Exiting big tech, part 1: the awakening

As mentioned in a recent note, I have deleted my Google account.

This was a milestone on my journey to reduce my reliance on "Big Tech" services in my day-to-day life.¹ In this post, I will write about why I am doing this. Later, I will follow up with posts on how. Once published, I will add these posts to the endnotes — to save you the work of having to go looking to see if I have published them.

Early beginnings

Technology, computers in particular, always fascinated me. I remember fondly the day I went with my father to pick up our first home computer. Eight at the time, it felt like I had nagged about getting a computer in the house forever.

A short time later, we went to a newly opened (and, alas, short-lived) local internet café to surf the web. My list of things to nag about gained a new entry. Luckily, it didn't take long before our house was outfitted with a state-of-the-art ISDN dual dial-up line and I got to experience the web in all of its dial-up glory.

Technology and the web was a space of infinite possibility.

Fast forward a quarter century and well, well, well, how the turntables...

Enshittification everywhere

Seemingly every single product from the big tech companies have fallen victim to enshittification. Dealing with tech products has become akin to being stuck in traffic. Matthew Gault hit the nail on the head writing for Gizmodo:

Google search is filled with garbage. The internet is clogged with SEO-farming websites that clog up results. Facebook is an endless stream of AI-generated slop. Zoom wants you to test out its new AI features while you’re trying to go into a meeting. Twitter has become X, and its owner thinks sharing links is a waste of time. Last night I reinstalled Windows 11 on a desktop machine and got pissed as it was finalized and Microsoft kept trying to get me to install Onedrive, Office 360, Call of Duty Black Ops 6, and a bunch of other shit I didn’t want.

Good, old fashioned road rage is sweet relief compared to the tech equivalent inspired by trying to figure how to do the simplest thing with your state-of-the-art edition of some commercial software suite. Not to mention the ever-worsening bargain (for the user, anyways) of functionality and, you know, things actually working, versus privacy. As noted by Simone in Why I Make Smart Devices Dumber: A Privacy Advocate's Reflection:

In the rush to embrace smart devices, you accept a devil's bargain: convenience for surveillance, efficiency for privacy. Homes become frontiers in the attention wars—each gadget a potential Trojan horse of data collection, promising easier lives.

Tech no longer inspired a sense of awe and opportunity. Instead it had become a necessary evil to be endured. It left me jaded and I hated it. I was done. Ready to embrace my inner Luddite and abandon tech in all aspects of life where at all possible.

A new hope

In 2023 I decided to quit social media.

For a while I gave Mastodon and "the fediverse" a go. Ultimately, I found that it triggered all the wrong things in my in the same way as its strictly commercial counterparts. It wasn't all bad, though, because it was through Mastodon that I stumbled across the Indie Web and adjacent movements like the Small Web and the Open Web. Here, people strive to take back the web and make it fun and interesting and awesome again.

That quickly led to the relaunch of this website. In turn, an epiphany resulted:

Tech doesn't have to be uninspiring. I don't have accept enshittification. Looking behind the curtain of big tech corporate offerings that have come to dominate our world is possible. There I found the same stuff that so hooked me years ago, only with more than two decades of technological progress to supercharge already endless possibilities!

In parallel to working on this website, I began exploring big tech alternatives. Some of what I tried, I liked. Other things, I didn't. That didn't matter. The immense feeling of agency and freedom was all I cared about. This awakened me to the fact that the worst part of modern tech is the lock-in.

You're free to flee, of course, should you be so inclined.

Just beware the intermingled services and web of co-dependencies between products. If you decide to do that little thing there somewhere else, don't be surprised if it all just stops working. And, if it doesn't, what's that? You say you want your new solution to integrate with our other products? Look, we think you'd be better off if you just go back to using our offering instead.

And so begun my journey. My goal? To make every part of my tech stack open and easily replaceable. A year later, a significant part of my tech stack runs on FOSS (Free and Open Source Software) alternatives. Even more importantly, I'm conscious about storing my data in ways that make it easy to switch between systems and providers, now and in the future.

This journey has reawakened my joy for technology. On a personal level, I haven't been as engaged and inspired by technology in many, many years. Once more, I feel like tech has the potential to be a force for good, in my life, and in the world at large.