Pihole, Windows, Ubuntu, and the loss of the internet
I haven't seriously used Windows for a long time. In the old Windows XP days, I had a bit of a ritual I'd go through every single time I installed Windows. I'd go through and change as many of the default settings as I knew and set them to better alternatives. I'd get rid of Internet Explorer, install Chrome or Firefox, play with the page file settings. Scour the auto-starting applications but also the list of enabled services. I'd get it as lean as I knew how. I wasn't necessarily even talented at this but I knew for sure that by default Windows was set with a bunch of non-ideal preferences. In some cases this was fairly innocent; a service that most users would need (but that I don't need) is set to autostart to reduce confusion and friction. In other cases, it was clearly malicious -- cramming Microsoft applications down your throat in the hopes that it locked you into their ecosystem.
This was XP, mind you. I've mostly been on Linux since 2010, but I did dive back into Windows around 2015-2017 for gaming. I ran Windows 7 and Windows 10. For the most part, the previous pattern persisted; I needed to jump through a lot of hoops to change bad or malicious defaults. But, Windows 10 introduced something new. You'd spend a significant amount of time removing bundled applications, OneDrive, all the terrible apps you can only uninstall via Powershell. Disabling Cortana as much as possible. (and of course you could never remove Cortana.) Fighting with even more of the privacy settings. But, then a Windows update would drop, and a LOT of stuff would be reinstalled, settings would be flipped. And you'd spend all the time to disable them, and of course later a new update would drop, and all the trash would be reinstalled and reconfigured yet again. This was long before any hint of Windows 11, and even before Windows 10 got as bad as it is now. There was no online account requirement, no recall, no forced restarts for updates, etc. Of course, I got sick of this, and dumped Windows for Linux. I didn't even know about Proton (Steam's compatibility layer that lets you play Windows games on Linux) -- I actually stumbled into that accidentally when I noticed Steam would just let me install a Windows game I owned. I was just so sick Windows.
It was very clear that Microsoft no longer viewed the OS as something that I owned, and didn't care about my preferences, my workflow. They saw it as something they could use to coerce me into making a small bit more money for Microsoft. When I switched to Linux, this was really my primary motivation. If I need to actively fight my OS to make it non-hostile to me, I've got a bad OS. It's not just a matter of preferences, it's a matter of escaping coercion. Computing and the internet really used to be empowering, but that reality was slowly changing.
When I was on Linux, I had been on Ubuntu for a while. It was the first Linux distro I tried way back 2004-2005, and I really loved it. Ubuntu wasn't perfect, but compared to Windows it was all about returning computing to its roots. That is, making sure my computer was a machine that I owned and configured. It didn't make choices for me so that the company could coerce me into purchasing their products and services. You can probably see where this is going. Ubuntu never got anywhere near as bad as Windows -- and I doubt it ever will. But it did stray from the path. One day, a few years ago I was trying to figure out what to do about a new Ubuntu installation. I found a "decrappify" script on a github repot. It dumped snaps, removed the advertisement when running apt, and made a few other changes. The script actually did not work that well, but this was not what pushed me over the edge. Instead, I realize that I was treating Ubuntu the way I'd treated Windows: on a first install, how do I make sure the OS is not hostile to me? Again, the hostility was minuscule compared to Windows, but was definitely there. So I left Ubuntu and will never return. I've been on Fedora, Mint, Manjaro, CachyOS. All have been great except that Manjaro was not super stable.
I also got into Pihole around 2016. I've always hated advertisements (and always will) and Pihole was a really cool concept; block ads at the DNS for any device on your network. Put more pointedly; retake some control over the devices on your network. Devices that are built to take advantage of you, to coerce you. Devices that pretend to offer you a service, but really you are not the customer. They exist to steal your data and sell it to data brokers. And if there was a conflict between the interests of the customer and the interests of the data broker, the the data broker's interests would obviously win out.
For a while, I got pretty obsessive about Pihole. I broke a lot of websites, and I did it intentionally. "Why the fuck do you need this CDN? Fuck your CDN. Just serve content." If I couldn't identify a subdomain, I'd just block it. I didn't care what I broke; I was angry at the internet. When I was a young teenager, the internet was a beautiful island of sanity in a world that didn't make sense to me. There was always better information available on the internet. I could learn about things I really cared about -- at my pace, without distractions. That world was already declining in 2010, but by 2016 it was impossible to ignore. Facebook has hostile. The transformation was so complete that I doubt people would believe me if I told them early Facebook was actually wonderful. But it was. Reddit was getting worse and worse. Amazon reviews we starting to become worthless. And nearly everywhere you turned, someone was trying to coerce or persuade. Feed you with outrage, steal your attention. Waste your time. My island of sanity was truly dead.
For a while, I allowed myself the delusion that Pihole and other privacy technologies could let me cling on. I did always know it would be a losing battle in the end. But despite this, a part of me wanted to cling onto the familiar. The internet, for the most part is now a busy mall. There might be useful stuff there, but you want to get in, get out, and put your shields up. The mall is there to waste your time and money. The internet is there to waste your life, to degrade your soul.
Surprisingly, it wasn't until this morning that I put two and two together. I left Windows because it ceased to be something I control. When I installed Windows, I tried to fight against it, but it was ultimately a losing battle. I refused to accept the coercion. And what is Pihole? If I move to a new home, what is the first thing I do? Setup Pihole so that the internet is less hostile. Like Windows, we will lose this battle in the end. My island of sanity is gone. The only recourse is offline media, nature, books. Anything but the internet. Fuck every single person who writes a dark pattern. Fuck every single advertiser. Fuck all data brokers. The dregs of humanity are here for your mind. They're here to poison you, to radicalize you. They're building tools to herd you into acting in their interests. The internet is not primarily bots, but the internet is dead.