A dramatic photo of clouds I shot over the Fraser River.
I have not just turned off OneDrive on my Windows 11 PC, I have uninstalled it! All of my files, photos and electronic doodads are now stored locally and/or on my NAS, until such time that I choose to store some of them “in the cloud” again. And if I do, that big fluffy cloud will not be floating over the hellscape that forms the current political realm known as the United States.
I ponder, but for now, I’m all local, baby. And you know what? It actually feels kind of good. Not even retro (though it definitely has a retro vibe, as well), just…nice. I never really needed cloud storage before, it was just a perk. And now that it’s gone, I’m perfectly fine with that.
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.
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.
When I first clicked the Cancel subscription button, it took me here:
From there, I had to keep scrolling to get to judgy I don’t want my subscription button, which lets you actually cancel:
I don’t blame Microsoft for making a pitch to keep me, and this is way easier than cancelling Amazon Prime, as it’s just a bit of scrolling on a single page.
Anyway, in less than a month, I am off the cloud and, uh, on the ground, or some other metaphor I haven’t quite worked out yet. I had used this sub mainly for the OneDrive storage, but Microsoft is a company I’m trying to minimize all contact with (see previous post) and this is one of the biggest steps I can take.
Not in UFOs and aliens that will save us from ourselves, that’s to be determined.
But I do believe in the power of us as individuals to resist big tech, to take back control, and, if incrementally, make the world a better place than it is now.
When I talk about The Culling, it’s not just a list of services or products I’m dropping to save money, it also represents taking away access from giant tech companies that are long past providing a good user experience and simply looking to extract as much value as they can from our personal data (and money from our wallets, if they can get that, too), it’s about regaining autonomy over my digital life and the collective data I’ve put out there since I connected my first 1200 baud modem1I skipped the 300 baud era, I’m not THAT old. to an online service. When I choose to put my photos and pictures on a local drive or NAS instead of “in the cloud”, it’s a decision to deny direct access to my personal files to a tech company that cares nothing for me as an individual except as an entity to be squeezed out of as much money and information as possible, to make it richer, even though it already generates more wealth than it could ever need.
So yeah, it’s also, in a way, a protest of sorts against the unfettered capitalism that has poisoned the western world in particular, where avarice and the constant need for more has perverted companies into rent-seeking, data-pillaging monsters.
I’ve said it before and will echo it again now: There are no more tech good guys when it comes to the big tech companies, if there ever were.
None of these companies truly want to do what’s best for their customers. They just want your money and all of your personal information:
Apple
Google
Microsoft
Meta
And so many others that aren’t quite as big as these four
That isn’t a ranked list, BTW, but if it was, Meta would be #1 with a bullet, as they are quite literally OK with people dying if it gets their platforms engagement. Anyone using any of their services should stop right now–you are enabling one of the most monstrously rotten companies on the planet.
In the meantime, I’m over here, still trying to determine the best new home for my blog, to get it away from WordPress and the control of a single person who has started an unhinged crusade to “protect” it, no matter how many people or companies he hurts or destroys along the way, and reducing my online presence across the board. I read blogs again. I participate on Mastodon, a social media platform that has no ads, no algorithm and no incentives or structure to add either. It’s quieter, it’s nicer, and it’s more human.
We can have a better future, we just need to keep pushing for it, and put in the effort to make the changes we want to see.
This is a minor culling and I can’t prove that Logitech is acting maliciously, but the effect amounts to the same.
A while back I subscribed (via my Gmail account) to a Logitech newsletter because I realized I buy a lot of Logitech mice (and keyboards, to a lesser extent). For some reason, these messages aren’t getting forwarded to my current email, despite Google not marking them as spam. Odd.
But I then decided I don’t really want to get these anymore, anyway, so I hit the ol’ Unsubscribe link at the bottom of the most recent newsletter.
It took me here:
Yes, “unsubscription error.” Whoopsie, we didn’t unsubscribe you, our bad! Try again or go through our customer support hell, and good luck with that lol!
I tried a few more times, the error persisted. I then did the following in Gmail:
Problem solved (for me)!
(My current mouse is still Logitech but my keyboards are from Keychron and Drop.)
Today I uninstalled a few programs on my Windows 11 PC I no longer use and made the great leap to open source office software (technically I already did, because I installed LibreOffice a while ago, but now it will be my default).
Uninstalled:
Facebook Messenger (can’t use without a FB account, anyway)
Arc browser (did not like)
Microsoft 365 (Word, Excel, etc.)
Microsoft Bing Search (I didn’t even know this was installed)
Microsoft Teams (I thought I had uninstalled this already)
I heard that Microsoft was shoehorning its Copilot AI stuff into Microsoft 365 (née Office 365) because of course it was. AI for all, whether you want it or not!
But then I saw reports that Microsoft 365 plans were also going up in price. Indeed, when I checked my account, my $109/year package was going to be billed at $145 in April when it renewed. This is a substantial increase. The internet advised me that if I cancelled my current subscription, I would then be offered a “classic” version of my plan, without AI, for the previous $109 price. And lo, there it was:
To be clear, it is exactly the same plan I have now, just renamed. Microsoft moved me off that plan and to the new, more expensive “Microsoft 365 Family” plan, acting as if nothing had changed, just a simple (large) price increase.
It’s shady, it’s scummy, and it’s exactly what I expect of Microsoft these days.
My solution is to go back to storing everything locally and having backups available through my NAS, which will function almost as well as OneDrive would have, anyway.
Congrats, Microsoft, in your bid to shove AI down my throat and get more money from me, you will soon be getting none!
For fairly obvious reasons, I have dropped the subs to the politics channels I follow on YouTube, except for Steve Boots, because he is a zesty socialist who covers Canadian politics and his cat is constantly vamping in the background of his videos.
I’ve also filtered a few related words or phrases on Mastodon.
These things may change, but for now, it feels right. I still get a lot of news/doom through osmosis, anyway.
Yes, I changed email again. Why? Because I am mad, perhaps.
But also, I find I am less willing to do business with companies where the people in charge loudly blare their terrible views in public.
And it happens my main email service has one such person as its CEO. The company is doing damage control, stating they are non-profit, the CEO does not control the company, etc. It doesn’t matter, the rot is at the top. I’m not interested in supporting you with my dollars anymore.
So, I’ve gone from:
Obscure ISP-based email (sjames@istar.net or something) 25+ years ago
Less obscure ISP email through Telus
Gmail
HEY
Outlook
Proton
A few others that were never primary addresses, some of which I still have
And now:
Fastmail
The one bonus in the latest move is I can now drop the “w” from my name and just use stanjames@fastmail.com. Plus, it sounds fast.
If Fastmail doesn’t work out, I am going to invest in carrier pigeons.
I never actually used Tumblr, but I did create an account awhile back for it. Unlike Meta’s properties, Tumblr doesn’t appear to care if you delete your account, because the process is:
Select Delete Account in Account Settings
Enter your username and password
Click the Delete Account button
It then confirms the account is gone and offers you to sign up (ho ho).
And now I wonder just how many other accounts I have on old-timey social media sites that are still shambling along, zombie-like.
There have always been good reasons to delete your Facebook account, but my inactivity over the last few years pretty much made the issue go away. If I ain’t using it, what harm is there letting the account go fallow?
This changed in the past few weeks, when Mark Zuckerberg decided to become macho or something (tip: You will never ever be macho, Zuck), pay fealty to God King Trump, and then decided to:
Stop most moderation and fact-checking on Meta sites, such as FB.
Replace moderation with “community notes”.
Kill all DEI initiatives.
In the name of “free speech” allow more slurs, name-calling and such to be permitted, especially and specifically against LGBTQ+ folks.
This is all in addition to the already running:
Endless, perpetual “Suggested For You” that never stops. It’s a useless sludge waterfall, and you are nailed to the bottom of it.
Reels, reels, reels! The “See less of this” when you click the X to close one is a jokey kind of placebo. Like the vampire kids in Salem’s Lot, they’ll be floating outside your window and scratching on the glass again soon enough. And forever.
Terrible, low-rent ads, but now with terrible, low-rent AI-generated crap in them.
A lot more AI sludge in general, including cringe-inducing (at best) AI people you can interact with (or rather, the ones they haven’t pulled yet after the not-insignificant backlash to them).
And not forgetting that FB executives have always been OK with people dying in exchange for increased engagement (revenue).
Today, I requested all of my FB info (mostly bird photos and various doodles). I already made a post letting actual human people know I’m deleting the account and pointing out I am easy to find elsewhere. The next step will be to request the deletion once I have my big ol’ FB info bundle (UPDATE: Shortly after I posted this, I got the info, just under 400MB worth at “medium” quality), then probably wait some period of time, probably 30 days, similar to the Instagram deletion.
It seems obvious now, but corporate controlled social media can probably never work. Mastodon might be a bit clunky, but there’s no billionaire or VC money behind it, just a bunch of federated servers relying on donations from individuals.
UPDATE: My Valentine’s Day gift to myself will be going Facebook-free.
It feels like more, but the total amount of culling this year has been relatively small, though a few major sites/services are included:
Instagram. The platform is garbage, the company is worse, and I stopped posting more than a year ago. This one was easy.
LinkedIn. I barely used LinkedIn at all, so nuking it was also easy.
Substack. Their stance on actual Nazis made me move my newsletter (which then died of neglect) and also unsubscribe to about half a dozen newsletters, including several I paid for. The platform is also clearly working to entrap writers into their “ecosystem”. Those that stay may ultimately regret it, Nazis or not.
verge.com. I normally wouldn’t include a mere website, but The Verge decided to offer an optional subscription, but also decided to just arbitrarily block content at random (?), which annoyed me enough to just remove the bookmark. I’ll miss David Pierce’s gushing over every terrible tech company’s latest thing.
Posthaven. In my quest to find a WordPress alternative, Postahaven was a finalist. But if you don’t pay for a full year (month by month) they nuke your site, which was enough for me to give it a pass.
Dumping Substack and The Verge have saved me the most time, purging LinkedIn also provided some relief for my inbox.
