Saying goodbye to big U.S. tech

West Kildonan

If you’ve been feeling more like the consumed than the consumer lately, you aren’t wrong. I wrote a piece in this space a few months ago about abandoning my Amazon Prime habit, but now I am going further.

The tech billionaires who sat behind U.S. President Donald Trump at his inauguration are determined to extract as much data and value as they can from us, while reducing the quality of our experience of their products.

The Canadian writer Cory Doctorow describes this process as ensh*ttification – wherein companies first offer good service to lock in their users, good business service to lock in their advertisers and, finally, lousy service to both users and advertisers to lock in their real customers, the shareholders.

They are counting on our inertia and the difficulty of switching to keep us locked in, even as we receive less and less value from their products – while we no longer love Facebook, we love our friends and family who are there, and it’s hard to leave them, unless we can persuade them to come somewhere better with us.

While social media may present a particular challenge in terms of leaving, it’s much easier to switch from other big U.S. tech to other companies – European or even Canadian.

I have been slowly disconnecting myself from all things Google, Meta, Amazon and Microsoft and have discovered that some products are easier to replace than others. Even the mighty Zoom is not irreplaceable – I’ve been using a Norwegian upstart called Whereby for my video calls, and it works quite well, and, as far as I know, its CEO has not been seen in the White House.

Office products (Word, Excel, PowerPoint) and their Google equivalents can be replaced by LibreOffice, a free, Microsoft Office lookalike based in Germany. With Microsoft announcing that it will be raising its prices to force its AI into everything, it’s not a hard choice for me.

I’ve mostly replaced Gmail and Google Drive with Proton, which is based in Switzerland, and guaranteed not to spy on me.

While Signal and BlueSky are US companies, they are much smaller than WhatsApp and X, for which they are greatly preferable replacements, with better privacy policies and no oligarchic overlords.

If you want a comprehensive guide to making these changes, I recommend that you follow Canadian journalist Paris Marx – they have published a guide on their blog, Disconnect (search for disconnect.blog) and also have a podcast called Tech Won’t Save Us, which I highly recommend if you are interested in learning the ways tech shapes our world.

These are not easy times, and sometimes we can feel completely powerless to make any kind of change for the better. But we can choose to extract ourselves from at least some webs, and it feels good. Join me!