aligning my technical dependencies with my anti-corporate anti-harm values

Inspiration

In 2020 the fediverse prompted this question for me, aligned around degoogling and de-ICEing our reliance on corporate platforms. Noah's Personal Tech Ethics Audit as a sample of the intention and motivations, along with de-centralizing open source movements like the fediverse and Permacomputing, and more politically-aligned awareness of the surveillance capitalism and fascism-comfortable stance of centralized platforms (from Facebook to Substack) and the consent-less enclosure of human creative work in LLM AI.

Dependence and Values

In the subsequent years, not so much has moved for me. I had already disassociated myself from corporate social media and tended towards rejecting subscription services, but remain intimately reliant on Google in particular.

My goal is to reduce my personal dependence on impersonal systems that by scale and advertising-driven and oligarchy ignore and harm myself and others.

In practice that has meant deciding to do with less subscription and streaming, seeking out ethical alternatives often cooperative or community-maintained, and self-hosting for family.

(In the tradition of such posts, someday there may be a link here to a clear full statement of personal tech ethics.)

In several cases the practical state of our existing world has made a poor fit for fully boycotting some platforms: I still maintain a Facebook account to help manage existing community groups, and I intend to degoogle my own life while keeping a google account for collaborating with groups that use Google Docs, for examples.

Personal Progress From 2020 to now.

• Social on the Fediverse via Mastodon (@loppear@social.coop), BookWyrm, etc.
• Self-hosting various small tools such as this blog, a private forgejo git host, RSS reader. Yunohost has made this dramatically easier for me.
• Local NAS for home backup and media serving, dropping streaming music services in preference for purchasing directly from artists (although usually still via Bandcamp which became less wholesome in the interim).
• This local server also runs PiHole which along with uBlock Origin in browsers and not watching ad-tv cuts down on advertising at home.
• In repair and not buying new devices, I continue to replace batteries and screens on laptops and phones that are now 3-9 years old.

In Need of Action

• Gmail – personal email used to be a thing I hosted, but it is intimidating again.
• Google Drive, Photos, and office suite – Nextcloud seems ready to replace this for me.
• Github – some personal projects and gh-pages sites need to be migrated.
• Pixel/Android phone – purchased with the intention of installing GrapheneOS but delayed.

Harder to Say

• Credit card networks, ecommerce. While I prioritize not purchasing from Walmart, Amazon, Shopify, etc in general, my small commercial activities still contribute to Visa, PayPal, Stripe, etc.
• 1Password. The primary commercially hosted subscription service I rely on. I could self-host an alternative, but as a company they haven't done anything I'm aware of to conflict with my values to date?
• Github, Facebook, Google for collaboration with others. My values are not absolute, and I tend not to proselytize even when my values may prioritize that.