RE: MAKE-A-PLEDGE
This Gopher post, from the "Money-saving-and-minimalism" phlog in
IanJ's Gopher hole, got me thinking (possibly just because my
internet got really scratchy this morning and I couldn't be
bothered waiting minutes to load something else after it):
gopher://gopher.icu/0/phlog/Money-saving-and-minimalism/Make-a-pledge.md
I think he's basically saying that it's too easy to buy short-lived
junk, and by "pledging" to avoid buying from junk-making
manufacturers, you can make that hard enough that you start to
value the stuff that you do buy.
I guess I'm already pretty much 'there' with this. Certainly with
the "Google|Amazon|Sony|Apple" products that he's pledged to avoid.
The only one of those brands I ever bought from was Sony with a
Playstation 2 when I was a kid, and really that was a pre-selected
present of some sort from my mother. But then I don't really buy
tech products like that anymore.
I don't even really buy non-consumable products new more than a
handful of times a year these days. Usually not from major brands
even then, although ethically this isn't necessarily any better
than buying from a known brand with a bad name. As regular readers
will have seen, I tend to analyse the hell out of many purchases
such as that Atomic Pi SBC, so I certainly do value them highly
afterwards. Possibly too highly. In fact it certainly isn't
something that has implied "minimalism" for me, especially with me
settling now on the strategy of buying a couple of spares for
everything to avoid distruption and the need for rushed replacement
purchases.
But then again maybe that conclusion is completely untrue?
What I, and I suspect also IanJ, are ignoring is services. These
are downright tricky things to pin down. I don't want to obsess
over just tech businesses but they're probably the clearest example
(for reasons I'll go into later). So I'll copy IanJ, except that
Sony didn't really wrong me that obviously with my PS2 so I'll
switch in the company I most love to hate and make it
"Google|Amazon|Microsoft|Apple". Now how well can I hold to that
pledge overall?
On the Apple front I might be pretty safe, I've been ignoring and
thoroughly out of touch with them for years. I even would have bet
money that their Apple Watch thing would be a flop - everyone's
carrying smartphones so why the hell would they buy a smart watch
too? Well they do, I'm _that_ out of touch apparantly.
As for the other evil corporations though, their core product has
never really been a physical thing. They've all got into hardware
to some extent, but only really as an expansion of their core
services business. At heart physical products aren't what Google,
Amazon, or Microsoft are about. What they sell are ways of _using_
your stuff (_if_ it's new enough to be compatible), and the awkward
thing is that they don't always charge you for it, so it's quite
hard to refuse.
Yet even if you use their services for free, and in fact even if
you disable advertising and tracking, thereby breaking any model
they have for profiting off you directly, as a user you are still
making yourself one of their assets. If there are enough of you,
then other people will put content where you're already looking for
it, you'll then tell other people about that content, and those
people might not know or care about disabling the advertising and
tracking. Even if you've just used a YouTube downloader to grab a
video that you found in one of my Phlog posts, you've just
supported Google. I've obviously _really_ supported them by posting
the YouTube link, and oh the evil of the person who uploaded the
video there in the first place!
But OK, at least I probably didn't use Google's search engine to
find the video, so maybe it wasn't the one of their videos that
they most wanted me to share. Odds are that I would have used
DuckDuckGo instead, and I never pledged to avoid DDG. But wait, in
spite of claims they make about being a search engine aggregator,
it's been shown that really their main source for search engine
results is via some sort of partnership with Bing, Microsoft's
search engine! So now I'm in bed with one of my other enemies as
well!
Well at least I'm not using Microsoft Windows. I'm nice and cosy on
Linux with all my open-source tools. But oh, where are most of
those tools developed? On GitHub. Even Linux hosts their Git repo
on GitHub as well as at git.kernel.org. Who owns GitHub? Microsoft!
So I can't even use Linux without being some indirect part of
Microsoft's user-base, and thereby potentially contributing to the
success of another one of their services. Worse again if I
recommended Linux to someone else - I'm still helping Microsoft! Oh
and if I were to actually contribute to a project that's primarily
hosted on GitHub, that would completely break my pledge, I'd be
making content for the enemy!
Then of course Google, Amazon, and Microsoft all now run massive
cloud services that host much of the content you might look at on
the web, and the path to log in somewhere often ends up leading to
a Google captcha. At the same time they're all potentially
collecting data about you that becomes one of their other products
to sell. So I can't keep my pledge while practically browsing the
web either. At least that avoids the search engine problem.
But what about life beyond the computer? Some say it still exists.
Well for one thing, IanJ will have to avoid watching anything
distributed by Sony's film and music companies, so that'll wipe a
fair few movies and music hits off his menu. But beyond that, it's
actually a lot harder to figure this stuff out in the real world.
Was the brand making these generic earphones sub-contracting the
same dodgy sweatshop factory you saw in that documentary about how
iPhones are made? You'd never know. Is this independent petrol
station re-selling fuel bought wholesale from the same company that
leaked oil all over those beaches you saw on TV? You'd never know.
Is there even a practical second source for half the stuff that you
buy regularly, or is it all reliant on some specific companies that
control the relevent markets behind the scenes? You'd never know.
Thousands of people work their whole lives helping to tangle up
this corporate web of power and untraceability combined. With
technology you can at least sit at the end of the pipeline and
reverse engineer much of what's gone on upstream, whether or not it
matches the claims of the company at the other end. You can't
really do that with a can of petrol, a pack of zip-ties, or a bag
of flour. Hell maybe I don't want to, I've watched Soylent Green.
But maybe I'm taking this all a bit too radically. I don't really
want to write the lead-in for an anti-captialist manifesto just
because some guy decided he wasn't going to buy Google's next model
of smartphone. If everybody tried to live like me then the world
would certainly be a very different place, but on an individual
level living in a rich wasteful society does offer some extremely
good opportunities to someone who values things more than others
do. People give away old computers (if you can catch them before
they go to the tip), companies give away video hosting, and mobile
telephone networks are set up which I can _usually_ use for my
internet for just $30-$40 each year. Maybe avoiding direct
purchases but still living in this world where you pay with your
own existance is as far as such a pledge needs to go? Maybe it's as
far as most people would even think of taking it? Still, I'm the
sort of person who can't help but take these things literally, so
I think such a pledge would be too much for me.
- The Free Thinker
