Thanks for the information, but it is a bit out of my limited technological depth.

Thanks for the information, but it is a bit out of my limited technological depth. — BC

I am probably not the right person for electronic freedom outreach or advocacy.

The undisputed ideological admiral ship of the free software world for end-user outreach is the Free Software Foundation:

https://www.fsf.org

The Free Software Foundation (FSF) is a nonprofit with a worldwide mission to promote computer user freedom.

Free software means that the users have the freedom to run, edit, contribute to, and share the software. Thus, free software is a matter of liberty, not price. We have been defending the rights of all software users for the past 35 years. Help sustain us for many more; become an associate member today.

Another important ideological powerhouse is the Electronic Frontier Foundation:

https://www.eff.org

The Electronic Frontier Foundation is the leading nonprofit organization defending civil liberties in the digital world. Founded in 1990, EFF champions user privacy, free expression, and innovation through impact litigation, policy analysis, grassroots activism, and technology development. EFF's mission is to ensure that technology supports freedom, justice, and innovation for all people of the world.

The very first thing to do, for both non-technical and technical users, is to develop a keen awareness of the problem. Hence, ideological training of the end user is an absolute necessity.

Software can put a lot of power in the wrong hands.

We want to prevent the oligarchy from secretly carrying out the ultimate land grab. That is why we refuse to install or use their software on our own devices.

Interesting about the terracotta photography. You should share the photos. The online format is infinite availability, so you can always locate what you intended to look for. This is helpful, but I think it presents a difficulty as a universal idea in itself, because it places creativity wholly in the aesthetic, or outer, which is something foreign to it. To feel genuine, a creative work needs access to the inner, or at least to sublate the purely aesthetic.

It's still over my head, and thanks for the links. I'll check them out at greater length. Had I been born later, say in the 1970s instead of the 1940s, everything else being equal, I would be involved in organizations like EFF and maybe FSF. I definitely relate to the issues they are working on.

In the 1990s I learned how to program HyperCard on the (now primitive model) Macintosh and built two programs, one to tabulate details on an AIDS help line and the other to sort a text into Anglo Saxon origin words and non-AS words. Both programs worked quite well, though the text sorting application was pretty slow, even by 1990 standards, but it did the job. It was a great pleasure to make my own software. Unfortunately, Apple retired HyperCard.

Computing and the Internet are dominated by behemoths like Microsoft, Apple, et al, and AI will make it all worse in terms of user control of systems and devices. "Frontiers" tend to be chaotic, but that's where the most creative stuff gets done, along with destruction. Clearly, the behemoth organizations want to close the frontier.