> So the "trap door" here is just that you can't buy a phone and immediately sta...

forshaper · 2026-09-01T14:11:41.000000Z

It's still surprising to me how fast we lost ownership norms, and most seem satisfied with renting the right to be a sort of peasant.

einpoklum · 2026-09-01T21:49:45.000000Z

About that... you might be interested that private property ownership in general is the result of similar kinds of onerous and exploitative processes. Anthropologists and historians have done a bunch of research on this for a while, and one of the interesting narrative texts about this is Engels'

Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State (based on Lewis Herny Morgan's work) https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1884/origin-fami...

NetMageSCW · 2026-09-01T15:20:47.000000Z

Unless you own your own cell carrier and built towers across your country, you can’t own a phone.

orangecat · 2026-09-01T16:16:59.000000Z

Sure you can, the same way you can own a lamp without owning the power plant.

shiandow · 2026-09-01T21:00:09.000000Z

If you don't lay down your own roads you can't own a bike.

dataflow · 2026-09-01T17:28:47.000000Z

I agree wholeheartedly, but you can already unlock and root your phone and install whatever you want. This is not that battle. Mind you, I don't like either of these, but they're very different in nature.

brainwad · 2026-09-01T18:02:55.000000Z

And if I want to run the stock OS I paid for, with apps of my choice? It feels like a bait and switch to lock down the OS like this after you've sold the device.

dataflow · 2026-09-01T21:10:30.000000Z

This is the stock OS you paid for. It's beholden to Google and subject to their updates as it always was. You can either flash a different OS entirely, or even break their ability to update it before the change rolls out, if that's what you want. What I think you really want is to pick and choose what updates you get, which I would love too, but that's neither here nor there.