Journalist Kashmir Hill recently made an attempt to cut the ‘big five’ tech companies from her life—Amazon, Facebook, Google, Microsoft and Apple. She wrote about it in Gizomodo and links to all the articles are here: https://gizmodo.com/c/goodbye-big-five. Hill cut each in turn for a week then went for a final week without any of them.
By ‘cut out’ I mean she tried to go the whole way and used a custom VPN to block any IP Address associated with the five companies in any of their manifestations. It wasn’t entirely successful, and is probably not an exercise easily repeatable by most of us anyway, but it drove the provocative content of the exercise, and made me consider again aspects of my own life and tech.
The articles are smart, funny, troubling and provocative all at the same time, and I recommend you read them.
The first thing that struck me was the sheer quantity of tech. in the life of Ms Hill and her family. For Amazon there was:
- An Echo
- An Echo Dot
- 2 Kindles
- 2 Amazon Prime credit cards
- Amazon Prime video and TV
- 2 Prime accounts.
We certainly use Amazon, but we have none of the above things, though we might have an old-ish Kindle in a drawer somewhere. We have no Apple products in the house except a 10-year-old (at least) iPod mini that still worked last time I tried it. With Google, I’ve used Gmail since 7 August 2004 when it was still in Beta, and have both an Android phone and tablet. Nonetheless I rarely use Google Apps apart from Calendar. My wife has a Chromebook and an Android tablet and phone.
This isn’t a Luddite mentality; I’ve been around the internet since around 1990, just about when Mosaic came along to make things interesting, and most of the last 20 years of my working life have had to do with eCommerce in one form or another. I’ve blogged since 2002. But I do continually assess my relationship to technology and how much I let it dominate me (bearing in mind I spend most of my day in front of a laptop). As regular readers know, I deleted my LinkedIn and Facebook accounts and now only keep Instagram (@ianburdon) and Twitter (@Cosmic_Serf) as social media—and I’m trying to cut back on Twitter screen time. I use WhatsApp. I’m also ad-blocked to the max and routinely refuse cookies; to the extent I can I block trackers, but that’s a losing battle I think.
I keep in regular contact with four people from my schooldays, and I realised a while ago that I am the only who has ever had a Facebook account, and I’m the only one with Twitter. One of my friends uses an old flip-top phone by choice and I’m not sure if he has a regular email address; he and I communicate by phone or in person.
I certainly do use my phone for pics., for here and Instagram and Twitter, and I have some good, if ageing, digital cameras, but most of the time I use film (35mm or 120) and am thinking of processing my own black and white film again for the first time in decades. I do stream music, but more likely I play CDs in the office and vinyl in the front room when I’m alone. I have a working Creative Zen MP3 player I’ve had since 2007.
I was interested in Hill’s attempt to cut out Amazon; that is the one that ultimately failed because of Amazon’s dominance of infrastructure. By blocking AWS, anything hosted there was also blocked including, to my surprise, Signal. During one week, her devices tried to ping Amazon servers 300,000 times at 3,800 different IP addresses.
I was interested too in the Linux alternatives Hill tried out; I have a couple of laptops running Linux but I don’t use them much. They’re functional but also in many ways a PITA if you want a consumer-level experience or even anything more than that. I have a Linux phone somewhere which I really liked but it fell by the wayside because I couldn’t get alternatives for the few Apps that I do use.
Ms. Hill finishes by saying she’s going to buy a watch. Ironically enough, the decision I took years ago to stop wearing a watch was one of the most freeing things I’ve done. I have a couple of watches that I wear from time to time if the situation requires it, but most of the time they stay in a drawer.
And I think that’s the spirit in which I respond to the articles. I’m 60 this year and I like the differences tech brings to the way I live now. I like being able to have conversations (voice or video) with my sister in Texas and my daughter in Michigan without having to book time on international telephone exchanges. I like the way I can control my bank account balances and transfer money and pay my bills from my phone. But I also remember the internet as it used to be and the idealism we all had back then. I don’t want to rehash things I’ve written about previously (https://www.cosmicsurfer.co.uk/?p=2631) but I do want to affirm that old idealism, which remains my default setting.
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