Thank you for not snitching!

Every time I turn around, Windows and macOS and even my damned watch are coming up with some new and entertaining way to keep tabs on me, my friends, and everything we say and do. I think we might finally have come to a breaking point.

Thank you for not snitching!

Hey, chucklefuck, you're not ALLOWED to take screenshots of everything I do on my computer!

I'm not gonna lie, boys--I've pretty much had it with this nonsense. I now own half a dozen mechanical watches, with springs in them, and then another half dozen with batteries and hands instead of batteries and screens. I use my phone almost exclusively to talk to people instead of to get my news, sports, and entertainment; I'll admit that I talk to them with my thumbs a great deal, but that's just the modern world for you. I don't think I'm asking that much when I say that everything I own should not be snitching on every action I take. The reason our forefathers didn't encode a right to privacy in the Bill of Rights was that it never occurred to them that your writing desk might one day be able to publish your collected works without your permission.

We'll set aside the fact that the tenth amendment was supposed to cover for this, or the fact that all those guys who argued against the inclusion of the Bill of Rights were probably right, and we'll just talk about fucking snitching for a minute.

Snitching is getting out of hand. The fact that the Internet at large had to tell Microsoft, "Hey, chucklefuck, you're not ALLOWED to take screenshots of everything I do on my computer! That ain't a feature, bozo--that's a breach of the social contract!" is not a good sign. We have clearly gone too far down a road that no one was meant to tread, and yet here we are. It's time that we made snitching a problem for the people doing it instead of for us.

If there's one thing I admire about the Black community (we'll have a conversation some other time about why I'm ok with capitalizing that), it's that they do a good job of self-policing. It's high time we started. I'm going to start by taking a long, hard look at the software I use every day to find out which programs are snitching and which ones are playing by the rules. I'm also going to take a longer, harder look at which programs I really have to keep using and which ones I can jettison.

To be clear, Adobe is already gone. Fuck Adobe. Fuck Photoshop. Fuck all that shit. I mean, hell, my photographs have improved a lot since I first bought a Lightroom subscription ten years ago. I don't really need you anymore. Eat a dick, Adobe.

The question is whether I can afford to drop Microsoft. I've got my gaming desktop running Ubuntu Linux as we speak. I have mixed feelings about that, but it's not bad. I kind of like Pop OS better, but of course they're busy with this big new desktop environment of theirs and... Whatever. It works. Anyway, there are two flies in the ointment:

The good news is that a lot of older games, in my experience, actually work better on Linux. Don't ask me why; I'm not that kind of nerd. In any case, I've only been playing Selaco, DOOM, and Dark Forces lately, so it doesn't really matter at the moment. Oh, and Motor Town.

Don't get me started on Motor Town.

The question of exactly how much snitching Linux itself does is... open. I guess that's all I can really say about that at the moment.

P.S. It should go without saying that my website does not snitch. I run uBlock Origin, which reports having blocked 0% of this page as of just now. If you catch this website doing anything funny, I want you to say so. Hopefully you know my email address but, if not, we'll come up with something soon.