"Paying it forward" is fundamentally the most important weapon we have against the oligarchy, and simply refusing to participate in the endless cycle of new technology.

A long time ago, I kind of stumbled into a habit of "paying my hardware forward". It started because it was simply a pain in the ass to try to sell something on ebay because your first ten offers are scam artists.

So when I upgraded a drawing tablet that I was using, I had a friend of a friend that was looking to try digital drawing and said "Here you go. The only thing I ask is that when you upgrade, or when you're done with it, give it forward to someone else who could make use of it."

Later, the same thing happened again with a camera stabilizer. I had bought one that it turned out was too lightweight for my DSLR. So I had to buy a heavier weight one. Meanwhile, a friend's son was a budding filmmaker just using his cell phone to make stupid movies with his friends and I said "Hey...he'll like this. The only thing I ask is when HE upgrades, or whatever, he passes it forward to another person"

Even something as simple as a dog ramp I bought for my aging dog. After he passed, it hung around in my shed until a friend of mine's dog needed an operation and couldn't do stairs. When her dog recovered she asked if I wanted it back and I said, no...just pass it forward.

I've done it with spare monitors. Old laptops that someone has needed for school, etc...

So what started as me just being too impatient to deal with ebay became something that literally makes me feel good knowing that I'm helping someone out, or even better, supporting another person's artistic passion.