Extricating myself from big-tech

For so many reasons, one of my projects this year, has been to extricate myself from big-tech and it’s been a process but I feel like I’m nearly there.¹

What started it all?

The catalyst was an email from my doctor last fall but, when I think about it, it goes further back than that.

I’ve known for a long time that there are problems with social media and big tech. I remember reading Digital Minimalism, by Cal Newport, when it came out. It definitely gave me a lot to think about, particularly as someone with a background in health, social communication and behaviour sciences. At the time, however, I wasn’t ready to leave social media. I still saw potential to use it for good and I appreciated how it kept me connected to family and friends who I may not keep in regular contact with otherwise.

Reading that book did motivate me to remove people from my friends list who I either hadn’t had any in-person contact with for the last two years or who I didn’t really see myself having in-person contact with over the next couple of years. At that time I thought I would just keep that profile to people I really knew, however, in the coming years that would become more difficult as it became more of a networking tool for more casual contacts.

It wasn’t too long after that when I saw The Social Dilemma. It reinforced and built upon what I had read in Digital Minimalism about, not just the harms in using social media but, how it is intentionally being used to keep people on the platforms as long as possible, the attention economy as it’s now known. Yet, it still wasn’t enough for me to give it up. I told myself I could be in control, that I wouldn’t watch or click on ads, and that there was still too much benefit for me to leave.

Fast forward to 2022. One of my favourite platforms had been purchased by a billionaire who’s values are so far from my own that I decided to delete my profile on that platform. It wasn’t easy and I’m embarrassed to say I felt grief in leaving. I had made many friends through there. People who I wouldn’t have likely met otherwise and several who had gone on to become friends offline. I had used it to make important work connections and learned a lot through reading articles that had been shared by experts in various fields. However, I felt deeply that by continuing to participate in that platform, I would be contributing to what makes it successful and I didn’t want to do anything that increase that individual’s wealth further.

I began using a different company’s platforms more for sharing and connecting with family and friends. I reconnected with some of the people I’d met through my favourite platform on these other platforms. I knew that it was still problematic, that it didn’t align with my values, but it felt like the lesser of evils.

Late last year, however, that changed. Witnessing how people with so much power and wealth could continue to hoard that and contribute to worsening the overall social situation and health of their users, while supporting others in power who clearly do not have the best interest of the many at heart – it was too much for me. I could no longer participate in that. I had left a platform that was important to me before and survived. I had lived over twenty years of my life without social media and survived.² I knew that I could leave social media, and big-tech, and not just be fine but better.³

I downloaded my assets from my various accounts and deleted them. That was relatively easy. The more time consuming part has been leaving my “free”⁴ email account but I’m nearly free from that too.

That brings me back to the catalyst for all of this: an email from my doctor with “sent from proton” in the footer. I remembered reading about Proton a few years ago and decided to check it out. Although I don’t think I’d consciously decided to leave big-tech at that time, I knew that I was becoming increasingly uncomfortable being the product for so many of these services and was more interested in paying for a service where me and my attention wouldn’t be the product.

I signed up for Proton and quickly decided I liked the experience enough to subscribe to a paid plan for a year. I thought I’d see how it went and, if it worked well enough for me, I’d aim to have everything off of my other email (+ drive + photos) account before my paid subscription renewed again nearly a year later.

This isn’t meant to be a plug for Proton. It just happens to be the email service I’ve decided to switch to. Obviously, the encryption and privacy factors, plus knowing they’re making money from my subscription (not selling my data for me to be advertised to), are the main benefits. It’s generally just nice to use (it’s very clean looking and intuitive) and it has a lot of features that I had with my previous email service (calendar, drive, and password management). One thing that is better is aliases (I had created different accounts for different aliases with my old email platform but Proton makes aliases easy within your main account). Everything works well, maybe not quite as smoothly as the other service (e.g., I find the calendar is a bit laggy to load on my phone app but perhaps this is due to the encryption) but I notice it improving all the time.

In future posts, I’ll write a bit about some of the other services I’ve switched to in order to reduce my reliance on the giants of the tech industry and, where possible, use services that are more privacy focused.

1. As you read this know that I don’t judge anyone for being on any of the platforms. This is my experience in trying to live true to my own values. I know it is not possible for everyone (for many different reasons) and acknowledge the privilege I have in being able to make the choice to leave platforms that are not serving me. ↩︎
2. While talking about this one day I met someone who didn’t seem that much younger than me and they shared that they don’t remember a time before social media and that hit me harder than expected. ↩︎
3. At the time of writing, I do still have accounts on Bluesky and Mastodon. I’ve been on a social media break most of this year, so I haven’t posted to them much. As far as I know, both are still ad-free. I’m not sure if I’ll keep one or both of them at this time. That’s probably a musing for a future blog post, not a footnote. ↩︎
4. Not actually free because (1) as I’m sure most of us are aware, nothing is free. If you’re not being charged for a service, it’s because you’re the product and (2) I was paying for extra storage space and receiving reminders that I was nearing capacity and would need to either delete files or upgrade further. I chose to delete my account. ↩︎