Ed Zitron has written a tremendous manifesto railing against the tech industry. Carve out some time in your day to read the whole thing.

The average person’s experience with technology is one so aggressive and violative that I believe it leaves billions of people with a consistent low-grade trauma. We seem, as a society, capable of understanding that social media can hurt us, unsettle us, or make us feel crazed and angry, but I think it’s time to accept that the rest of the tech ecosystem undermines our wellbeing in an equally-insidious way. And most people don’t know it’s happening, because everybody has accepted deeply shitty conditions for the last ten years.

Now, some of you may scoff at this a little — after all, you’re smart, you know about disinformation, you know about the tricks of these companies, and thus most people do, right?

Wrong! Most people don’t think about the things they’re doing at all and are just trying to get by in a society that increasingly demands we make more money to buy the same things, with our lives both interfered with and judged by social networks with aggressive algorithms that feed us more things based on what we’ll engage with, which might mean said things piss us off or actively radicalize us. They’re nagged by constant notifications — an average of 46 a day — some useful, some advertisements, like Apple telling us there’s a nailbiter college football game regardless of whether we’ve ever interacted with anything football related, or a Slack message saying you haven’t joined a group you were invited to yet, or Etsy letting you know that you can buy things for an upcoming holiday. It’s relentless, and the more time you invest in using a device, the more of these notifications you get, making you less likely to turn them off. After all, how well are you doing keeping your inbox clean? Oh what’s that? You get 25 emails a day, many of them from a company owned by William Sonoma?

As I understand it, people don’t really block ads or delete spam emails? This is madness.

He then goes into excruciating detail about his experienced with an $238 Acer computer.

On November 21, I purchased the bestselling laptop from Amazon — a $238 Acer Aspire 1 with a four-year-old Celeron N4500 Processor, 4GB of DDR4 RAM, and 128GB of slow eMMC storage (which is, and I’m simplifying here, though not by much, basicallyan SD card soldered to the computer’s motherboard. Affordable and under-powered, I’d consider this a fairly representative sample of how millions of people interact with the internet.

I believe it’s also a powerful illustration of the damage caused by the Rot Economy, and the abusive, exploitative way in which the tech industry treats people at scale.

It took 1 minute and 50 seconds from hitting the power button for the laptop to get to the setup screen. It took another minute and a half to connect and begin downloading updates, which took several more minutes. After that, I was faced with a licensing agreement where I agreed to binding arbitration to use Windows, a 24 second pause, and then got shown a screen of different “ways I could unlock my Microsoft experience,” with animations that shuddered and jerked violently.

Now, why do I know that? Because you’ll _never guess who’s a big fan of Windows S? That’s right, Prabhakar Raghavan, The Man Who Killed Google Search, who said that Microsoft’s Windows S “validated” Google’s approach to cheap laptops back when he was Vice President of Google’s G Suite (and three years before he became Head of Search).

To be clear, Windows Home in S Mode is one of the worst operating systems of all time. It is ugly, slow, and actively painful to use, and (unless you deactivate S Mode) locks you into Microsoft’s ecosystem. This man went on to ruin Google Search by the way. How does this man keep turning up? Is it because I say his name so much?

Throughout, the laptop’s cheap trackpad would miss every few clicks. At this point, I was forced to create a Microsoft account and to hand over my cellphone number — or another email address — to receive a code, or I wouldn’t be able to use the laptop. Each menu screen takes 3-5 seconds to load, and I’m asked to “customize my experience” with things like “personalized ads, tips and recommendations,” with every option turned on by default, then to sign up for another account, this time with Acer. At one point I am simply shown an ad for Microsoft’s OneDrive cloud storage product with a QR code to download it on my phone, and then I’m told that Windows has to download a few updates, which I assume are different to the last time it did that.

It has taken, at this point, around 20 minutes to get to this screen. It takes another 33 minutes for the updates to finish, and then another minute and 57 seconds to log in, at which point it pops up with a screen telling me to “set up my browser and discover the best of Windows,” including “finding the apps I love from the Microsoft Store” and the option to “create an AI-generated theme for your browser.” The laptop constantly struggles as I scroll through pages, the screen juddering, apps taking several seconds to load.

When I opened the start bar — ostensibly a place where you have apps you’d use — I saw some things that felt familiar, like Outlook, an email client that is not actually installed and requires you to download it, and an option for travel website Booking.com, along with a link to LinkedIn. One app, ClipChamp, was installed but immediately needed to be updated, which did not work when I hit “update,” forcing me to go to find the updates page, which showed me at least 40 different apps called things like “SweetLabs Inc.” I have no idea what any of this stuff is.

I type “sweetlabs” into the search bar, and it jankily interrupts into a menu that takes up a third of the screen, with half of that dedicated to “Mark Twain’s birthday,” two Mark Twain-related links, a “quiz of the day,” and four different games available for download.

The computer pauses slightly every time I type a letter. Every animation shudders. Even moving windows around feels painful. It is clunky, slow, it feels cheap, and the operating system — previously something I’d considered to be “the thing that operates the computer system” — is actively rotten, strewn with ads, sponsored content, suggested apps, and intrusive design choices that make the system slower and actively upset the user.

It is an incredibly long way of saying buying a $250 computer will result in you owning a shitty computer. I haven’t owned a non-Apple computer in so long I had no idea. A shitty Windows computer or a shitty Chromebook does nothing for me or really anyone.

Not to take away from his point, but if you can afford a $250 computer, just save a little more and get a refurbished or pre-owned MacBook Air for about the same price. It won’t have the latest technology or features, but it will be infinitely better than a Chromebook.

I believe billions of people are in active combat with their devices every day, swiping away notifications, dodging around intrusive apps, agreeing to privacy policies that they don’t understand, desperately trying to find where an option they used to use has been moved to because a product manager has decided that it needed to be somewhere else. I realize it’s tough to conceptualize because it’s so ubiquitous, but how much do you fight with your computer or smartphone every day? How many times does something break? How many times have you downloaded an app and found it didn’t really do the thing you wanted it to? How many times have you wanted to do something simple and found that it’s actually really annoying?

How much of your life is dodging digital debris, avoiding scams, ads, apps that demand permissions, and endless menu options that bury the simple things that you’re actually trying to do?

You are the victim of a con. You have spent years of your life explaining to yourself and others that “this is just how things are,” accepting conditions that are inherently exploitative and abusive. You are more than likely not deficient, stupid, or “behind the times,” and even if you are, there shouldn’t be multi-billion dollar enterprises that monetize your ignorance.

There has always been a business to exploit the naïve and stupid. There’s a sucker born every minute.

I don’t feel in “active combat” with my computer or my phone. I can turn off notifications. I’ve never had a computer “break.” I’ve downloaded apps that have micro-subscriptions attached that I didn’t want to opt-in and so I simple deleted the app. I have ad blocking software everywhere. I don’t experience this “trauma” that Zitron espouses.

Maybe I’m in a bubble?

“If you’re not paying for the product, then you’re the product,” is one of the most repeated quotes from the Netflix documentary, The Social Dilemma. I fully understand this concept. Do you?

Tech companies and platforms only exist to make money. They continue to make the lives of those who participate in their platforms, who are too stupid, tired, naïve, or ignorant, terrible. Everything is bad because of obnoxious, vicious and malicious digital manipulation. It’s why the next four years in the United States and maybe the world is going to be objectively bad and why I’m actively pulling away from these platforms.

You probably should too.