A couple of months ago, I set out to answer the question of whether its possible to avoid the tech giants. Over the course of five weeks, I blocked Amazon, Facebook, Google, Microsoft, and Apple one at a time, to find out how to live in the modern age without each one.
This article was originally published in 2019 and has been updated since its original publication.
To end my experiment, Im going to see if I can survive blocking all five at once.
Not only am I boycotting their products, a technologist named Dhruv Mehrotra designed a special network tool that prevents my devices from communicating with the tech giants servers, meaning that ads and analytics from Google wont work, Facebook cant track me across the internet, and websites hosted by Amazon Web Services, or AWS, hypothetically wont load.
I am using a Linux laptop made by a company named Purism and a Nokia feature phone on which I am relearning the lost art of T9 texting.
I dont think I could have done this cold turkey. I needed to wean myself off various services in the lead-up, like an alcoholic going through the 12 steps. The tech giants, while troubling in their accumulation of data, power, and societal control, do offer services that make our lives a hell of a lot easier.
Earlier in the experiment, for example, I realised I dont know how to get in touch with people without the tech giants. Google, Apple, and Facebook provide my rolling Rolodex.
So in preparation for the week, I export all my contacts from Google, which amounts to a shocking 8,000 people. I have also whittled down the over 1,500 contacts in my iPhone to 143 people for my Nokia, or the number of people I actually talk to on a regular basis, which is incredibly close to Dunbars number.
I wind up placing a lot of phone calls this week, because texting is so annoying on the Nokias numbers-based keyboard. I find people often pick up on the first ring out of concern; theyre not used to getting calls from me.
On the first day of the block, I drive to work in silence because my rented Ford Fusions SYNC entertainment system is powered by Microsoft. Background noise in general disappears this week because YouTube, Apple Music, and our Echo are all bannedas are Netflix, Spotify, and Hulu, because they rely on AWS and the Google Cloud to get their content to users.
The silence causes my mind to wander more than usual. Sometimes this leads to ideas for my half-finished zombie novel or inspires a new question for investigation. But more often than not, I dwell on things I need to do.
Many of these things are a lot more challenging as a result of the experiment, such as when I record an interview with Alex Goldman of the podcast Reply All about Facebook and its privacy problems.
I live in California, and Alex is in New York; we would normally use Skype, but thats owned by Microsoft, so instead we talk by phone and I record my end with a handheld Zoom recorder. That works fine, but when it comes time to send the 386 MB audio file to Alex, I realise I have no idea how to send a huge file over the internet.
My Gmail alternativesProtonMail and Riseuptell me the file is too large; they tap out at 25 MB. Google Drive and Dropbox arent options, Dropbox because its hosted by Amazons AWS and relies on Google for sign-in. Other file-sharing sites also rely on the tech giants for web hosting services.
Before resorting to putting the file on a thumb drive and dropping it in a IRL mailbox, I call up my tech freedom guru, Sean OBrien, who heads Yale Law Schools Privacy Lab. He also does marketing work for Purism, the company that makes my laptop. OBrien tries to avoid tech giants in favour of open source technologies, so I figure he might be able to help.
OBrien directs me first to Send.Firefox.com, an encrypted file-sharing service operated by Mozilla. But it uses the Google Cloud, so it wont load. OBrien then sends me to Share.Riseup.net, a file-sharing service from the same radical tech collective that is hosting my personal email, but it only works for files up to 50 MB.
OBriens last suggestion is Onionshare, a tool for sharing files privately via the dark web, i.e. the part of the web thats not crawled by Google and requires the Tor browser to get to. I know this one actually. My friend Micah Lee, a technologist for the Intercept, made it. Unfortunately, when I go to Onionshare.org to download it, the website wont load.
Hah, yes, emails Micah when I ask about it. Right now its hosted by AWS.
As I encountered at the beginning of this experiment, Amazons most profitable business isnt retail; its web hosting. Countless apps and websites rely on the digital infrastructure provided by AWS, and none of them are working for me this week.
Micah suggests I download it from Github, but thats owned by Microsoft. Thankfully, OBrien tells me I can download the Onionshare program directly from Micahs server via command line on my Linux computer. He has to walk me through it step-by-step, but it works. Im able to run Onionshare, drop my file into it, creating a temporary onion site; I send the URL for the onionsite to Alex so he can download it via the Tor browser. Once he downloads it, I tell Onionshare to stop sharing, which takes the onion site down, erasing the file from the web.
(In the end, Alex doesnt even wind up using my audio for Reply Alls year-end finale. Sigh.)
I realise thats a long story about sharing one file, but its a nice summation of what online tasks are like this week. There are workarounds for services offered by the tech giants, but they take extra research to find and are often more difficult to use. I wind up in strange parts of the internet, using Ask.com (formerly known as Ask Jeeves) as my search engine, for example, after I ixnay Google.com and realise DuckDuckGo is hosted by AWS.
But Ask.com is not necessarily a great replacement: its owned by IAC, the media and dating company behemoth. Ive just traded one huge corporation seeking to monetise my searches for another, less competent one.
Some strange things are delightful: I discover that my Nokia phone can play the radio, so when I go running, I listen to NPR instead of my usual go-tos: Spotify, a podcast, or an audiobook. Im planning a trip to South Africa, and wind up in charming conversations with the travel agents I have to call for help; its more costly and less efficient to book via a travel agency, but its the only option because travel-booking websites arent working for me.
Something not delightful is my Nokia 3310s camera; it takes terrible, dark photos. I have an old Canon point-and-shoot digital camera, but I find I dont take many photos this weekbecause without Facebook and Instagram, I dont have anywhere to share them.
Sometimes I just cant find a digital replacement. Venmo wont work without a smartphone, so I pay our babysitter in cash. I start using a physical calendar to keep track of my schedule. When it comes to getting around, Marble Maps is an option, but Im confused by the interface, so I stick to places I know, and buy a physical map as a back-up.
Its funny because Nokia used to have amazing navigation with Navtech, a technologist says to me one day when Im talking about how hard driving is without mapping apps, but then they sold themselves to Microsoft.
Fuck, I think, my Nokia 3310 might be made by Microsoft.
But it turns out, while Microsoft did buy Nokias mobile devices division for $US7.2 billion in 2014, it sold Nokias feature phone assets two years later for a painful write-down, $US350 million, to Foxconn (of Apple outsourcing fame) and to HMD Global, a Finnish firm helmed by a former Nokia executive. HMD Global now uses Nokias intellectual property, i.e. brand, to sell phones. Most Nokia phones are Android smartphones, but theres a line of classic phones, including the 3310, which run an operating system called FeatureOS made by Foxconn.
My Nokia 3310 is not a tech giant phone, but its certainly tech giant adjacent.
To find out why the HMD Global is still selling dumbphones, I call its Hong Kong-based chief product officer, Juho Sarvikas. Sarvikas tells me that the company thought the core market for classic phones would be in Asia and Africa, where smartphones are less prevalent, but he says the devices have done surprisingly well in America.
Digital well-being is a concrete area now, he says. When you want to go into detox mode or if you want to be less connected, we want to be the company that has the toolkit for you.
So these phones are the nicotine patch for smartphone addiction, I say.
He laughs, Ive never put it that way before, but yes.
I had assumed that the phones were for parents who wanted their kids to have phones sans a pipeline to social media and apps.
That too, says Sarvikas.
Many people I talk to about this experiment liken it to digital veganism. Digital vegans reject certain technology services as unethical; they discriminate about the products they use and the data they consume and share, because information is power, and increasingly a handful of companies seem to have it all.
When I meet a full-time practitioner of the lifestyle, Daniel Kahn Gillmor, a technologist at the ACLU, Im not totally surprised to discover hes an actual vegan. I am surprised by the lengths to which hes gone to avoid the tech giants: he doesnt have a mobile phone and prefers to pay for things with cash.
My main concern is people being able to lead autonomous healthy lives that they have control over, Gillmor tells me during a chat via Jitsi, an open-source video-conferencing service that will work on any web browser. Theres no proprietary app you have to download and it doesnt require you to create an account.
Gillmor hosts his own email and avoids most social media networks (he makes exceptions for Github and Sourceforge, because hes an open source developer who wants to share his code with others). He refers to joining social networks as being bait that lures other people into surveillance traps.
Gillmor thinks people will have better lives if they arent being data-mined and monetized by companies that increasingly control the flow of information.
I have the capacity to make this choice. I know a lot of people would like to sign off but cant for financial reasons or practical reasons, he tells me. I dont want to come across as chastising people who dont make this choice.
And there are definitely costs to the choice. How things are structured determines the decisions people can make socially, he says. Like you didnt get invited to a party [via Facebook] because you chose not to be part of a surveillance economy.
Gillmor teaches digital hygiene classes where he tries to get people to think about their privacy and security. He usually starts the class by asking people if they know when their phones are communicating with cell towers. Most people say, When I use it, but the answer is, anytime its on, he says.
He wants people to think about their own data trails but also when they are creating data trails for other people, such as when a person uploads their contacts to a technology servicesharing information with the service that those contacts might not want shared.
Once the data is out there, it can be misused in ways we dont expect, he says.
But he thinks its going to take more than actions by individuals. We need to think of this as a collective action problem similar to how we think about the environment, he says. Our society is structured so that a lot of people are trapped. If you have to fill out your timesheet with an app only available on iPhone or Android, you better have one of those to get paid.
Gillmor wants lawmakers to step in, but he also thinks it can be addressed technologically, by pushing for interoperable systems like we have for phone numbers and email. You can call anyone; you dont need to use the same phone carrier as them. And you can take your phone number to a different carrier if you want (thanks to lawmaker intervention).
When companies cant lock us into proprietary ecosystems, we have more freedom. But that means Facebook would have to let a Pinterest user RSVP for an event on its site. And Apple would need to let you Facetime an Android user.
No one wants to give the keys out when they have customer lock-in.
The Amazon block continues to be the most challenging one for me.
My friend Katie is in town from New York; we have plans to meet for dinner one night at a restaurant near my house, an event marked on my physical calendar. On the morning we are to meet, I get an email from her to my Riseup account with the subject line, What is happening.
Katie had been sending me messages for days via Signal, but I hadnt gotten them because Signal is hosted by AWS. When she didnt hear from me, she sent an ARE YOU GETTING MY TEXTS email to Gmail, and got my away message directing her to my Riseup account.
I tell her dinner is still a go, but its a reminder of the costs of leaving these services. I can opt out, but people might not realise Ive left, or might forget, even if they do know.
One day, I ask my husband, Trevor, who declined to do the block with me because he has a real job, what the hardest part of my experiment is for him. I never know if youre going to respond to my texts, he says.
What do you mean? I ask. What have I not responded to?
I sent you some messages on Signal, Trevor says, having forgotten I am off it.
The block provides constant conversation fodder, and I find myself in conversations more often because, at social gatherings, I dont have a smartphone to stare at.
An Ivy League professor tells me he regularly employs a Google blocker. I had to disable it when I paid my taxes because they have Google Analytics on the IRS website, he says. It was kind of horrifying.
People under 35 are intrigued (and sometimes jealous) of life without a smartphone; people over 35 just seem nostalgic.
One night, I run into Internet Archive founder Brewster Kahle, who is delighted to hear about the block. Its hard to get away from technology, he says. A friend was just telling me about trying to get a TV that wasnt smart and didnt have a microphone. It was impossible. He wound up getting a 27-inch [computer] monitor.
Sometimes we make the choice to bring technology into our lives, but sometimes its forced upon us. Television makers have turned their products into surveillance machines that collect what we watch and what we dont watch and sometimes even what we say, and thats just how most TVs come now.
This week, I stop watching TV altogether because we dont have cable and internet TV isnt an option. I hadnt meant to make this experiment a rejection of all technologybut it happens despite my intentions.
Im most frustrated by this with my phone. I would love to be using a tech-giant free smartphone, but they arent really commercially available yet. If you want one, you need to be technically savvy and install a custom operating system on special phone models. That will hopefully change soon, with commercial offerings on the horizon from Eelo and Purism.
In the past, I would have assumed that idealistic projects like these were doomed, but there seems to be a heightened awareness these days of the dystopia created by the tech giants. Everywhere I look, I see criticism of the Frightful Five.
A writer I know pens an op-ed in the New York Times: Hate Amazon? Try living without it. (She didnt actually live without it.) A CNBC tech reporter reveals she gave up Facebook and Instagram for three months and that it made her a lot happier. A CBS reporter tries and fails to quit Google. A Vice writer gives all the giants up for a month (but not as rigorously as I did). The New York Times writes about apps tracking peoples locations with horrifying regularity and granularity.
The tech giants laid down all the basic infrastructure for our data to be trafficked. They got us to put our information into public profiles, to carry tracking devices in our pockets, and to download apps to those tracking devices that secretly siphon data from them.
Are Americas technology companies serving as instruments of freedom or instruments of control? asks a Californian politician.
Its in the air. The tech giants were long revered for making the world more connected, making information more accessible, and making commerce easier and cheaper. Now, suddenly, they are the targets of anger for assisting the spread of propaganda and misinformation, making us dangerously dependent on their services, and turning our personal information into the currency of a surveillance economy.
The world is flawed, and, fairly or not, the tech titans are increasingly being blamed.
A new book about surveillance capitalism by Harvard Business School professor Shoshana Zuboff argues that the extreme mining and manipulation of our data for profit is making an inescapable panopticon the driver of our economy.
Zuboffs publicist sent me an advance copy as an e-book, and Ive really been enjoying it, but I have to put it down this week because I cant read it on my Kindle. Instead, Im reading a physical bookHenry Thoreaus Walden, which I ordered from Barnes & Noble. It too is full of calls to re-immerse ourselves in the natural world and not get too caught up in the distractions of modern life.
But, because it was published in 1854, it warns people to get away from work and newspapers rather than smart devices and screens.
For ideas about what the government can do about all this, I call Lina Khan, a fellow at the Open Markets Institute who wrote a blockbuster paper on the need to regulate Amazons monopoly power. (At least its a blockbuster by academic standards.)
Khan is in New York doing an academic fellowship at Columbia University where she is working on more papers. Khan doesnt have a Prime account and avoids Gmail. Right before I call her, I see a tweet from a video producer at the Washington Post who got bombarded with baby ads after she had a stillborn delivery.
Please, Tech Companies, I implore you: If your algorithms are smart enough to realise that I was pregnant, or that Ive given birth, then surely they can be smart enough to realise that my baby died, and advertise to me accordingly or maybe, just maybe, not at all, she wrote in yet another reminder that privacy invasions have real harms.
I recount the story to Khan at the beginning of our call and say that this type of anger seems to be on the rise.
The tech companies own actions are prompting the tide to turn. It is a belated reckoning, but it seems to be a reckoning nonetheless, she says. Companies started monetizing user data far before most users even realised their data was valuable, let alone being collected by private actors. If users had been told that the price for access would be near-total surveillance, would they have agreed? Would companies have been forced to offer different business models?
Khan thinks law enforcers need to get involved to keep these companies from using anti-competitive tactics to dominate the business landscape, as public officials did in the 90s against Microsoft.
Several of the big tech firms have acquired rivals and inhibited competitors through predatory conduct, she says, a topic thats been in the news recently with the exposure of Facebook emails where CEO Mark Zuckerberg talks about cutting off then-viral video service Vines access to the Facebook social graph. They have engaged in practices that, a few decades ago, were widely considered monopolistic. We need investigations by the Department of Justice, the Federal Trade Commission, or state attorneys general.
Europe is on the case, its regulators fining Google and saying Facebook cant combine users data from Facebook, WhatsApp, and Instagram without their consent. But antitrust regulators in the U.S. have stayed away from these companies because their services are cheap or free, so theyre perceived as pro-consumer, which is ultimately what regulators want to encourage. But how does that work when the consumer is what the company is selling?
An uncomfortable idea I keep coming up against this week is that, if we want to get away from monopolies and surveillance economies, we might need to rethink the assumption that everything on the internet should be free.
So when I try to create a fourth folder in ProtonMail to organise my email and it tells me that I need to upgrade from a free to a premium account to do so, I decide to fork over 48 euros (about $75) for the year. In return, I get a 5 GB email account that doesnt have its contents scanned and monetized.
However, Im well aware that not everyone has $75 to spare for something that they can easily get for free, so if thats the way things go, the rich will have privacy online and the poor (and most vulnerable) will have their data exploited.
The previous week, my 1-year-old, Ellev, started saying that Alexa is scary and spooky, concepts she learned while trick-or-treating. Its not unreasonable; I can see how a disembodied voice thats always there and always listening would be disconcerting to a toddleror really any normal human being.
But this week, she keeps crying for Alexa, wanting her to play Baby shark and other music that is otherwise absent from our home. I miss Alexa, she says, and I feel terrible both for depriving her and for making her dependent on an AI at such a young age.
On the last day of the block, Trevor and I are flying to New York, and hes begging me to end the experiment early so we can use the iPad to keep Ellev happy. However, Im adamant about maintaining the blockade for the six-hour flight.
Im changing my seat to a different part of the plane, Trevor warns, kiddingly.
Trevor charges the iPad up in case my will falters. But I hold strong. We read books with Ellev, doodle on a magnetic drawing board, sing songs, and play for at least an hour with sticky, flexible Wizzle sticks that come in her Alaska Airlines snack pack. She sleeps for the last hour and a half of the flight, something she doesnt usually do if there is an iPad available.
That was Ellevs 26th flight. In the taxi after we land, Trevor turns to me and says, Thats the easiest flight weve ever had with her.
We get to our Airbnb in Brooklyn, which I booked months before the experiment. (It should technically be banned because Airbnb is hosted by AWS.) Theres a lock box on the outside of the apartment building that I open with a four-digit code. Inside is a key that gets us into the building and the same four-digit code opens a digital lock on the apartments door. I had written down the address and code on a piece of paper knowing I wouldnt be able to access the Airbnb website.
We get in with no problem. Were starving so head to a restaurant we passed in our taxi. Afterward, we need groceries, but Ellev is melting down, so I head to the Airbnb while Trevor goes to shop. I get into the building with the key, but once Ellev and I climb four flights of stairs to the apartment, I realise I dont have the piece of paper with the door code on itand I dont remember the code.
Ellev is crying and trying to turn the doorknob. I start to feel that desperate panic of an earlier age that nowadays accompanies a dying smartphone battery.
My laptop is inside the locked apartment. I use a password manager, stored on that laptop, to get into all my online accounts, so I couldnt get into Airbnb on another computer even if I wanted to toss in the towel on the blockade.
A masochistic part of my brain reminds me that I am in this mess because I used a site hosted by AWS. I could have just booked a normal hotel room via the phone, and then I would be picking up a new key card at this very moment. Technology creates the problems that technology solves, and vice versa.
While soothing Ellev, I try a bunch of different combinations on the lock based on my vague recollection of what the four numbers are. One of them works. As soon as I get inside, I plug my iPhone into the charger, relieved Ill resume using it the next day.
Critics of the big tech companies are often told, If you dont like the company, dont use its products. I did this experiment to find out if that is possible, and I found out that its notwith the exception of Apple.
These companies are unavoidable because they control internet infrastructure, online commerce, and information flows. Many of them specialize in tracking you around the web, whether you use their products or not. These companies started out selling books, offering search results, or showcasing college hotties, but they have expanded enormously and now touch almost every online interaction. These companies look a lot like modern monopolies.
Since the experiment ended, Ive resumed using the tech giants services, but I use them less. I deliberately seek out alternatives to do what I can, as a consumer, not to help them monopolize the market.
But the experiment went beyond that for me; it made me reexamine the role of tech in my life more widely. It broke me of that modern bad habit of swiping through my phone looking for a distraction rather than engaging with the people around me or seeking stimulation in my real world environment.
Read the original post:
I Cut The Big Five Tech Giants From My Life And It Was Hell - Gizmodo Australia
