Yeeeees. We need more to to hop on this train and move away from conglomerates and towards digital sovereignty. But go Lyon!

Publicity stunt or not, this is the right move. If I wasn’t so skeptical or even suspicious of companies, I would even call this a noble attitude.

I’m not sure that is necessary to go that far, unless one wants to. Both Volla and Jolla phones and Fairphone 5 version with /e/os are all degoogled out of the factory. Sailfish and Ubuntu touch are great Smartphone OS options. If you haven’t tried it on someone else’s phone, you should, they’re both really great.

But I completely support people using dumbphones. Getting away from the hassle and hustle of an app centered world is quite refreshing.

I’ve degoogled my Samsung Android quite a while ago. And, no, I don’t have Google Play Services in the background either. Completely degoogled. If you don’t know how to jailbreak it to remove the apps entirely, you can just deactivate the apps and uninstall the updates from them. It will free a lot of space and memory and your battery will last longer. My phone is over 5 years old and the battery lasts over 4 days. Although I only have two non-system apps installed, voyager for Lemmy and Pixelfed. And when I travel and need directions I install Herewego or Mapy. I take turns between them. When I don’t need them, I uninstall them. And that’s it. No Meta shit (no, not WhatsApp either), no youtube, nothing. I do my banking in person. Malware is getting too good too fast with A.I. as a sidekick for hackers. This is a huge cybersecurity concern all over. One can risk it out of convenience, I won’t. If the bank gets fucked on their end, the money is ensured, if I get fucked on my end, it isn’t. It’s that simple.

Anyway, there are decent European alternatives for both Smartphones and Dumbphones. And yes, we should support them. Apple, Google, Meta and Microsoft are some of the worst companies out there.

The DSM contains a wide range of disorders and illnesses, and just because one can find a diagnosis cataloged in the DSM does not mean it is naturally inherited or genetically predisposed. Any diagnostic deriving from trauma such as PTSD as a quick example would not fit genetic predisposition. But Narcissism can indeed derive from genetic predisposition if found in correlation with another clinical profile such as psychopathy, for instance, which research really found genetic predisposition for. Psychopathy will always contain Narcissism as a “feature” (for a lack of a better word) of the profile. But Narcissism as an isolated “feature” can be learned behaviour or accidentally re-enforced environmentally. Examples would be parents who immensely spoil an only child or learned behaviour by imitation in a setting, such as growing up in Hollywood, just to name two basic and obvious examples. Not to mention that sociopathic beahaviour is encouraged by capitalism, which is also intertwined with perceived Narcissism. It’s a mess. Nature VS Nurture always is. This is all surface level of discussion, obviously. We could spend hours and hours on this. I hope I wasn’t an annoyance though. Just thought to chime in between the two sides to say that is more nuanced than it is either one or the other.

As to this person in question… it’s just another tech bro shitshow trainwreck of a human being. As to what is the Nature or the Nurture in this mess of an individual, I’m not so sure. These Silicon Valley like settings definitely attract these profiles, but it also definitely re-enforces this type of behaviour. Through mirroring or even peer pressure, emulation of behaviour can become inherent behaviour over time. So, who knows?