There has already been several discussions about the problems with social media, both in my articles on Google and Facebook, and on the rest of the internet. This is Mrwhosetheboss’ video on why he is ‘worried about humanity’s future’, and is a very good video which describes the most well-known issues with social media very clearly and easily. Any attempt from my side to write all that is wrong with social media would be a waste as it has already been made so well. Please watch it before reading the rest of this article. What follows are my thoughts not just about that video, but about social media, and its aspect of social surveillance.

Debian 11 has been released recently, but one of the admittedly few reasons I am excited for it is that testing/ unstable will be unfrozen soon.  I have already lost my main Debian install due to dependency hell resulting from an impulsive jump to sid+experimental in need for newer packages. (Testing had been frozen since January.) I wish I switched to Flatpaks instead.

Did you get to know about the study conducted by Instagram which showed that the platform was extremely toxic to teens and negetively affected their mental health? You didn’t? I’m not surprised – they kept in under the covers since 2019. If you are using Facebook, Instagram and other such sites regularly, you may not realise it, but these ‘services’ are slowly taking over your social and personal lives.

As someone who is primarily recognised as the “tech guy” by his classmates, teachers and friends, you would think that I have some level of competency at actually maintaining a computer or phone such that they are always at least at a functional state. This is a complete and utter lie. What most people don’t realise is whatever knowledge we ’technical’ people have, we achieved it by a series of trying and testing. I can’t talk for others here, but my success to failure ratio in such experiments is alarmingly low. But not only are such fails a learning opportunity, they are what make my tinkering and technical endeavours fun.