This may effectively become a farewell letter to my favorite word processing software application, Microsoft Word, far and away the best and most important product from its ubiquitous brand. As I type these words using my dear old Word within Windows 10 on my dear old PC, I wonder whether the specter of insecurity that writhes within me like the tangled cables connected to the back of my rig will compel me to change my digital and economic habits so radically that I may no longer be able to continue using Word.
Watching the economy change before my eyes has been one of the latest discomforts of this era of monumental change. Whatever may be happening, at the very least my relationship to money and my spending habits have been affected by the radical changes that just keep coming. Working through the pandemic, in exhaustion and shock I have lost the motivation to be careful with either privacy or credit. Now my chief concern is being trapped in some harshly authoritarian replacement for the credit system, losing my freedom and privacy on account of having bought in to the system when it was less monolithic.
For a while I imagined that the end of money would invite a period of unprecedented chaos into which credit and other financial constructs of the bygone age might simply disappear. Inflation gave the idea of spending with credit a superficially plausible rationalization. Financial experts can argue about whether spending with credit during inflation might not have been such a bad idea in times of ordinary expectations.
These are not ordinary times.
We had years during the last part of the bygone Golden Age to study and to experiment with digital privacy techniques, time to learn healthy economic habits and the many other subtle skills that make individual freedom more likely. Of course, prior to the pandemic, we were all worried about our own personal problems; there were always fair reasons to compromise our earnest desire to maintain efficient privacy and to obtain private financial stability. Perhaps we did our best. Now the underground tension is building into an earthquake; yet for those of us living in the democratic West the structures most likely to fall are those that enable us to flee.
It might finally be time for me to ditch my broken Windows 10 partition, abandoning several simulated universes in Endless Space 2 where I was actively trying to sharpen my strategic budgeting skills while whittling away at cultural and economic victories. When Windows 10 was new, it convinced me to again dally in Microsoft’s garden despite the concern that it raised by being much more privacy invasive than its predecessors. Microsoft did a lot of things right with the design, compatibility, and user access in Windows 10, learning both from its own strengths and weaknesses from previous versions of Windows as well as from the strengths of other operating systems.
Microsoft Word excelled even more than the OS at becoming an increasingly well-integrated solution with a design informed from the functionality conventions of multiple branches of office and text editing software. Consider how its recent addition of paragraph moving keyboard shortcuts mirror the functionality of raising and lowering lines of code in text editors such as Sublime Text or Microsoft’s own Visual Studio Code. Its newest prominent feature, text predictions, mirrors a long time functionality of LibreOffice Writer, Word’s open source rival and perhaps close competitor in overall excellence, if word processing software were to be compared without regard to licensing.
Practicality always seems to win over privacy, even for inefficient idealists like myself. I wonder if this will change. I wonder if privacy skills will become truly practical for anyone wanting to survive and to maintain self-determination.
I don’t know whether I’ll be able to get by in this tightly controlled world, the combination of the surveillance society of the recent past with the geopolitical blocks of the previous era. I know that there are many people out there, many of whom I know in real life, who are smarter than me and better at managing time and money than me, who are however even less ready than I to take up the necessary practices of digital privacy, cryptocurrency, and technological freedom.
Here lies the balance between practicality and privacy – real social utility. I will use whatever digital practices will help me to help my neighbors. Those who roll their eyes at the mention of Telegram or WhatsApp, not because those apps are not private enough but because they require a little extra effort to use instead of the ordinary texting and calling protocols on today’s smartphones, are as wrong as all the would-be hackers bragging about all the different browsers, VPNs, and virtual machines that they waste time pretending to use.
At various times during the history of Microsoft’s market domination, using Microsoft’s products has drifted from being a good choice for those wanting to apply technology skillfully and well in their lives to create meaning and opportunity to being a somewhat poor choice. The social recognition of the Microsoft platform is one factor in its favor, but even the desire to use the most common and accessible digital techniques is only one consideration, and never a universal or an isolated one. The political and social upheaval of the current time together with the concerning system update process on the Microsoft platform make our present dark age one wherein using the Windows platform exclusively or even primarily would tend to be a poor digital lifestyle choice.
Although I’m not yet certain if I’ll be leaving Microsoft Word, I could never set aside the power of the word afforded by digital technology. The democratized mediation of experience through digital media is the cement that holds together the pieces of the world as I have known it.
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