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