Go away, big tech!

For the longest time I've been thinking of drastically reducing my reliance on Big Tech. The lack of respect for privacy, ever-encroaching enshittification and the constant need to alter the deal has put me off entrusting my entire life to them.

But when I actually sat down and tried to think about what I needed to do, I realised how locked in I was to so many different big tech companies.

As an example: for my productivity, everything was tied to Apple.

• all my devices were Macs, iPhones and iPads
• I actively sought out products and services that connected to Apple's iCloud
• I paid them a modest amount each month for their cloud storage
• it largely worked and let me forget about it as my stuff synced... until it didn't

This was a problem, and it needed solving.

While I care about privacy, I don't actually have much to hide. I write in my journal almost every day and if I was hyper-paranoid I wouldn't do that. If I was pretty paranoid, I'd write in a digital journal that's encrypted beyond the point that anyone without a quantum computer would ever be able to decrypt it. If I had something to hide, it would at the very least be password protected and I wouldn't tell anyone it existed.

My journal is actually on paper, written in plain English in my terrible handwriting. I don't want anyone to read it because it contains my private thoughts, but I have nothing in there that, were it disclosed, would cause me actual harm. Maybe a little bit of embarrassment about mental health issues that I've talked about in therapy, but that's about it.

In short, my threat model is pretty unsophisticated and actually quite vanilla. The main security and privacy concerns I have are around protecting my medical history, bank details and passwords, and more nebulous stuff stuff like my identity and in-progress writing projects.

The problem is, pretty much all of those things were stored nice and safely on Apple's iCloud.

What if I lost access, and Apple lost a backup? That's it — gone.

What if a backdoor is installed and cybercriminals got access? I guess that's my identity stolen!

And then there's all the other stuff that relying on Big Tech exposes you to, like rolling out a worse service. Many times when I pay for something, it usually gets shittier. This includes:

• Netflix (price hikes, lower quality shows, ads)
• Spotify (price hikes, forcing podcasts — including some vile ones — onto you)
• Windows 10 and 11 (a succession of updates that make my PC games run worse, while shoving AI in my face)
• ...and more I'll probably think of after I publish this

For the longest while I thought it was just Google I needed to rid myself of. The other companies, while pretty crappy as most companies are, were mostly fine in the scheme of capitalism.

Alas, none of them can be forever trusted. They will always choose profits over the best interests of their users.

Breaking free

To make a long story short, Big Tech has inserted itself into my life, made it convenient, and now threatens me with a bad time at the drop of a hat.

It's time to move.

I've got a lot stuff all tied up with one big tech company or another, and in January I started planning how I was going to gradually take more control over this stuff.

I divided it up into three categories:

• services
• software
• devices

From there, I worked out what I'd need to do to immediately stop paying more money than was already spent with Big Tech.

To do this, I broke it down into a series of steps, working out what I needed to deal with first before I could change the rest.

That left me with this very basic flow chart:

The idea is if I disentangle myself at the top, the one below it becomes a little bit easier to deal with.

This is still a work in progress for me — I'm nowhere near free from the enshittosphere that is Silicon Valley. And in all honesty, I probably never will be — I just love tech too much.

But in a series of blog posts I'm going to document:

• where, how and when I make the shift
• what worked and didn't work
  
• what I've learned
• what flat-out pissed me off

The first one, which I'm going to cover in a few days, is the one I've already largely accomplished (and what inspired me to write this): moving away from services.