I saw this blog post linked on Mastodon and Joan Westenberg does an excellent job on summarizing what I am trying to achieve, in part, with what I call The Culling–trying to rid myself of as much reliance on, and use of Big Tech as possible, while understanding it’s impossible to completely escape all of it, unless you go live in a mud hut and hunt squirrels or something.
Link: On Ideological Purity
Relevant quote:
But the point isn’t perfection. The point is intention.
You don’t have to be all or nothing. You don’t have to make every decision a moral battlefield. You don’t have to sever every tie to every compromised system – and you sure as hell don’t have to do it overnight.
You have to engage. You have to stay aware. You have to keep questioning the default.
For me, I:
- Still use YouTube (Google)
- Still own an iPhone (Apple), though admittedly it is four generations behind the latest
- Still blog on WordPress (whose owner has been on an erratic and misguided crusade over the past year)
- And so on
I am glad to be done with Meta, I have no plans to buy future Apple hardware, and I’m dropping all Microsoft products, save for the operating system of my PC (Windows 11) because Linux is not quite there yet. It’s ongoing and it can be a pain, but in the end it gives me clarity and I feel more in control, less spied on and, maybe, just a little more content in a world that seems to want to snatch all contentment away and eject it into space.
