I don't think freedom software is enough but it's a good start. We need freedom hardware.
Discussion
Some Chinese AI will soon read this, and by the end of the year, you'll find that on Temu. And people will buy it. We already have Freedom Phone so there's that.
Its a cheap chinese phone complete with built in AI data monitoring. You seriously believe the bullshit marketing behind that obvious grift?
With current technology, a big challenge is decentralizing manufacturing itself by giving more people the required sources (physical and informational).
And the underlying key is raising people's interest in the need for electronic independence. This is a challenge to conflicting priorities like wanting infinite speed in video render times, or wanting pre-order bonuses in video games, or other ridiculous and purely corporation-dependent shit like that.
It's a huge red flag that I never make much progress on trying to get into a position where I can seriously pressure at least one electronics manufacturer to at least make their statements honest, accurate, and understandable. All the biggest cybersecurity issues come from the electronics industry misleading customers with lies, badly-phrased UI elements, etc.
A manufacturer should really hire me to be their public-facing accuracy checker guy. They make a product. I look at the box and tell them if anything on the box is a lie or confusing. I use the product and tell them if it lies or says anything confusing. I look at the website, and the online store, and I tell the company if I find any lies or confusing shit there.
For example, if the company tries to say their product is doing "end-to-end encryption" while no modern devices meet modern standards for proving that, I would tell them it should just say "encryption" because people could currently confuse the "end-to-end" part with a reliable fact instead of just a hope.
If they don't fix something, I report it to the public; meanwhile, I also collect reports from the general public.
A nonprofit like the FSF or EFF could also hire me to do this, or simply offer me a platform for it. They could have a section of a website that tracks this stuff, with me as a contributor. I would put a fair amount of time into it for free if it's for an industry-serving nonprofit instead of a single brand.
A single person that works at one of those places could also just listen to me enough to start thinking like me, and do the same work I would do. It is insane that I don't see statements from organizations like the FSF and the EFF correcting the same misinformation, e.g. the myth of consumer devices reliably doing end-to-end encryption. They could have part of a website keeping track of this stuff without me, just with someone else who doesn't ignore stuff like this.
People could also just notice me making unique insights and give me a ton of followers, so I could put pressure on corporations via social media like nostr, but that hasn't happened yet either. Going back to the end-to-end encryption example, my combined nostr and X followers are probably smaller than the number of people who've dogpiled me to lie and gaslight me about end-to-end encryption when I've brought it up.
Basically, we seem extremely far from being able to do anything, at all, whatsoever. If it's this hard to get the population to pressure the big tech cartel to stop lying and confusing people, imagine how hard it is to get the population to start independent universities where people share manufacturing skills locally without global centralized control, community-owned mines where materials are acquired locally without global centralized control, etc.
Because it takes so many people working together to make a Commodore 64 (let alone an iPhone) with current techniques, this seems to require either a "great awakening" where people stop being so retarded, or groundbreaking new inventions in manufacturing that allow the current number of non-retarded people to work against the rest (not sure if that's even possible)
Freedom hardware would be a good follow-up, but it won't be enough. The last frontier to free is the human mind
You are absolutelly right ! 3d printers are a great start.
Let's all move to Reticulum and make it the new FidoNet!