Lead a simple modest life.
Fuck all the globalisation and the fomo and the terminally online. You family and freinds and maybe your neighbours, that's what matters. That's what influences you personally the most.
I spent a lot of the pandemic learning about farm boxes and local produce. Now I spend most of my grocery money on local produce and whatever the farmer's market has available. I try to pay cash everywhere they will take it because tech bros get money for most wireless transactions nowadays.
Costco has been the great balancer. It is quite progressive for a public company and supports DEI policies. It also has just about anything you can want. I bought my car through Costco and I use the Costco credit card. For all things there are alternatives to tech bros.
Slow tech. I recently transferred my music library from my laptop (mostly ripped CDs) to my phone. Love having offline access to my music. Listening to entire albums. Not paying money to Spotify that shills for ICE and is ripping off artists by creating AI music.
Going to buy a cd player and/or cd-rom and buy more CDs, or buy digital albums directly from artists.
A lot of people are buying iPods to do something similar, but your phone will do the same thing if you just remove the streaming apps.
I vote for listening to full albums as well.
As a youngster I used to have a massive playlist, only my favorite songs on it... These days I only listen to full albums, bad/weak songs and all. Its so much better. I've realised that a lot of the "bad" songs that I didn't want to listen to as a youth, are not that bad actually.
I think there’s something to this. Even if the album isn’t great, simply sitting with it and experiencing it is instructive.
It’s strange to think, but in the late 90s, albums were a bit of a cynical play. “I like this band or performer, let me get all that they have to give. I will spend $20+ on an album where a $5+ single might have given me the best they had to give.”
Which is not a knock against the concept album. I quite like those. The Who; or more recently The Mars Volta.
But wrapping around to my point about slow tech — if you put an album in a CD player and listen to it start-to-finish — has something been gained? I would say yes. This is what the performer wanted you to hear. Good or bad.
I always heard about Spotify ripping off artists and thought "well, it can't be worse than YouTube's random demonetisations, can it?" but what's this about it shilling for ICE?
“Shilling” isn’t quite right but they ran ICE advertisements.
Ah, yeah that's a yikes
Instead of the popular social media sites, I use one called Lemmy. It's kinda underground. You probably haven't heard of it.
Went from Design Home Game to Cozee, switched from Amazon to Chewy for cat supplies, next phone will be a Pixel, and I can't say the other
Well, by never becoming part of it in the first place.
Just being around them is enough to repel me. The other day I eavesdropped on a group of them who were talking about increasing access to personalized avatars. It uhh got creepy fast
Linux, fediverse, signal, matrix, self-hosting services like Jellyfin and Gittea, minimizing subscription services as much as possible, embrace physical media and retro gaming, touch grass, etc.
You would be amazed how much free and open technology you personally have access to, even on modest used hardware running out of your home.
I am or am in the process of being rid of most of them except for Amazon. Unfortunately, there's no end in sight for Amazon.
Since email seems like the key to everything now, starting fresh with a new service was the most logical place to start for me. I went with Proton, largely because email and VPN in one payment. From there, replace (or transfer) old accounts one-by-one.
Oh yeah, and everyone else is mentioning this, so I'll add it too: it's also a good time to reevaluate where you spend your time, so check:
- Can I discard this service? If no, then...
- Can I replace this service? If no, then...
- Should I transfer my account for this service?
Obviously it depends on what you buy from there, but personally I find Amazon one of the easiest places to avoid, and one of the first places I've started avoiding. I've just been substituting it with eBay and Onbuy, and so far there's nothing Amazon has that they don't.
Amazon is very easy to avoid, if you don't have prime it's often more expensive then other places and there is so much drop shopped crap and fake goods and terrible customer service I see no reason to ever use it.
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