Breaking Up with Big Tech - Part 1
As Big Tech becomes increasingly parasitic and horrific, how can you reduce your dependence on them? Let's talk about alternatives you can use and steps you can take.
As Big Tech becomes increasingly parasitic and horrific, how can you reduce your dependence on them? Let's talk about alternatives you can use and steps you can take.
Silicon Valley has changed a great deal from its early days. Long gone are the days of quirky forums and the first smartphones. Tech firms are now the dominant players in our economy, turning eye watering profits by owning our attention and consuming traditional industries.
However, even this has not been enough for them. They wish to displace huge swathes of the workforce through the mass adoption of genAI and, through co-President Elon Musk, they seem set on taking our government.
While witnessing this, you may want to push back on these digital oligarchs and reduce your reliance on their products. After all, they are the lords of the attention economy, so wouldn't your best tool be denying them your attention? This ongoing series will be steps that you can take to do just that and I will be testing out every option myself!
Generally my my goal with these changes will be that they: improve our lives, reduce the profits of the shittiest companies out there, and, when possible, support better platforms.
Step #1 - Adjust Your Social Media Diet
Social media has increasingly become the medium through which all culture flows, as I discussed in the first piece on this site:
Nicholas Cameron
Despite this, these platforms are increasingly terrible. Meta has recently announced they will abandon almost all moderation and Elon Musk has overseen a surge in hate speech on X (formerly Twitter). In upcoming articles, I will discuss strategies you can use to adjust your overall relationship with everything digital, but one simple action you can take immediately is to adjust where your spend your time online.
Your easiest and most effective option is to replace X. I would recommend Bluesky as a replacement. It has to continued to grow rapidly and is functionally quite similar to X, making the transition relatively easy. It also has some impressive goals around creating a more user-centric social media, where you control your feeds and your data.
Today, Bluesky is the only platform I'm really active on. It feels like it hit a critical mass after the 2024 US election where there's always something to look at and scroll, similar to X. To ease your transition, here are a few Stater Packs you can use to get your feed started:
Before Bluesky opened its doors, I also spent some time trying to replace X with Mastodon, an older Twitter competitor. Though it has noble goals around decentralization, I found it to be too clunky for an average user. It'll always be a good place for techies and people highly motivated by their ideals, but I'm highly doubtful it will ever see mass adoption.
If you are still interested despite that you can check out a guide I wrote a while back when I was more optimistic about the platform, but I'd suggest sticking with Blueksy.
Unfortunately, other platforms don't have such clear alternatives. Cohost was a Tumblr alternative that seems to have failed from the complications of keeping such a site running. Pixelfed seems like an interesting Instagram replacement but has yet to have its viral moment to get the sort of audience something like Bluesky has. And I'm fully unaware of compelling competitors for other platforms like Facebook or TikTok.
Edit: Just yesterday, a Bluesky powered Instagram launched, but I haven't had time to look into it quite yet.
Also I think its important to acknowledge that for lots of folks, it isn't as simple as just dropping a platform. You may have family only present on one (like Facebook) or you may make your living through these platforms. If this is the case, I would recommend reducing your time on big tech platforms, rather than dropping them altogether.
#2 - Change Your Meta Settings
John Oliver released a conveniently timed piece diving deep into Facebook's recent pivot, which is absolutely worth your time:
John Oliver covered a very relevant topic last week: Meta's rapid shift to becoming even more terrible than it was before.
At the end, he provides a resource for reducing how much of your data Meta collects (and in turn reducing how much profit you make them which I highly recommend you use if you have an account on those platforms:
#3 - Drop Amazon
Amazon has completely dominated multiple sectors of our economy, both acting as a digital Walmart but also being the leading cloud service provider. This gives Bezos a godly amount of power, but he has shown that that still is not enough for him. He wants to control our news as well. There's never been a better time to cut out Amazon.
But that's a bit of a tough ask, right? It can be hard to find certain things in brick and mortar stores today and sometimes you just cannot afford to shop at more ethical marketplaces.
My recommendation would be to reduce what you order on Amazon to the minimum you can manage and also to unsubscribe from Prime. This stops you from providing them a reliable income.
Amazon is also dominant in the literature space, but luckily there you have very solid alternatives:
- Check your local library! You'll always be surprised what they have, whether it be audiobooks, e-books, comics, etc.
- If you want a audiobook subscription service like Audible, I recommend Libro.fm.
- For purchasing physical books, try your local bookstore! They need your support.
- For e-books or physical books your bookstore/library don't have, try Bookshop.org! As convenient as any online storefront and it supports local bookstores.
What's Next?
I've got some other alternatives I'm testing out, which I'll definitely be discussing in the next article in this series. I'm particularly excited about Google alternatives...
However, I think the next piece I'll be writing for Electric Avenues is about re-evaluating how you spend your time on the internet to live a happier, more productive life. That will likely be in two weeks time, as I will be quite busy over the next week.
If you found this helpful, please let me know!
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