I stole the title from this post from a post I saw the other day online.
Last year I spent more than six months extracting myself from the modern big-tech hegemony, rejecting the rapidly expanding surveillance state, its growing weaponization against citizens, and the commodification of our identities.
I took my time; allowed myself to try multiple solutions in pursuit of a finalized stack. I wanted something I could expand to our entire family, something polished, a worthy replacement for the consumer-sticky coordinated offerings from the big service providers, but free from their ownership and oversight.
I succeeded. I exceeded my expectations.
Because I had so heavily invested in the Google ecosystem, my kill-list reads as a bit targeted, but it’s just by virtue that investment. I got rid of our Google smart-speaker/home-assistant devices, our Google home security cameras, Google’s closed-source mobile operating system. I switched nearly every single one of my cloud-services from corporate owned/hosted to self-hosted, nearly every single mobile application to a free/open-source alternative. We aligned our shopping to places most aligned with our ideals, which led to a dramatic 40% decrease in overall shopping spend.
My motivations were manifold, and will no doubt feel conspiracy-thinking to many. At first I thought it was about personal privacy, about data/information autonomy, about putting our money where our hearts and mouths are. And it is about those things, very much about them. But I know now that it’s also about not “feeding the machine.” The reality is that systems we are increasingly incentivized and compelled to use are busy gathering and trading on information that’s being used to reduce us to datapoints, sales surfaces, and threat-assessment scores.
Yes, I know it sounds alarmist, doomy, paranoid. I’m not really here to convince, it’s OK if you don’t see it the way I do. Maybe I’m overreacting. Read this, though. And this, too. Some of what feels like a far away probability is truly a right-now certainty. But I’m going to stop there because it’s hard to not sound unhinged.
In perhaps a more palatable framing: we are saving $300 annually on SAAS and cloud subscriptions; we own our information again; we don’t get afternoon ads tailored to what we just spoke about this morning.
I have more to do, more strings to cut in 2026. But we are well down the road.
Also written on this day...
- serve, walk, ride - 2026
- displacing fever & weariness - 2011
- what godless monster? - 2010
- struggles - 2008
- crumbelievable - 2006
- i know because i know - 2005