The 5 big tech companies have a big impact on our society, but how difficult it is to avoid them? The author of these articles tries to cut each of the tech companies out of her life, one each week, and then the last week, she tries to cut all of them out. She encounters hilarious and also thought-provoking obstacles each time.
The story is worth reading in full, but below I’ve pulled out some of the more interesting facts and conclusions, for us to discuss.
Amazon:
Amazon reportedly controls 50 percent of online commerce, which means half of all purchases made online in America, which is obscene.
Amazon is not just an online store—that’s not even the hardest thing to cut out of my life. Its global empire also includes Amazon Web Services (AWS), the vast server network that provides the backbone for much of the internet, as well as Twitch.tv, the broadcasting behemoth that is the backbone of the online gaming industry, and Whole Foods, the organic backbone of the yuppie diet.
AWS is the internet’s largest cloud provider, generating 0ver $17 billion in revenue last year. Though Amazon makes much more in gross sales—over $100 billion—from its retail business, if you scrutinize its earnings reports, you’ll see that the majority of its profits come from AWS. Tech is where the money is, baby.
CDNs obscure AWSs
Launched in 2006, AWS has taken over vast swaths of the internet. My VPN winds up blocking over 23 million IP addresses controlled by Amazon, resulting in various unexpected casualties, from Motherboard and Fortune to the U.S. Government Accountability Office’s website. (Government agencies love AWS, which is likely why Amazon, soon to be a corporate Cerberus with three “headquarters,” chose Arlington, Virginia, in the D.C. suburbs, as one of them.) Many of the smartphone apps I rely on also stop working during the block.
With the VPN up and running, I start to wonder why so many sites still work. Airbnb, for example, is a famed user of AWS, but I can search for a Thanksgiving vacation home there. I email Airbnb to ask if it still uses AWS for hosting, and a spokesperson confirms the company does. (I also could have confirmed it with this cool tool, which tells you about the digital provenance of a website.)
That’s how Dhruv and I discover a major flaw in our blocking technique. It turns out many sites, in addition to using a company like AWS to host their digital content, employ a secondary service called a content delivery network, or CDN, to load web pages faster.
If a website uses AWS in combination with a non-Amazon CDN, my blocker sees the IP address used by the CDN and lets that AWS-hosted content slip through. When I check with Gizmodo Media Group’s tech team, I discover that our own sites are hosted by AWS and use Fastly as a CDN. Just like Airbnb, Gizmodo is sneaking past my blocker.
Surveillance large and small
In addition to entertainment options going dark, basic tools of my work become unusable, notably the encrypted messaging app Signal and the workplace communication platform Slack.
It’s hard to convey how disruptive this is if you’re not a person who uses Slack at work; it tends to replace office meetings, emails, and phone calls. Without Slack, I basically have no idea what is going on at the office for the entirety of the Amazon-blocking week, and my colleagues have little idea what I am up to.
There is a psychological benefit to this. Slack’s purpose is to improve workplace communication, but it’s also a vehicle for workplace surveillance, made obvious by the green dot next to your name indicating whether you’re sitting at a keyboard at the ready, or an empty gray dot revealing your absence. By blocking Amazon, I don’t just dismantle Amazon’s surveillance of my life, I block my colleagues’ surveillance as well.
Like a parasite, Amazon uses what they know about their own customers to crush them out of their own marketplaces
In her blockbuster academic article, Lina Khan, now a legal fellow at the Federal Trade Commission, argues that Amazon is breaking the spirit of antitrust law, but that regulators have failed to act because that law has evolved in a way to ignore monopolies if they result in immediate low costs to consumers.
But Khan says that our increasing reliance on Amazon in our everyday lives carries harms that we are only beginning to see, including Amazon being able to exploit its workers (who reportedly pee in bottles to keep up with the company’s punishing pace), being able to massively data-mine Americans whose activity it has vast access to (meaning it could charge different people different prices based on what it knows about them, which it experimented with in the past), and being able to kill off competitors who would otherwise offer consumers a variety of options and prices (R.I.P. Diapers.com).
Amazon does not see itself as a monopoly. “There is an important difference between horizontal breadth and vertical depth,” said a spokesperson in a statement sent after this story was published. “We operate in a diverse range of businesses, from retail and entertainment to consumer electronics and technology services, and we have intense and well-established competition in each of these areas. Retail is our largest business and we represent less than 1% of global retail and around 4% of U.S. retail.”
But, based on my experience this week, I find Khan’s conclusions chilling and prescient, especially her points around Amazon’s luring third-party sellers to its site. That allows the sellers to make more money by providing access to Amazon customers in the short term, but Amazon slurps up these businesses’ data and can ultimately crush them with cheaper prices.
Given Amazon’s access to data about many, many businesses through hosting websites via AWS, it could be collecting similar competitive data on a vast scale. In fact, in the past, it has used insights gleaned from AWS to make investments in start-ups that it saw were doing gangbusters growth in its cloud.
“I’d be stunned if AWS product managers aren’t using data from the usage patterns of their platform to decide with whom and how to build competitive products,” said Matthew Prince, who runs Cloudflare, one of the content delivery networks that frustrated my blocker this week. “They’ve done this relentlessly in retail, there’s no reason to think they won’t use the data from their platform to do the same with digital services. Companies that use AWS are feeding critical market data directly to the company that, almost certainly, will one day be their largest competitor.”
Facebook:
Getting off Facebook doesn’t prevent Facebook from knowing about you
Of course, while I can “delete” my Facebook, that doesn’t delete all my information from its servers, even after 30 days. It still knows what other people share about me, from photos of me and my family, to my contact information if others upload it.
Facebook tracks you relentlessly
The Amazon block took out whole websites and services for me, but that’s not the case with Facebook, because it doesn’t control the building blocks of the internet.
The vast majority of Facebook’s requests are likely its attempts to track my movements around the web, via Like and Share buttons, Facebook Analytics, Facebook Ads, and Facebook Pixel. Facebook Pixel, if you haven’t heard of it, is a little piece of code that a company can put on its website—say, on a particular sneaker page that you look at while signed into Facebook on your work computer. Once the pixel captures you looking at the sneaker page, the shoe company can retarget you through Facebook, so you later see an ad for the same shoe when you’re scrolling through Instagram on your personal phone.
Changing Networks Is Hard, because building a new Network is too hard unless you have a real reason.
I try to fill the social media hole in my life by joining Mastodon, an open-source, decentralized Twitter-like social network. (You “toot” instead of “tweet,” a term chosen by someone who either doesn’t know the standard definition or who believes most of what people write online is noxious hot air.) I try a toot or two, but honestly, I find the idea of building yet another online social network exhausting. So after signing in a couple of times, I abandon it. Network effects are real and powerful. Sarah Jeong summed up the problem well in Vice soon after Mastodon’s October 2016 launch:You aren’t on Mastodon because your friends aren’t on Mastodon. Your friends aren’t on Mastodon because you’re not on Mastodon. And I wouldn’t be on Mastodon, either, if I hadn’t promised my editor to write an article about it.
This is the hold Facebook has on us: We built our networks there, and we are loathed to leave them or to start again.
If you’re not on social media, when everybody else is, you lose.
I also lose my ability to receive news from my social circle. Spoiler: When I give in and re-enable my Facebook account weeks later, I see at the top of my Newsfeed that one of my closest friends recently gave birth. I call her to congratulate her and tell her I wouldn’t have found out if I hadn’t re-joined the social network. “I just assume that if I post something on Facebook, everyone will know about it,” she tells me.
If you give up Facebook and all the companies it owns, you’re cut off from participating in your community, whatever your community may be.
And I realize I don’t really know what people are up to. My friends now largely expect that I’ll see their broadcasts on various social networks, which means they don’t tell me things individually anymore, unless I see them in person.
Or the alternative happens: I assume I know everything that’s going on with someone because I’ve been following their feed. I recently went to visit a college friend who lives across the country. We text each other every weekend with our favorite photos from the week, and I felt like we were in relatively good touch, but once I’d spent a few days with her, I discovered there was ground-shaking stuff happening in her life about which I’d had no clue. It made me realize just how limited many of my digital communication channels are.
Google
Google is central to the internet
“Your smart home pings Google at the same time every hour in order to determine whether or not it’s connected to the internet,” Dhruv tells me. “Which is funny to me because these devices’ engineers decided to determine connectivity to the entire internet based on the uptime of a single company. It’s a good metaphor for how far the internet has strayed from its original promise to decentralize control.”
In some cases, the Google block means apps won’t work at all, like Lyft and Uber, or Spotify, whose music is hosted in Google Cloud. The more frequent effect of the Google block though is that the internet itself slows down dramatically for me.
Most of the websites I visit have frustratingly long load times because so many of them rely on resources from Google and get confused when my computer won’t let them talk to the company’s servers. On Airbnb, photos won’t load. New York Times articles won’t appear until the site has tried (and failed) to load Google Analytics, Google Pay, Google News, Google ads, and a Doubleclick tracker.
Can you even have a phone without Google?
O’Brien has an “Android phone with no Google on it.” Google bought Android in 2007 in “the best deal ever,” and then started insisting that phone companies that used the operating system, which is about 80 percent of the market, bundle Google apps and make them the default options. That little directive led European regulators to hit the company with a $5 billion fine last summer in an antitrust ruling that now has Google charging a licensing fee for apps and services that most phone makers have become dependent on.
To de-Google his Android, O’Brien had to install a custom operating system. “The irony is that the phones it’s easiest to do this on are the Google developer phones: the Nexus and the Pixel lines,” O’Brien says. So the operating system is Google-free, but the phone is made by Google.
If It’s Free, You’re the Product
Damn you, Google. You’ve given us some really useful products over the years, even if they weren’t welcomed by everyone.
If I stick with this, it will be a more costly way to live. While everything I use this week is free, some services won’t be if I become a heavy user. Protonmail charges after 500 MB of data; I’ve got 14 times that in my free, personal Gmail alone. Making the switch to decentralized, privacy-focused companies means you might actually have to pay for a service because they’re not necessarily monetizing your data.
A bigger drawback is that Google is really damn good at a lot of the things it does, and I miss those things. For example, DuckDuckGo works for my internet search needs but isn’t quite as spot-on as Google Search. And yes, it’s privacy-invasive that Google is mining all our data all the time, but I love that when I get an email about a flight, Gmail automatically tells Google Calendar to pencil it in. Is that worth the trade-off? Millions of people seem to think so.
My overall impression from this week is that Google touches almost everything on the internet. I run into it on almost every site and every app that I use. Blocking Google from my life was almost as hard as blocking Amazon, on which much of the non-Google internet relies.
Microsoft
Microsoft more B2B than retail
If you’re like me and exclusively use Macs, you might think you don’t use Microsoft very often. But it operates the workhorses of social media—LinkedIn, Skype, and Github—as well as a big distraction from work in the form of Xbox. During the block, I can’t use any of them, nor can I connect to websites and apps hosted by Microsoft Azure, its rapidly expanding cloud business.
Even though I don’t use any Windows machines, don’t own an Xbox, and don’t turn to Microsoft Office for document creation, the company still turns out to be tricky to block, not so much online, but in the real world, where Dhruv and his VPN can’t help me. In one surprise example, I run into the Redmond giant in my car—a 2015 Ford Fusion, which I have from a long-term rental service called Canvas. I’ve been driving it for weeks but only now notice a placard on the center console that reads, “SYNC, powered by Microsoft.” Turns out, Microsoft’s technology powers the car’s entertainment and navigation system, so I have to drive to work in silence.
When I tell Dhruv about this, he points out that there are many more places I could potentially be using Microsoft services without realizing it, like when I buy coffee at a coffee shop that uses Windows as the operating system for its payment system or when I use public transportation that uses Microsoft to power its back-end services. As the New York Times points out, Microsoft is “mainly a supplier of technology to business customers.”
That means that Microsoft is virtually impossible to completely avoid without also retreating from society entirely, which, at least for me, isn’t an option. Just as Amazon was inescapable on the web, Microsoft is unavoidable IRL.
Is Microsoft less ubiquitous at the retail level because of the 1990s anti-trust suit?
It is possible, I find, to avoid personally using Microsoft’s products. Maybe this is the way things would have gone regardless of what happened in the 1990s. Maybe this was the kind of company Microsoft was fated to become. Or maybe, if the government hadn’t intervened decades ago to keep Microsoft from dominating the world of computers, we’d all still be using Microsoft-owned Hotmail and surfing friend feeds on Microbook and posting our photos to Microgram and Binging our latest health concern.
That decades-old Microsoft antitrust case was sprawling and complicated in the way that any legal matter is, but it boiled down to a rather simple catalyst. Windows was the dominant operating system 30 years ago, as it is on PCs still today, and the internet was only just starting to develop. In 1994, a company called Netscape released a popular internet browser called Navigator that it was selling for about $50, and Microsoft decided to undercut it.
To try to ensure its dominance in the growing business that was the internet, Microsoft developed its own internet browser called Internet Explorer, gave it away for free, and insisted that it be bundled with Windows. So when you bought a computer—which was probably operating Windows because most then computers did—you’d get Internet Explorer installed by default the same way you get Safari pre-installed on your iPhone or the Google Play Store pre-installed on your Android phone, which gave Internet Explorer a distinct advantage.
Microsoft was using its powerful control of the computer operating system supply line to muscle its way into controlling people’s internet experience (Netscape eventually made Navigator free as well, helping to lay the groundwork for an internet where almost everything is “free” but monetized instead via our attention and data.) Regulators worried that Microsoft was using its dominant position in the software industry to crush competitors and would-be competitors, and so they sued.
Giving Internet Explorer to people for free was seen as ultimately hurting consumers, which is a version of antitrust law that American regulators have since mostly abandoned, though activists like the Open Markets Institute are pushing for it to be re-embraced. It’s an approach that Europe recently adopted, as evidenced by its antitrust crackdown on Google last year; European regulators fined Google $5 billion for making its search engine the default and including the Google Play store and the Chrome browser for free in Android operating systems, which are used by 80 percent of smartphones.
The big difference between Microsoft and the others in the Big Five is that it’s been forced into the shadows while the others are freely operating their respective empires right in our faces all the time.
So if the conclusion is that I can live (sort of) without Microsoft today because of the government’s antitrust crackdown in the 90s, the question is what the government should do now about the behemoths I am finding I can’t live without.
Apple
Apple the Privacy Cop?
In fact, Apple has become a kind of privacy regulator for the rest of the tech industry. It recently punished Facebook and Google by rendering their internal iOS apps unusable after the two companies abused special all-seeing powers to spy on iPhone users for “research,” illustrating just how powerful Apple is, with the ability to control what code people can run on their own phones.
Convenience is Seductive
The 13-inch Librem (which means “freedom book”) has a GNU/Linux operating system, an Apple-level price tag of $1,399, and a lot of privacy-and-security bells and whistles—some of which throw me: I can’t get the camera and microphone on my laptop to work for a video chat one day, because I don’t see that the computer has a tiny kill switch for them, and that they’re switched on.
Purism is a new player in the computer hardware space; it registered as a social purpose corporation in 2017, meaning it considers company mission when making decisions rather than just profit maximization. Its 50 or so employees work remotely. (One of them is Eugen Rochko, the lead developer of Mastodon, a Twitter-like social network hosted by its users that I failed to take to when I was blocking Facebook.)
About a month before the Apple block started, Weaver met me in downtown San Francisco to lend me a Librem and to show me how to use it. I was apprehensive because when I think “Linux,” I think of hardcore programmers and imagine data streams flowing down the screen a la The Matrix, but Weaver showed me that I didn’t need to know command line language to operate it.
“Convenience is the root problem to solve,” Weaver tells me. “You have to go out of your way and inconvenience yourself to avoid these tech giants that are enslaving people’s data. We’re trying to give people your experience but without having to do the research.”
A Walled Tech Garden
This group of technologists tends to dislike Apple because it is a walled tech garden that uses its own operating system (iOS), its own software (a song you buy on iTunes isn’t easily listened to on a non-Mac device), its own screws (so that people can’t easily open the innards of devices they own), and its own hardware, powered by (always changing) chargers that work only for Apple devices. Hell, it’s the company that eliminated the headphone jack. In Weaver’s ideal world, you wouldn’t be stuck in individual companies’ ecosystems.
“Society is now realizing we’re under the control of these big tech companies,” says Weaver. He tries to come up with a real-world analogy for what it’s like to use Apple devices rather than an open source device. “In the physical world, you can own your home, which means you have the keys. In the digital world, Apple controls the keys to your device. You are renting it, like you rent a hotel room. They control the keys, so they can do anything to your device whenever they want without your consent or knowledge.” (As iPhone-using employees at Google and Facebook now well know.)
Hard to get out
When I get home, I find out why I haven’t gotten a text from Trevor: There are two iMessages from him on the notification screen of my (now banned) iPhone. Apple still has iMessaging turned on for me and is automatically routing text messages from people with iPhones to its own messaging service.
Still using my damn MacBook Air, I Google “how to turn off iMessaging.” I turn it off, but it causes problems for the rest of the experiment; some people’s texts just don’t get to me, particularly if they are sent to group threads in which all the people have iPhones except me. It’s harder to get out of Apple’s ecosystem than Google’s.
“[Apple] is like any gated community. It’s very beautiful and the produce is nice, but it’s hard to leave,” says Rankin.
Social Outcast?
When you don’t use Apple devices, Apple doesn’t track you. But it does make it very obvious to everyone that you no longer have an Apple device.
“Are you using an Android?” asks my friend Katie in the middle of a conversation by text. When I text my friend Chiko—whose new baby I discovered when I brought my Facebook account back from the dead—to ask her how things are going, she’s alarmed.
“Are you traveling? Why is this green?” she texted back.
Apple makes it very clear who else has an iPhone; text messages sent from an iPhone arrive as blue bubbles whereas all other messages come in green bubbles. The blue messages are iMessages, and while it’s important users know that, because those texts are end-to-end encrypted while the green messages aren’t, it’s also become a cultural marker that signals your tech class. Blue is better. Videos that are sent in a blue bubble are clear and beautiful, whereas the ones in a green bubble are a blurry mess.
I am not blue anymore. I am now green. I am out of the gated community and I feel some weird technological shame.
Blocking all Five
We don’t keep track of our own contacts anymore
Earlier in the experiment, for example, I realized I don’t know how to get in touch with people without the tech giants. Google, Apple, and Facebook provide my rolling Rolodex.
Calling happens more when texting is hard
I wind up placing a lot of phone calls this week, because texting is so annoying on the Nokia’s numbers-based keyboard. I find people often pick up on the first ring out of concern; they’re not used to getting calls from me.
The silence of not being plugged in
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.
File sharing without the Big Five’s deep digital pockets is complicated
when it comes time to send the 386 MB audio file to Alex, I realize I have no idea how to send a huge file over the internet.
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 O’Brien, who heads Yale Law School’s Privacy Lab. He also does marketing work for Purism, the company that makes my laptop. O’Brien tries to avoid tech giants in favor of open source technologies, so I figure he might be able to help.
I call up my tech freedom guru, Sean O’Brien, who heads Yale Law School’s Privacy Lab. He also does marketing work for Purism, the company that makes my laptop. O’Brien tries to avoid tech giants in favor of open source technologies, so I figure he might be able to help.
O’Brien directs me first to Send.Firefox.com, an encrypted file-sharing service operated by Mozilla. But... it uses the Google Cloud, so it won’t load. O’Brien 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.
O’Brien’s last suggestion is Onionshare, a tool for sharing files privately via the “dark web,” i.e. the part of the web that’s 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 won’t load.
“Hah, yes,” emails Micah when I ask about it. “Right now it’s hosted by AWS.”
As I encountered at the beginning of this experiment, Amazon’s most profitable business isn’t retail; it’s 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 that’s owned by Microsoft. Thankfully, O’Brien tells me I can download the Onionshare program directly from Micah’s server via command line on my Linux computer. He has to walk me through it step-by-step, but it works. I’m 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.
There are still dumb phones sold! But why?
But it turns out, while Microsoft did buy Nokia’s mobile devices division for $7.2 billion in 2014, it sold Nokia’s “feature phone assets” two years later for a painful write-down, $350 million, to Foxconn (of Apple outsourcing fame) and to HMD Global, a Finnish firm helmed by a former Nokia executive. HMD Global now uses Nokia’s “intellectual property,” i.e. brand, to sell phones. Most “Nokia” phones are Android smartphones, but there’s 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 it’s 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, “I’ve 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.
It influences your social options in invisible ways
“How things are structured determines the decisions people can make socially,” he says. “Like you didn’t get invited to a party [via Facebook] because you chose not to be part of a surveillance economy.”
Why can’t we have open, interoperable systems? Oh yeah, because capitalism.
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 it’s 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 service—sharing information with the service that those contacts might not want shared.
“Once the data is out there, it can be misused in ways we don’t expect,” he says.
But he thinks it’s 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 don’t 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 can’t 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.
People assumw you’re connected and don’t remember you’re not on the network, and not getting the info.
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 hadn’t gotten them because Signal is hosted by AWS. When she didn’t 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 it’s a reminder of the costs of leaving these services. I can opt out, but people might not realize I’ve 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 you’re 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.
Life without the Big Five is essentially a life without tech.
The block provides constant conversation fodder, and I find myself in conversations more often because, at social gatherings, I don’t 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. “It’s hard to get away from technology,” he says. “A friend was just telling me about trying to get a TV that wasn’t smart and didn’t 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 it’s forced upon us. Television makers have turned their products into surveillance machines that collect what we watch and what we don’t watch and sometimes even what we say, and that’s just how most TVs come now.
This week, I stop watching TV altogether because we don’t have cable and internet TV isn’t an option. I hadn’t meant to make this experiment a “rejection of all technology”—but it happens despite my intentions.
