It's too late for me - save yourself

Published in Technology / The Web - 6 mins to read
In the last few months I have become more and more disillusioned with our corporate overlords, the Big Five - Apple, Alphabet (Google's parent company), Microsoft, Facebook and Amazon. I am scared about what they have already done to our society and what they continue to do, that they are eroding not only the foundations of the internet but also our basic human right to privacy, and tearing at our social fabric.

Sure, my tinfoil hat is pretty screwed on at this point, but I'm not sure I need to explain in too much detail why I think these companies are bad, it just seems as a society we have collectively accepted our fate. But, in an effort to make myself feel better about life, a couple of weeks ago, I decided to see how much of these five companies I could remove from my life. The answer is - not very much. But here is what I found.

Microsoft

Microsoft is probably the company out of the five that I have the least qualms with, however this could be due to lack of sensationalist articles on Hacker News about them more than any kind of higher level of business ethics. The fact they don't run their own ad network helps a lot, as does the fact they sell proprietary products, and ironically the fact I don't use any Bing services probably means I like them more as I am have no idea what their ad or tracking policies are like. 

At the moment my home PC and all my laptops (and a VM) are running various versions of Windows. As of this weekend, my PC now dual-boots Windows 10 and Kali Linux, but I can't see myself ever making the switch full time to Linux, due to the lack of software support on the latter. I'm excited to get to grips with Unix and try to learn some pentesting on Kali though, I think it will improve my computing knowledge a lot.

Facebook

Ah, Zark Fuckerberg, get your hands out of my data. I would put money on Facebook being the first test case for GDPR in EU court, after another massive breach this past week. The old "if you're not paying, you're the product" isn't quite as poetic and universally true as some might think, but in Facebook's case I absolutely believe it.

Sadly... I am struggling to carve Facebook out of my life. Despite having deactivated my Facebook account proper, I have retained use of its Messenger app, as it's the way I communicate with most of my friends, and I fear ditching that too would leave me something of a social leper. You win this time, Fuckerberg.

Alphabet

Oh Google... how far you have fallen in my estimation. Once a company I trusted, now I am in the process of migrating away from as many of its services as possible, during which I have discovered quite how many Google services I previously used. Chrome 69 was really the last straw from me, despite being a Chrome user since sometime around version 1, they have shown their true colours in that all they want is your juicy, juicy data. Well, no more! Below are the services I use and what I have been replacing them with. Big shout-out to https://nomoregoogle.com



Apple

Do you have any idea how tedious it is to switch away from an iPhone once you already have an iPhone? All your apps, contacts, data etc is stored in Apple's corner of the ever-mysterious "cloud", and the prospect of having to manually generate it all again is one that doesn't bear thinking about. Also, most of the viable alternatives are made by some other giant megacorp tech company so it wouldn't even make me feel that much better. 

As with Microsoft, at least I am actually paying for a product here, so perhaps that means that Apple don't have any incentive to harvest my data. After all, it's pretty widely thought that they make an insane markup on each phone, I suspect due to cheap labour and poor conditions in their manufacturing plants in China. Having said that, you don't become the world's first trillion dollar company by not squeezing every penny you can out of your poor, unsuspecting consumers... so Tim Cook, if you're reading this, fuck off.

Amazon

Ya boy Bezos has been in the news a lot recently, and rightly so - it seems he is the poster boy for everything wrong with capitalism. After reading accounts of appalling working conditions in Amazon factories across the world, I am going to see how practical it is to stop ordering anything from Amazon over the next few months - I don't think it should be too bad, and I'm happy to pay more in shipping for the peace of mind that comes with knowing the company who I am supporting doesn't make its workers terrified of peeing.

There is a problem with Amazon and I though... Like Messenger and Youtube, Amazon provides a service which I cannot see myself moving away from and there are no good alternatives - Twitch. Twitch hosts the vast majority of the content for esports, my biggest passion in life, it's biggest competitors in that regard being... Youtube and Facebook. For fuck's sake. Perhaps this will be my legacy - an open-source, peer to peer esports streaming platform... I'll add it to the list of projects to start "when I have the time".



Overall, writing this out has made me kinda bummed I still rely on the Big Five so much. I'll report back in a couple of weeks to see if I've made any progress.

Previous Post: Relating to People

Next Post: Stress