- A few months ago, I set out to answer a question.
Whether it's possible to live life
without the services of the tech giants.
Over the course of five weeks,
I blocked Amazon, Facebook, Google,
Microsoft, and Apple
one at a time, in that order,
to find out how to survive without each one.
Not only did I boycott their products,
a technologist named Dhruv Mehrotra
designed a special network tool for me
that prevented my devices from communicating
with the tech giant servers.
That meant that ads and analytics from Google wouldn't work.
It meant that Facebook couldn't track me across the internet
and it meant that websites hosted by Amazon Web Services
hypothetically wouldn't load.
To end my experiment, I spent a week blocking all five
of the tech giants.
Hey! Good to see you.
- Good to see you too.
- It's so nice to see you not on a screen.
- I know.
- I'm glad to say I survived to tell this tale
and I learned a lot on the way.
Let's talk tech giants.
- Yeah.
- This week, I'm using a point-and-shoot camera
from Canon, a camera I forgot I still had,
a meme status Nokia 3310,
and a Librem Linux laptop.
Alright, so it's the first day of the tech giant ban
and I'm driving to work in silence
because the entertainment system in my car
is powered by Microsoft.
And actually, all background noise
has just disappeared from our lives this week
because there is nothing we can play at home.
Spotify's gone.
Netflix and Amazon video are gone.
So it just leaves a lot more time for just thinking
or being in my head which is great
except this week, all I find myself thinking about
is the experiment itself and how I'm gonna get
various things done without the tech giants in my life.
For example, on the first day of the block
I recorded an interview with Alex Goldman
of the podcast "Reply All" about Facebook
and its privacy problems.
Instead of using Skype, which was blocked
because it's owned by Microsoft,
I recorded our phone conversation
with a handheld Zoom recorder.
That worked fine, but when it came time to send
the audio file to Alex, I had no idea how to send
a huge file over the internet without the help
of a tech giant.
I couldn't use Google Drive, both Dropbox and WeTransfer
are hosted on AWS, so they were blocked.
Mozilla's file sharing service is hosted by Google,
so I ended up panic calling my tech guru, Sean O'Brien.
He directed me to OnionShare,
a tool for sharing files privately via the Dark Web.
Except he had to help me download it without visiting
their website, which is hosted by AWS.
That's how complicated even the simplest
of tasks were for me this week.
There were workarounds for services offered
by the tech giants, but they took extra research to find
and were often slightly more laborious than the
streamlined tech giant versions.
Using Ask.com as my search engine for example,
after I realized DuckDuckGo was hosted by AWS.
But Ask.com is not necessarily a great replacement.
It's owned by IAC, the media and dating company behemoth.
I've just traded one huge corporation seeking to monetize
my searches for another.
The tech giants have steadily bought up companies
that give them more market share
and a fuller view of consumer activity in a given arena.
Facebook gobbled up Instagram and WhatsApp
because it saw their share of the
social networking universe expanding.
Microsoft took over the platforms where people get work done:
LinkedIn, GitHub, and Skype.
Google expanded its insight into what we do
and what we look at by buying DoubleClick, YouTube, and Nest.
Amazon wants to eat up the retail industry,
from Zappos to Whole Foods.
While Apple mostly seems interested in acquisitions
that will improve its existing products, such as
Shazam for Apple Music, Beats for headphone technology,
and Mapsense for Apple Maps.
Combined, the frightful five, over the last decade
have bought over 400 startups and companies.
They faced no anti-trust pushback from regulators.
That means their footprint on and offline is huge.
Even as I blocked them, and boycotted their products,
they continued to try to interact with my devices thousands,
and in the case of Google and Amazon,
hundreds of thousands of times.
It's changed our lives in ways that we regret,
and I think a lot of people feel this anxiety.
I kept seeing random stories about "I quit Facebook",
"I quit Instagram", "I quit Google".
It's like we wanna get away from this,
we don't feel that it's healthy,
but we don't know how to step back.
Critics of these big companies are often told,
if you don't like the company, don't use its products.
I did this experiment to find out if that was possible.
And I found out that it's not.
So if we can't stop using these companies,
what can we do to keep them in check?
That's a hard question, so I sought out other people
who might be able to answer it.
- Hello. - Hey.
I talked to Daniel Kahn Gilmor.
He's a technologist at the ACLU.
He's also a digital vegan, as well as a real life one.
- I haven't been an active consumer
of a lot of the big tech titans,
but I am someone who people can pass data to
that is not gonna turn around and leak it back to a cloud
if I can at all help it.
It's important for me to feel like I'm not bait,
that I'm not luring other people into
these surveillance traps.
I don't think this is a thing
where user action alone is going to solve the problem.
I love the stunt that you have pulled,
the series of stunts that you've pulled
in those articles, right?
One risk of those stunts is that it looks like you're saying
all everybody has to do is just these things
that I've just documented that are really hard to fix,
but we do need to think about this as a collective problem.
In the same way that we think of environmental problems
as a collective problem.
It's not enough for me to say
I'm gonna reduce, reuse, and recycle.
There needs to be a social framework that supports
people in doing those things.
- An uncomfortable idea I keep coming up against this week
is that if we want to get away from monopolies
and surveillance economies,
we might need to rethink the assumption
that everything on the internet should be free.
I talked to Lina Khan.
She's a fellow with the Open Markets Institute
who wrote a blockbuster academic paper about how Amazon
is already a monopoly.
She has ideas about how the government can fix this.
- So I think one basic thing the government could do
would be to ensure that firms are not abusing their dominance
in anti-competitive ways.
So one example is, people have been deleting their Facebook
but then they say, but I'm going to keep my Instagram,
I'm going to keep my WhatsApp
and that's a problem because the lack of competition
in the social media market means that
there's no competition for privacy, right?
A service is not really able to say,
hey you can quit your Facebook account and come to me
because I'm gonna provide better privacy.
These companies have been dominant now, for a decade,
and we really haven't seen any significant innovations
beyond the service that they rolled out a decade ago
so I think there's a very legitimate question to be asked
whether they're using their dominance to stifle innovation
and competition that would make things
even better for us, as users.
- What are the habits that you're gonna stick to now?
- I was sleeping with my smartphone next to my bed,
and the first thing I would do in the morning
would be to look at it and start scrolling.
And for the first couple of days of using the Nokia,
I would have that urge in the morning,
like, the thumb scrolling urge,
and it went away.
I finally got my iPhone back and I just,
I don't want it next to my bed.
I like waking up and spending time with my daughter
before kind of plugging in.
Should we put this blanket on Daisy?
- Yeah.
I have a candy!
- [Kashmir] I'm done with my experiment,
and to be honest I'm already using the tech giants again,
but I'm using them less than I used to.
And in general, I'm just trying to use technology less.
When you give up the technology,
you're giving up who the technology connects you to.
So it is about being in the moment more,
being with the people around you, but that means
it's harder for people who aren't around you
to get in contact with you.
I feel less frantic. Everything is less urgent.
- The privilege in some ways, is being able to step away.
- Right.
The other day my husband jokingly noted
that I never know what time it is anymore.
And it's true.
I'm more in the moment, but less aware of
the actual minute and hour,
and I love it.