Cut out Amazon. Quit facebook and twitter. What else, though? If the mighty dollar reigns supreme, and I wanna vote with my spending, what small steps can the average person make to disrupt the patterns of the nihilistic ego tripping energy vampires who are willing to burn it all down so they can live forever?
Quit Meta a few years back, never had Amazon, and haven’t had a computer in… fuck, almost 20yrs now! My phone is a compromise because it’s a work phone, personal phone is a landline (it’s fantastic, you can ignore it and people can’t assume you have it on you and are ignoring them). Still rocking cassettes, cds, dvds, and vhs, some old, some thrifted. When I do drive (which is infrequent) I drive a 40yo dumb car with a manual and windows you still have to crank down. I still use a typewriter. Some of this is deliberate anti-tech, some is just a fondness for vintage tech.
I am or am in the process of being rid of most of them except for Amazon. Unfortunately, there’s no end in sight for Amazon.
Since email seems like the key to everything now, starting fresh with a new service was the most logical place to start for me. I went with Proton, largely because email and VPN in one payment. From there, replace (or transfer) old accounts one-by-one.
Oh yeah, and everyone else is mentioning this, so I’ll add it too: it’s also a good time to reevaluate where you spend your time, so check:
- Can I discard this service? If no, then…
- Can I replace this service? If no, then…
- Should I transfer my account for this service?
Obviously it depends on what you buy from there, but personally I find Amazon one of the easiest places to avoid, and one of the first places I’ve started avoiding. I’ve just been substituting it with eBay and Onbuy, and so far there’s nothing Amazon has that they don’t.
I would say you could move to a communist country but honestly there aren’t any. so yeah, you’re kind of fucked. you can live in the woods and do nothing and influence nobody, but that’s about the same as being dead. how about making art?
Don’t let perfect be the enemy of the good. You can cut a lot out of your life without even significantly harming your leisure.
I think the first place I stopped using was Amazon way back in COVID times or earlier! I don’t think there was any specific thing they did, there just wasn’t anything they had that eBay, Onbuy or Argos didn’t have, and I don’t like to support monopolies if I can avoid it. In retrospect I’m very glad I stopped using it!
A couple of years after that I stopped using Google and changed to Mojeek and Qwant, when I heard that decent Google alternatives existed.
A few years later came Xitter. I sort of got peer-pressured into getting Twitter back in the day, I used it as an art dump, and didn’t really feel any personal connection to it, so I didn’t really feel bad about deleting it the exact day Musk bought it.
In the last year or so I’ve started to get serious about alternative tech. After working with Linux for about two years, I finally installed Ubuntu when Windows 10 became end of life last year, I deleted Instagram, I deleted Facebook, I deleted Reddit, and I deleted Whatsapp all within a couple of months of each other!
A few days ago my phone broke, which gave me the perfect opportunity to order a Fairphone (Linux) phone instead of using Android! I’m really proud of this one, because 99% of phones are specifically made to only run with one operating system, either Android or iOS. That means you can’t just install Linux on any phone the way you can with desktops and laptops, making transitioning into a Linux phone way more expensive.
The main thing I can’t seem to shake is YouTube, but even that’s been significantly cut down in favour of watching Peertube and my DVD collection!
I’ve been ignoring my phone (I work in sales so I don’t have much outside of my outreach) and reading more. I deleted all social media in 2024. I am slowly putting music onto my phone and soon to stop streaming entirely (I stopped Spotify years ago as I make music and hate them). I do think I’ll keep BandCamp as they’re cool so far but I feel the biggest way to fight is to take your attention back.
Life wasn’t this fast and anxiety driven before they shoveled these apps and content into our faces. I feel it messed with my CNS but who truly knows.
I think I read something terrible about BandCamp recently. Hmmm what was it??? Like they got bought by private equity or something… Sorry, I forget the specifics.
I’m skeptical of Songtradr but BandCamp standing against AI and continuing BandCamp Fridays is still a bigger positive than any other streaming service (even though BC is more of a purchasing platform).
No PE is good but they’re not making evil moves yet compared to Spotify or even Distros like DistroKid.
Personally, Epic Games owning them was the best thing possible as they knew nothing about it but that worked? It was truly a golden era.
Well, fingers crossed.
These companies keep getting passed around cuz companies want to extract value however they can. But like what do people even want money for? Like OK ppl have to pay for food, sure – you need food to stay alive. Health insurance is up there, too. And then I’m sure housing costs and car insurance costs are essentially unavoidable for most people. So that’s probably ~2k a month… So what all are people buying?
(To be explicit, I ask half-rhetorically – I’m kinda just wondering aloud, not like OMG TELL ME)
I got off the two platforms I used the most: Reddit and YouTube. The one big tech platform I still have an account on is LinkedIn.
I’ve been off Meta-services basically since forever, barring WhatsApp. My family is not interested in using Signal, so I chose to compromise.
I still use a bunch of Google-services. Maybe I’ll get off them one day, we’ll see.
Well, by never becoming part of it in the first place.
A person of culture ,nice
Minimal use of smatphone and I mean minimal. Mostly use it as just a phone and camera. switched to linux and became a member of the federation.
What’s “the federation?”
its a term I use for federated social media because I like star trek.
Ah OK. FYI, Star Trek is exactly what came to mind(!).
I work for one so I want to eat I have to engage :(
Slow tech. I recently transferred my music library from my laptop (mostly ripped CDs) to my phone. Love having offline access to my music. Listening to entire albums. Not paying money to Spotify that shills for ICE and is ripping off artists by creating AI music.
Going to buy a cd player and/or cd-rom and buy more CDs, or buy digital albums directly from artists.
A lot of people are buying iPods to do something similar, but your phone will do the same thing if you just remove the streaming apps.
I always heard about Spotify ripping off artists and thought “well, it can’t be worse than YouTube’s random demonetisations, can it?” but what’s this about it shilling for ICE?
“Shilling” isn’t quite right but they ran ICE advertisements.
Ah, yeah that’s a yikes
This week I went to a concert, bought the vinyl there and it came with a download code to get the FLACs.
I won, the artist won, the middlemen got shafted. Great success.
I vote for listening to full albums as well.
As a youngster I used to have a massive playlist, only my favorite songs on it… These days I only listen to full albums, bad/weak songs and all. Its so much better. I’ve realised that a lot of the “bad” songs that I didn’t want to listen to as a youth, are not that bad actually.
I think there’s something to this. Even if the album isn’t great, simply sitting with it and experiencing it is instructive.
It’s strange to think, but in the late 90s, albums were a bit of a cynical play. “I like this band or performer, let me get all that they have to give. I will spend $20+ on an album where a $5+ single might have given me the best they had to give.”
Which is not a knock against the concept album. I quite like those. The Who; or more recently The Mars Volta.
But wrapping around to my point about slow tech — if you put an album in a CD player and listen to it start-to-finish — has something been gained? I would say yes. This is what the performer wanted you to hear. Good or bad.
It’s strange to think, but in the late 90s, albums were a bit of a cynical play. “I like this band or performer, let me get all that they have to give. I will spend $20+ on an album where a $5+ single might have given me the best they had to give.”
Yeah thats the thing. The artist has to be interested in making a album not just making a few hit songs and then filling up space. Luckily thats mostly a issue with pop music, the stuff I listen to tends to be more in line with creating a package.
One of the best things an album can do is put you into a sort of a trance, where you just listen and sink into the music. Only when the album ends you snap out of it, wipe the drool off your face and chest, get up and try to deal with life again lol.
Lead a simple modest life.
Fuck all the globalisation and the fomo and the terminally online. You family and freinds and maybe your neighbours, that’s what matters. That’s what influences you personally the most.
VPN, private DNS, no amazon or x or any of that trash. Open source if possible. Fediverse.
Its really not hard. The hard part is getting the normies off it. They’re purely addicted to slop.
Linux, fediverse, signal, matrix, self-hosting services like Jellyfin and Gittea, minimizing subscription services as much as possible, embrace physical media and retro gaming, touch grass, etc.
You would be amazed how much free and open technology you personally have access to, even on modest used hardware running out of your home.
Touching grass is huge. I think of the end of “The Truman Show” often. All these folks are at home watching it on TV. Then, he busts out, and it goes off the air. This guy says to his wife (or something… Maybe she says it), "What else is on?* I feel like we’re roughly there. All these folks are like angry and/or bigoted, etc. But it’s all a fire some company is fanning for money.
My thing is, is that it isn’t so much about the things I use rather than what these platforms expect me to be which is a good capitalist doggy. One that feels the need to always CONSOOOM, at any given time. I’m not really about that, for I value what money I get. So I go out and thrift, I don’t subscribe to twenty different subscription services. I don’t just buy things for the sake of buying.
It’s all a big mental game.
I spent a lot of the pandemic learning about farm boxes and local produce. Now I spend most of my grocery money on local produce and whatever the farmer’s market has available. I try to pay cash everywhere they will take it because tech bros get money for most wireless transactions nowadays.
Costco has been the great balancer. It is quite progressive for a public company and supports DEI policies. It also has just about anything you can want. I bought my car through Costco and I use the Costco credit card. For all things there are alternatives to tech bros.
