The title may sound weird. I initially wrote it as “fuck over the billionaires”. But it is not only billionaires, but also multi-millionaires and people who think themselves hierarchically superior.
So:
- Are you doing something to fuck over “the powerful”? If so, what?
I’m here, for starters.
I’ve been systematically removing as many parts of myself from the corporate internet over the course of years. So far I’ve managed to drop:
I still have some stragglers, like YouTube, that I doubt will go anytime soon, but for the most part, I don’t have to deal with:
Really, I just do not like being advertised to, and outside YouTube sponsorships, which can be skipped, I can go whole days without ever coming across an ad on the internet, and even that feels high.
On top of all this, I’ve massively reduced my data collection footprint, meaning there’s far less info available to said advertisers and data collectors that they can use to manipulate me.
I also regularly try to provide some of this to my friends to also help cut them away from the propaganda machine.
YouTube, in my experience, has been the hardest one to fully cut. Sometimes you need a video tutorial for something, and there just… Isn’t one anywhere but YT. Also a lot of the content types just… Aren’t available elsewhere, and it was hard for a while not having some of my favorite YTers to watch. Nebula, and Dropout definitely helped with that part, though, they had enough that it made it easier.
It did make me realize how dependent I was on YT for emotional regulation, though. I have real bad anxiety, and I realized pretty quickly I was watching things to numb it. Podcasts, music, and to a lesser extent books/fanfic have helped with that though. Generally now I’m looking for people who want to make something good, not make money, and that’s lead me down a lot of really interesting rabbit holes in general with art
(I know a lot of artists are trying to make money, and pay your artists, but there’s a difference between “Making something that will sell” and “Making something you’re proud of hoping people will like it” y’know?)
Giving up those socials is a great start, and often times the start is the hardest part. I don’t see Instagram though. Hopefully you have quit them and just forgot to mention, if not, consider this the universe sending you a message motivating you to delete it!
Of all the “content provider websites”, youtube is certainly the hardest part to “cut”. However, the signal to noise ratio of youtube is so low (small signal, large noise) that I pretty much don’t use it anymore. Even good channels are, more and more, going for clickbait and shitty tactics, and AI content. I didn’t really actively cut youtube, but I did so passively. It just became worse and worse that I don’t feel drawn to it as often. And, of course, when I do use youtube, ads are blocked with ublock and SponsorBlock.
In a similar boat in regards to cutting out invasive, rapidly-enshittifying corporate tech providers but I agree that YouTube still has some good content worth it. Good news is that with the use of Invidious servers on desktop and SmartTube / NewPipe on Android TV or mobile you can pretty much have your cake and eat it too.
P.S. if you’re looking for a less shitty / ad bloated way of watching Yt videos on Nvidia Shield Pro or similar Android TV I recently switched from NewPipe to SmartTube and it’s much better since it integrates Sponsorblock and the UI is actually designed for a TV.