>>18808
>If you surrender the ability to run your main environment on something at least competitive with modern hardware, and access modern networks with it, you've lost the game. The moment we're squeezed into retrocomputing on a dwindling supply of eWaste quarantined from the normalfags on our own LARPnet, we've been neutralized.
That's unfortunately an important point. "Just use old hardware" and "just pirate all software" are not solutions to problems, but consumer responses. They aren't sustainable on their own, as they don't create, but cling to what others make without financially supporting them. Relying on old hardware depends on that dwinding eWaste supply you mentioned, and exclusive piracy depends on the very fragile community and technical/legal context surrounding software piracy.
Actual solutions, on the other hand, involve providing ways to create and support those who create. You also ideally want to address the problems that push people to use cancerous software or centralized web services in the first place as opposed to you just acting dismissively towards them. Think Gaben's "piracy is a service problem," but replace piracy with whatever cancer you wish: systemd, webshit, Rust, Discord, or Steam itself.
I gotta head off now, so I can't wrap this up or expand on it the way I'd like to, but I'd suggest looking into the concept of intermediate technology. Al