The promise that the smartphone phone is a product that will enhance your life is, and may always have been, a lie. The smart phone has become, and may always have been planned to be, a tool that for-profit corporations use to exploit you and the government uses to control you.

If you want to be free from exploitation and control, you have to change the way you think about and use your phone — you need a paradigm shift. Use your smartphone primarily, if not exclusively, as a communication device. Use your smartphone primarily, if not exclusively, for cellular phone calls, secure voice, text, and video messaging, and for encrypted e-mail. Self-host, and whenever possible, use open-source software.

If, on the other hand, you don’t mind being exploited and controlled, just keep doing what you’re doing — the for-profit corporations and the government will thank you.

The internet use to be free. Free as in freedom, not as in beer. That is what made the internet mostly wonderful, but also horrible at times.

Then the normies arrived, and soon after, as parasites are prone to do, the for profit-corporations descended on the internet. Now, the internet is free as in beer, not as in freedom, and it is mostly horrible.

Is it too late, or do we still have time to fix it?

“Privacy is necessary for an open society in the electronic age. Privacy is not secrecy. A private matter is something one doesn’t want the whole world to know, but a secret matter is something one doesn’t want anybody to know. Privacy is the power to selectively reveal oneself to the world.”

Eric Hughes, A Cypherpunk’s Manifesto

Everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression; this right includes freedom to hold opinions without interference and to seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers.

Universal Declaration of Human Rights, Article 19