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