Commercialized Voyeurism: Press OK to Consent

I'd say, it was around December 1st, 2023, when Roku decided to add a new row of "Featured" advertisements across the very top of the Home screen of their popular streaming platform. Unlike many of their other ads, you cannot hide this brand new row of ads in your Roku's settings. Plus, the very first ad is now your default app. Getting to my favorite app now requires 2 button presses, instead of just 1.

Life is a tragedeigh.

So big deal!! Right?! Surely there must be more "pressing issues" then that of yet another middle-aged geek's obsession with behavioral nudging? No, not that, but we'll come back to sex later. Yes, at surface value, this is absolutely a first-world problem. Yes, at this point the scourge of enshittification has normalized this sort of behavior. And yes, ads make the world go putt putt.

So in other words, this problem is entirely mine, and mine to solve.

But first, let's talk about spying

For all the years I've been blocking ads on my home network, never did I think it would be my Roku trying so darn hard to get my data back to the mothership. It's like my Roku was E.T., and my Ethernet cable was Elliot, and they're peddling their asses off to wiz past my custom DNS server, which sorta acts like the government in the movie. Except in this case, my government captured that frumpy look'n alien every single time.

Top Domains Blocked by Pi-hole DNS
December 12th, 2022 (11:30 CST) through December 5th, 2023 (10:02 CST)

Yes, you read that correctly: 3.8 million attempts, or 8 times as much as Windows tried phoning home to Daddy-o. Just don't forget to add the additional 75 thousand times Roku got caught hanging with Mr. Cooper. Those little black boxes are cheap, chatty bitches!

A new hero enters the fight

So, shocker, I write software. Also a shocker, I almost said, "I write computer software." Don't knock an old guy, especially when they've got shit like this to share:

Ya see, I was already wise to Roku's game. A few years earlier I complained, somewhat incoherently, about some other influx of advertisements onto yet another device. That time at the hands of Google. The best solution was not nearly as user friendly as I hoped it would be, so it became clear I'd have to build something custom.

Custom takes a while.

I settled on a small PC salvaged from a workplace recycling bin. The sum total hours spent designing, building, and troubleshooting the "Couch Commander" project could have been spread out over a handful of weekends. However, I must admit that it took me a while to get the motivation I needed to just begin the project. Custom set top boxes require a bit more than just a flashy UI. Some buttons on our universal remote wouldn't perform the actions we expected, thus requiring additional hours of research, development, and troubleshooting.

Which brings us to testing. I deployed my first Couch Commander in June of 2023. At that time I had 2 Rokus in operation, but was now able to disconnect one of them. My intention was to give Couch Commander an adequate amount of time in a real-world testing environment before I retired the final Roku 5 months later.

December 5th, 2023, was the day I permanently disconnected our last Roku. By that point I had secured a second PC and deployed Couch Commander. From that day forward, every single "Smart TV" I owned operated under the following principles:

1. I am in control.
2. There will never be an advertisement on my home screen.
3. My home screen changes when I choose to change it.

As of today, both Couch Commander PCs are still in operation and performing better than expected. I clean and update them on my own schedule, and have yet to experience any sort of crippling outages. And because it's a Linux PC and not a proprietary, locked down single board computer, I can do whatever I want.

Raise your hand if your Roku can do this:

• Plays commercial Blu-rays, DVDs, and CDs.
• Automatically raises and lowers the TV's Color Temperature & Brightness for improved viewing comfort during nighttime hours.
• Use a Web Browser like Firefox or Chromium.
• Change your home screen's wallpaper to any collection of photos.
• Play & Stream PC Games.
• Use any peripheral you want, including: keyboards, mice, game pads, flight sticks, driving wheels, wired & wireless headphones, virtual reality headsets, etc.
• Run an Open Source, Local AI captioning tool on a 2nd display.
• Sleep Timer.
• Run Android TV in a virtual machine.

I think I made my point.

So what about the sex?

Ah yes, that electronic bevy of behavioral modification techniques I was referring to earlier. Listen, I get it. Adam Curtis has been known to drop a documentary or two that breaks the mind, but his thesis in Hypernormalization was spot on: we're all just numbly scrolling through a reality so saturated with surveillance and nonsense that even our TVs are snitching on us while we binge-watch shows about people trying to escape dystopias.

How can I be expected to break my family free of this 21st century dystopia if I can't even stop my TV from snitching?

If you're still wondering what this has to do with sex, I'll spell it out for ya: buy a bunch of porn and put it on a Plex server. At least that way you're numbly scrolling through a curated collection of shit you like versus your employer finding out from a data broker that you're totally into pegging.

3.8 Million times. That's not a statistic. That's a confession.