Solutions//Easy
Mar. 18th, 2025 12:40 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
deja_indigoConvenience Kill$
Let me be clear about one thing: convenience is the siren song that the tech oligarchs sing to lure us to crash against the rocks of neo-feudal tech oligarchy.
I am old enough to remember the last days of the pre-internet era, as well as the pre-smartphone era of Web 1.0. The days where the only alternative to brick-and-mortar shopping was to order by phone or by mail, based on pictures and short descriptions in printed catalogs. Using printed phone books to look up the numbers and addresses of businesses and people, and having to call businesses to find out when they were open. The first time I took a road trip from the west coast to the east coast, I used printed highway maps to navigate, along with verbal directions from helpful folks when I got lost. Road signs and billboards were the only way I knew where to stop for food, gas, and lodging. If you wanted to watch something, you were either at the mercy of network TV programming, or you had to go to a video store and rent a physical tape or DVD.
Imagine living like that today...but pay attention to your immediate gut reaction to the prospect. I'll bet it made you feel at least a little bit uncomfortable, yeah?
Even those of us who lived in those "before times" are now so accustomed to the convenience of modern tech infrastructure, we can scarcely imagine living without it. Anything we desire can now be accessed by doing nothing more than tapping on our phone screens...and it is all provided, facilitated, and/or mediated by fewer than a dozen monopolistic corporations. These are the very same ones now actively dismantling our democracy, and seeking to bring about the neo-feudalistic corporate states of Curtis Yarvin and his Neo-Reactionary/"Dark MAGA" cohort.
These companies have grown to their massive sizes by feeding consumer appetites for convenience, and corralling us all into their proprietary walled gardens. Their technology has conquered and colonized nearly every aspect of modern life, allowing these corporations to buy up or starve out competitors, and create a cultural juggernaut that forces people to join in or be left behind.
In the process, they've destroyed countless industries and local economies, suppressed wage growth, replaced private property with endless subscriptions, and ushered in an era of cheap low-quality goods and massive consumer waste (and debt). They've also brought about the decline of repair, mending, and even maintenance, leaving most people now almost completely dependent on the support and replacement ecosystems of these companies.
Now, they are confident that they have us too dependent on them to ever escape the enclosures they've built around us. They believe the logical next step is to bar the last doors to exit, assume direct control of society, and lock the masses into an inescapable serfdom.
They're probably right that we are too dependent on them to resist...but only probably! It's not yet impossible to disconnect ourselves from their ecosystems. If enough people started reducing their reliance on oligarch-owned tech infrastructure, and rebuilding the parts of society that have wasted away, we could collapse the value--and political power--of these companies very quickly!
I cannot stress enough that this is absolutely crucial to an effective resistance effort!
///
The "Easy" Solution: Log Out, Re-Learn, and Show Up!
All of the power that these corporations have, is power that we have willingly ceded to them in the name of convenience. Compared to political adversaries like the Christian Nationalists, Neoliberal Globalist oligarchs, and the Military- and Prison-Industrial complexes, whose bases of power are obscure, entrenched, and difficult for average citizens to directly affect, Big Tech is vulnerable. Their revenue comes directly from consumers, and the more of us that cut them off, the weaker they get. We don't need to take to the streets, arm ourselves, build massive political movements, or even leverage existing political power structures. We just have to change how we live.
The easiest thing to do is switching away from Google, Meta, Amazon, X/Twitter, etc.to some of the many small, non-profit, and/or open-source tech alternatives. We don't even have to go back to maps, atlases, pagers, and phone books. I'll discuss the particulars of these alternatives in a future post.
However, we can do even more if we are willing to shift our mindset, and re-evaluate the value we place onto convenience. It's like"getting in shape" after a long period of sedentary inactivity--it takes a willful rejection of short-term comfort, for the sake of achieving a healthier/happier life in the long-term. Mindset is everything, because this is going to be difficult, uncomfortable, inconvenient, confusing, frustrating, and at times even exhausting. Our inability to tolerate, let alone embrace, the challenges of inconvenience is itself the root cause of our current predicament--and the longer we put off addressing it, the harder it gets.
///
Rising to the Challenge: a First Step
In a world that feels hostile, frightening, and bleak, when we already have to do uncomfortable and unpleasant things just to meet our basic survival needs, this mindset I'm talking about is extremely difficult to cultivate and stick to. That is by design--when people are tired, poor, and numb, we will seek comfort and convenience as much as possible.
So: just like any new health/fitness routine, the most important thing is just to make consistent progress, however slowly you have to. I'm not suggesting that all of us can immediately sever our connections with all of these awful big tech companies. Most people probably have no idea what alternatives are out there, or even the depth to which their lives have been infiltrated by insidious big tech...but even with all the knowledge in the world, actually making the changes is still hard!
This is the heart of why I am writing this blog: to help guide us out of the walled gardens, and to support us in relearning how to live outside of them.
That said: you don't need to wait for guidance! Start by taking inventory of the ways that big tech has assimilated you into its ecosystems. Pay attention to where and when you use Amazon, Google, PayPal/Venmo, Square, Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, Twitter, etc. Start asking yourself how necessary each of them feels, and what obstacles you think there are to leaving them. See if you can find some that don't actually feel that essential to you, or some that you don't actually like the experience of using. Have conversations with friends and family about what it would take to get off of some of them.
The journey of a thousand miles doesn't start with a single step...it starts by thinking about making the journey at all.
Let me be clear about one thing: convenience is the siren song that the tech oligarchs sing to lure us to crash against the rocks of neo-feudal tech oligarchy.
I am old enough to remember the last days of the pre-internet era, as well as the pre-smartphone era of Web 1.0. The days where the only alternative to brick-and-mortar shopping was to order by phone or by mail, based on pictures and short descriptions in printed catalogs. Using printed phone books to look up the numbers and addresses of businesses and people, and having to call businesses to find out when they were open. The first time I took a road trip from the west coast to the east coast, I used printed highway maps to navigate, along with verbal directions from helpful folks when I got lost. Road signs and billboards were the only way I knew where to stop for food, gas, and lodging. If you wanted to watch something, you were either at the mercy of network TV programming, or you had to go to a video store and rent a physical tape or DVD.
Imagine living like that today...but pay attention to your immediate gut reaction to the prospect. I'll bet it made you feel at least a little bit uncomfortable, yeah?
Even those of us who lived in those "before times" are now so accustomed to the convenience of modern tech infrastructure, we can scarcely imagine living without it. Anything we desire can now be accessed by doing nothing more than tapping on our phone screens...and it is all provided, facilitated, and/or mediated by fewer than a dozen monopolistic corporations. These are the very same ones now actively dismantling our democracy, and seeking to bring about the neo-feudalistic corporate states of Curtis Yarvin and his Neo-Reactionary/"Dark MAGA" cohort.
These companies have grown to their massive sizes by feeding consumer appetites for convenience, and corralling us all into their proprietary walled gardens. Their technology has conquered and colonized nearly every aspect of modern life, allowing these corporations to buy up or starve out competitors, and create a cultural juggernaut that forces people to join in or be left behind.
In the process, they've destroyed countless industries and local economies, suppressed wage growth, replaced private property with endless subscriptions, and ushered in an era of cheap low-quality goods and massive consumer waste (and debt). They've also brought about the decline of repair, mending, and even maintenance, leaving most people now almost completely dependent on the support and replacement ecosystems of these companies.
Now, they are confident that they have us too dependent on them to ever escape the enclosures they've built around us. They believe the logical next step is to bar the last doors to exit, assume direct control of society, and lock the masses into an inescapable serfdom.
They're probably right that we are too dependent on them to resist...but only probably! It's not yet impossible to disconnect ourselves from their ecosystems. If enough people started reducing their reliance on oligarch-owned tech infrastructure, and rebuilding the parts of society that have wasted away, we could collapse the value--and political power--of these companies very quickly!
I cannot stress enough that this is absolutely crucial to an effective resistance effort!
///
The "Easy" Solution: Log Out, Re-Learn, and Show Up!
All of the power that these corporations have, is power that we have willingly ceded to them in the name of convenience. Compared to political adversaries like the Christian Nationalists, Neoliberal Globalist oligarchs, and the Military- and Prison-Industrial complexes, whose bases of power are obscure, entrenched, and difficult for average citizens to directly affect, Big Tech is vulnerable. Their revenue comes directly from consumers, and the more of us that cut them off, the weaker they get. We don't need to take to the streets, arm ourselves, build massive political movements, or even leverage existing political power structures. We just have to change how we live.
The easiest thing to do is switching away from Google, Meta, Amazon, X/Twitter, etc.to some of the many small, non-profit, and/or open-source tech alternatives. We don't even have to go back to maps, atlases, pagers, and phone books. I'll discuss the particulars of these alternatives in a future post.
However, we can do even more if we are willing to shift our mindset, and re-evaluate the value we place onto convenience. It's like"getting in shape" after a long period of sedentary inactivity--it takes a willful rejection of short-term comfort, for the sake of achieving a healthier/happier life in the long-term. Mindset is everything, because this is going to be difficult, uncomfortable, inconvenient, confusing, frustrating, and at times even exhausting. Our inability to tolerate, let alone embrace, the challenges of inconvenience is itself the root cause of our current predicament--and the longer we put off addressing it, the harder it gets.
///
Rising to the Challenge: a First Step
In a world that feels hostile, frightening, and bleak, when we already have to do uncomfortable and unpleasant things just to meet our basic survival needs, this mindset I'm talking about is extremely difficult to cultivate and stick to. That is by design--when people are tired, poor, and numb, we will seek comfort and convenience as much as possible.
So: just like any new health/fitness routine, the most important thing is just to make consistent progress, however slowly you have to. I'm not suggesting that all of us can immediately sever our connections with all of these awful big tech companies. Most people probably have no idea what alternatives are out there, or even the depth to which their lives have been infiltrated by insidious big tech...but even with all the knowledge in the world, actually making the changes is still hard!
This is the heart of why I am writing this blog: to help guide us out of the walled gardens, and to support us in relearning how to live outside of them.
That said: you don't need to wait for guidance! Start by taking inventory of the ways that big tech has assimilated you into its ecosystems. Pay attention to where and when you use Amazon, Google, PayPal/Venmo, Square, Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, Twitter, etc. Start asking yourself how necessary each of them feels, and what obstacles you think there are to leaving them. See if you can find some that don't actually feel that essential to you, or some that you don't actually like the experience of using. Have conversations with friends and family about what it would take to get off of some of them.
The journey of a thousand miles doesn't start with a single step...it starts by thinking about making the journey at all.