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This almost reads like a parody to me. The author was introduced to alternatives for just about everything they used the tech giant services for, and therefore,
by ewzimm 6y ago
This almost reads like a parody to me. The author was introduced to alternatives for just about everything they used the tech giant services for, and therefore, living without their services was impossible.
The issue that alternatives are harder to find and use is something that should be solved. Instead of pursuing policies like nationalizing Google into a public service, what if various public agencies tried to operate with free software internally and then exposed their tools to the world with things like public Searx and Peertube instances?
- zerotolerance 6y agoThe point was even as far as she went to eliminate her direct interaction those services were transitive dependencies in almost every consumer interaction.
- ewzimm 6y agoWouldn't this be something like a "Kevin Bacon" game of tech giants? Anyone is only a certain number of degrees of separation away from any company in an interconnected world. I could find a very obscure company and show that if both of us participate in a global economy, there are transitive relationships between us. So I could choose not to use Amazon, but if I do business with only a few others, some of those people will do business with Amazon. The same goes for the Chinese Communist Party. Would that mean it's impossible for me to live without the CCP? There's a sense in which I could say that's true, but that wouldn't necessarily mean I shouldn't look for alternatives for who I depend on directly.