I’m making some changes to my online presence. I will no longer be using Facebook, and I’ve started an account on Bluesky.
This was originally just going to be a bookkeeping post about my social media, but it’s really about much more than that, so let’s dig in.
Nearly a decade old, this photo is unfortunately still relevant.
I’ve never really been entirely comfortable with social media or big tech. I dislike the way it steers us all towards shallow soundbites instead of deeper discussions (hence why I have a blog and not an Instagram account), and I’ve never really been comfortable with these faceless corporations harvesting my personal data.
I’ve tried to mitigate the risks. I use Firefox and NoScript to block as much tracking as possible, and I save everything locally, nothing in the cloud. Still, big tech has done a superb job of boiling our collective frogs, and while I resisted the siren call better than most people I know, I have by no means been immune. I spend far too much time doomscrolling reddit, and I got very used to the convenience of having updates from all my favourite games, musicians, and meme pages in my Facebook feed.
But seeing the way the leaders of American big tech have been cozying up to the tangerine bastard who’s currently threatening to annex my country has been a wake-up call.
It’s probably a damning statement about me that it’s only when they started threatening me and my people that I really started to care. I know Facebook’s been toxic for years. I should have left when it helped facilitate genocide in Myanmar. But I was comfortable in my rut, and I didn’t want to change.
And that’s true of all us, isn’t it? We know we’re making unethical choices, but it’s just easier to turn a blind eye to the problem.
One thing that shocks me is how blasé everyone is about China these days. We know they’re committing genocide. We know they’ve built literal concentration camps where families are being torn apart and innocent people are being tortured or worse every day. And no one seems to care.
I get that our economies are so dependent on China that boycotting them entirely isn’t practical for the average person. I know most if not all of my electronics were made there; I’d take another option if I could, but I can’t.
But the fact no one’s even trying, no one’s even talking about trying, is just not something I can’t understand. You can’t always avoid buying Chinese products, but no one needs to play Genshin Impact. No one needs to watch cat videos on Tiktok. We could do more.
I get that life is hard and we need our little escapes. I get that we can’t always avoid supporting unethical nations or corporations. I think this is why I increasingly see leftists fantasizing about a violent overthrow of the ruling class. It’s way easier to imagine everything being magically fixed in one bloody night than it is to examine your own behaviour.
But just rolling out the guillotines is unlikely to fix anything in the long term. Killing off the ruling class is just going to create a power vacuum that will likely be filled by something just as bad.
That’s not to say the 1% don’t deserve a whole hell of a lot of blame for all that’s wrong in the world, and something definitely does need to be done about about them, but it probably looks more like tax increases, breaking up monopolies, and other dull regulatory changes than some heroic scene of freedom fighters waving flags in the town square.
What’s really going to make the difference is protesting and striking — consistently, not just once. It’s getting involved in all levels of government to steer policy. It’s making more ethical consumer choices. It’s hard, and it’s slow, and worst of all, it’s boring. But that’s what will actually make lasting, positive change.
The revolution will not be interesting.
One person making small changes won’t do much, but millions of people making small changes would add up to a big change. We just need to be willing to push ourselves a little.
We don’t need to abandon all modern convenience and go back to the Dark Ages, but we do need to start acknowledging our current way of life isn’t sustainable. Yes, you do need to use paper straws instead of plastic. Yes, you do need to stop uploading your entire life into the cloud for billionaire tech CEOs to pick over at their leisure. Yes, you do need to drive less, fly less, and eat less meat.
Which brings me back to shaking up my social media. I wish I could abandon the whole mess entirely, but it’s hard to live without in this day and age, especially for someone like me whose disability severely limits my capacity for face-to-face interaction.
Facebook is gone from my life, and I’m avoiding Google where I can. I’ve switched to using a mix of DuckDuckGo and Brave for my searches. YouTube is difficult to live without, but I installed an ad blocker to hopefully not contribute to its bottom line, and I avoid logging in as much as possible to prevent their algorithm forming an accurate picture of me. I never engaged with Amazon much outside of New World, and while I’m not sure I’ll abandon it entirely (for professional reasons if nothing else), the current state of the game has me hardly playing anyway.
(And yes, I know much of the Internet runs on Amazon services nowadays, so you’re still kind of using their stuff even when you’re not. We do what we can.)
reddit still seems to be confining itself to everyday villainy rather than cartoonish super villainy, and Bluesky doesn’t seem to be up to any particularly scary shenanigans that I know of, but I’ll keep a close eye on both. I’m also giving serious thought to abandoning my Yahoo and Google emails for a European provider. I’ll continue to look for ways to extricate myself from big tech, especially American big tech, and try to hold myself to a higher standard of accountability.
The point is that there are a lot of situations in our society where making an ethical choice isn’t possible. But there are also a lot of situations where it is possible and just takes a little more effort, and that’s what I’m trying to do. If I can buy Canadian instead of Chinese or American or Israeli, I will. If I can support one company with more ethical practices over another without, I will.
It may not be as fun as throwing up a picture of Mario’s brother on social media, but it’s a lot more likely to make a difference. The oligarchs of the world want you to think there’s nothing you can do. They don’t mind that you hate them; they want you to blame all your problems on them so you keep buying their products and using their services, telling yourself all the while there’s no other option.
But we do have the power to change things, and we can do it right now, not in some glorious revolt that is forever on the horizon. We just need to be willing to make the hard, boring choice to do the right thing where we can.
The revolution will not be interesting.
