I am typing this on a MacBook. I have a Gmail account. I scroll my Facebook feed. I read books on a Kindle. There’s no escaping these big tech companies.
I recently read ‘World Without Mind: The Existential Threat of Big Tech’ and it really put me off all these big tech companies that get us addicted, use our data and manipulate us in order to gain ridiculous profits (while at the same time, hardly paying tax). I would really like to reduce my social media usage, but for me, it’s a slow process. One thing that I have managed to do is stop posting photos on Instagram and I deleted the app from my phone. I must admit that every now and then, perhaps once a week, I will open it up on my laptop for a few minutes when I am bored. Each time, I see that I haven’t missed anything.
I really sort of hate Facebook. I feel like it’s making us so dumb, now that it’s basically flooded with stupid videos. I thought the point of Facebook was to ‘stay connected’, but now the typical Facebook interaction (excluding Messenger) is to just tag someone so they can see some stupid video. I also hate how shallow it has made us. When we are not watching pointless, mindless videos, we are posting every mundane detail of our lives, but making sure it looks beautiful. My goal is to stop automatically going onto Facebook when I have nothing to do. I haven’t had the app on my phone for years, right now I logged out of it on my laptop. Hopefully it will stay that way for a while. I’ve deactivated my account a few times before and it was an extremely refreshing feeling, however right now I ‘need’ it as I am part of gardening, permaculture and home renovations groups.
Unfortunately, I don’t think boycotting Facebook, Google, Amazon, Apple is an option in today’s world. If i can just reduce their power over me, then that’s a small win. I briefly used duckduckgo, but old habits die hard and I need to get adjusted to seeing a different interface for my search. I need to give it another try. I now actively avoid buying from Amazon. I don’t find Apple AS bad as the other companies, because they deal mainly in hardware and don’t have THAT much access over our data. But they also avoid paying billions of dollars in tax and their factory workers are treated poorly..