Changing Lanes

This is some serious shit.

With the Plutocracy actively pulling the tendons of government apart I’ve been stuck in a state of passive horror. While both of those things must stop, I can only affect one of those realities. The tendency to sit idly by while the ship is sinking cannot be human nature. Kinda works against evolution. And so that’s how I decided to start boycotting as many of the big tech and commerce companies as possible. Or, at least, those whose ethics and DEI policies don’t align with mine. And it is in that spirit that I’ve decided to leave the ecosystems of Amazon, Meta, and Google. Tesla and Starlink would be on the list but I don’t have anything to do with Musk’s brands.

My first order of business, an ongoing one, is to identify just exactly who it is that I want to stop supporting, some of which I’ve mentioned above. I plan to make myself aware of, and support, those companies with DEI policies and ethics that align with mine, those whose policies don’t align, I won’t support. Target, for example, who has recently scaled back their DEI efforts and last year announced a plan to walk back their LGBTQ+ policies, can be added to the list above.

Amazon and Target are relatively easy, actually. And don’t forget that Amazon owns Whole Foods. Since the beginning of 2024 I’ve spent $22,048.09 at Amazon and Whole Foods. Amazon makes it really easy — too easy, in fact — to quickly get what you want with barely a muscle moved. And I love good food which means cooking with good ingredients, so that’s Whole Foods. Change boils down to a matter of shifting my mentality. I simply have to shop differently. It requires being deliberate and shopping locally more. Both of those things are huge positives.

This week I canceled our Amazon Prime membership. I wasn’t planning on doing it so soon, but it renews in exactly one week and there was no way I was doing another year, so, boom, that’s done.

The Google situation is different because of the sheer scale.

Here are all the services I use from Google:

Email
Search
Drive
Google One (cloud storage)
Google Keep (notes)
Calendar
Photos
Maps
News
Tasks
YouTube

Last year I switched from Android to Apple for my smartphone of choice and a couple months ago I moved to Firefox from Chrome. Earlier this week, I switched all of my device’s default search settings to Duckduckgo from Google, removed Google News from my phone in favor of alternative headline aggregators (specifically Bundle and Smartnews), and committed to using Apple Maps now instead of Google Maps or Google-owned Waze. I’m not sure if my website has anything to do with Google Analytics, because I am not exactly an expert at webdesign, but I will check into that.

On the above list, the hardest to leave are YouTube (almost no alternative), Photos, and Drive. Moving email is daunting and will be time consuming, but simple. Simple but not easy. Same for switching cloud storage providers. Ditto notes and calendar apps.

So here I go. I plan to keep an update of my progress here on this site.