I have long found the large internet content providers distasteful, ugly, and damaging to the culture. But I find a lot of things about our 21st century experience distasteful, ugly, and damaging to those of us living in the present despite our unprecedented wealth and privilege, so I chose not to lose much sleep about it.

Then, however, came the second Trump administration and the sycophant behavior of these corporate giants. With age I have learned you can (and should) ignore most benign changes in physical appearance. One should not, however, ignore a growth which is cancerous. When these giants of social influence threw in their lot with the self-enriching, breaker of norms, the die was cast. I am against them and will do my part to not contribute to their influence or wealth.

Of course, it is not just me but I am confounded by those who claim to be infuriated by the social influence companies' courting of Trumpian favor while continuing to use the products which bring them wealth and power. Some judgment, yes, must be made. I still use Apple services and Microsoft products. Yet many who oppose the tech giants seem to feel disempowered to free themselves from the corporations they hold in disdain.

I’ve conducted three experiments, and came away with an impression of the challenges of each.


Quitting Amazon.com was easy. I only took a small hit in convenience and price. I think first world material consumption is a problem anyway, so I was glad to have motivation to change. Under the hood, however, I recognize that many of my projects may inadvertently make use of Amazon Web Services. That is a task for another day, but I am aware of it.

Quitting Meta was more difficult; it required the self-help skills of CBT and I often find myself using the language of twelve step programs to maintain my distance. While on vacation I made use of Snapchat for 24 hours to use the map feature with some family members. Even though it is not a part of Meta, I found myself staring at the app for minutes at a time resisting the temptation to add all these people I knew. It was challenging to delete the app after the need for its map function had passed. Quitting social media is analogous to quitting a drug, and relapse is real.

All of this was small change, however, to quitting Google. Alphabet products have so infiltrated our culture and our work that it is more akin to learning to live without an automobile than addiction or a consumer choice. It is wrapped in everything.
I still open Google products when work or my volunteer endeavors use it; I am not ready to cut myself off from joining with my community to do good work or earn a living. Just refusing to initiate projects with the services or feed the Google database of everything, however, has been challenging to say the least. It is right up there with my experiments in veganism and living without a car.

I am 90 days into the experiment and I have no intention of returning to these services. Quite the opposite, I am looking to make sure that I am really as free from their data-gathering vacuums as possible.

I still don’t know how to think about the experience of disempowerment I hear expressed by others. Yet I was surprised about how differently I experienced each of the three experiments. It was easy to give up Amazon, just switching from one store to many smaller venders with a trade off on price and delivery time. Giving up Meta’s social media platforms was like quitting a deeply ingrained bad habit like biting my nails or picking my nose in public. Google was the most difficulty and challenging. Not impossible, but it required rethinking my whole approach to my internet infrastructure. We should no feel disempowered, however, we just have to make a decision and then undertake the work to bring it to fruition.