Sol over at the Zaibatsu [0] talks about social media as an

Sol over at the Zaibatsu [0] talks about social media as an
anti-social influence, and discusses blocking large swaths of IP
space associated with the worst offenders. That reminds me of an
article I read a while back, about a woman who wanted to remove
google completely from her life [1] (warning, that article was
posted unironically at Gizmodo which is itself a cancer on the
internet. Loading it in a recent version of Firefox with uMatrix and
Better Privacy reveals the site loading content from 54 outside
domains, 14 of them known trackers. It's best to just read it in
lynx). She enlisted the help of a friend who did just that with a
VPN - blocking the millions of IPs owned by google. What she found
was that it was impossible to actually do anything useful in the
context of modern life. Think about google fonts, maps and cloud
storage used by many mainstream sites and services. For many of us
that means online shopping won't work, or maybe even our online
banking.

Speaking of the latter, my own bank recently made changes to their
online portal so that my usual, mid-privacy firefox setup (standard
ad blockers plus a tab container dedicated to banking) stopped
allowing login. Viewing the console during the login page load
reveals they are trying to fetch data from 3rd party cookie
storage. The requests are blocked in my setup, and the login form
just refuses to function.

Here at the Republic, oldfolio talks about using older browsers to
get at gopher content, specifically Seamonky [2]. I'd suggest
running an older Debian version like v5 [3] in a VM, it came with an
un-branded Firefox v3 (Iceweasel), still with native gopher support.
For SSH console use and browsing gopher, it is an ideal solution.

I sympathize with Jynx here [4], I vacillate between contempt for
modern popular (western) society, politics and modern life in
general, and the need to live within it. It's easy to be cynical,
harder to build enough momentum to change things, even on a personal
level. In my case my family and I decided a life change was in
order, and the move to Canada three years ago worked out for us.
Canada is in some ways a US-lite, in other ways far more invested in
its citizens well-being than I think the US ever will be. But on a
nation-state scale, it's hard to see how the impetus to change
things enough before a major societal collapse happens is possible.

[0] gopher://zaibatsu.circumlunar.space/0/~sol_solaris/datalogs/20042019_purging_the_www.txt
[1] https://gizmodo.com/i-cut-google-out-of-my-life-it-screwed-up-everything-1830565500
[2] gopher://republic.circumlunar.space/1/~oldfolio
[3] https://cdimage.debian.org/mirror/cdimage/archive/5.0.10/amd64/iso-cd/
[4] gopher://1436.ninja/0/Phlog/20190414.post