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?
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!