporate life, but as a simple writer and blogger? It made no sense to spend hundreds of dollars per year for ok performance, no control over my data or computing power, and to be subject to the whims of whatever billionaire wanted to know about me that day.

I also deeply resent the data farming. I’m not that exciting. I don’t work on the dark web, I don’t really have any outside interests except for science and math. I shouldn’t really be that worried about all the monitoring and data scraping…except that I hate it. I hate the idea of it. I hate the ads. I hate the surveillance that is likely feeding our dystopian fall to MAGA authoritarianism. I don’t want my knowledge to feed AI training. I don’t want to use a data center for a question on how to spell surveillance. I love using AI for coding my simulations and learning, but I want to be able to shut it off and just use it when I need it.

So, this weekend, I put on my big-girl pants and made the switch. So far, there have been a couple small hiccups, but I’m excited to learn and use this new OS. The computer is beautiful. The interface is beautiful and simple. It feels like Mac before it was popular. I am cautiously optimistic about this. I can run all my standard programs and have access to a bunch of new apps that sound like they were built for my kind of nerd. Protein-folding programs, quantitative chemistry programs, scientific calculator and graphing protocols pre-built for complex analysis problems. Cosmology, physics, all kinds of interesting things are STANDARD. I feel like I may have found my people.

Lately, I have been feeling very intellectually unfulfilled. I crave some kind of discourse, or some kind of meaningful understanding. I’ve been reading more, thinking more; drawn to a sense that I need to feed the beast of my own mind without AI. My own skills and interests have value and are worth exploring in the old fashioned ways of Socratic discussion and study without any need of a product, service, school or other money-making enterprise. My mind does not need to generate profit for someone else. It is ok to have deep thoughts and an exchange of ideas without making money from it. I am getting more and more resentful of institutional requirements and social requirements to do my thinking in spaces that I have to pay for or where my ideas are farmed for someone else. Sharing is one thing, data mining and strip mining the human soul is another. Moving to Linux is just my first step in intellectual independence.

One of the AI CEO’s (maybe Sam Altman) mentioned in one of his interminable interviews that he wanted to make AI (and all intelligence) a utility that humans had to pay for, the same as water or electricity. I was deeply, profoundly insulted and disturbed. I don’t want to have to pay for access to my own thoughts and I don’t want to have to budget for the ability to think. My compute needs are mine. I don’t want to have to use AI if I don’t want to and I should be able to compete with AI for my own ability to produce usable and valuable intelligence. I find it ironic that these companies built their product on the backs of researchers and artists and now want to sell it back to them under the auspices of ‘productivity’. I also hate that individuals subsidize all the water, electricity, and content and now are excluded from use based on cost. Our power grays out as Altman’s agents thrive. We have less, they have more and now it’s our responsibility to advocate for policy and regulation to control their monsters to prevent our own destruction, even as they make obscene profits from selling us out. These CEO’s deserve to fail or be nationalized so that their ‘resources’, real people, can get something out of this whole journey to extinction before the end.