Rest Day Ruminations: Karl Is Antisocial (Part 2)

Where I am up to in the process of leaving Big Tech behind

Photo by Michael Geiger on Unsplash

Here’s a Rest Day Ruminations post. Thank you to my lovely paying subscribers who make some of the posts open to all, as with this one.

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Current Position

Last time I wrote about my long-term plans to break free of as many Big Tech companies as possible. You can read that post here. Here’s where I stand in 2025:

• Adobe: I don’t use any Adobe software. I always thought Photoshop was overpriced and clunky, and much prefer Gimp (which is free and has no DRM).

• Amazon: I don’t buy anything from Amazon any more, and I no longer publish via Amazon KDP or Audible. Support independent shops!

• Apple: I don’t own any Apple devices or have an Apple account.

• Google: I closed my gmail account years ago, and don’t use Android. My search engine is DuckDuckGo, not Google. My Blogger websites have all been deleted and the accounts closed. Ditto my YouTube channel.

• Meta: I closed my author Facebook and Instagram accounts some time ago. My personal Facebook account will be closed as soon as I save any remaining content I want to keep. I sold my Oculus Rift VR system, too. [Update 2025-02-04: I just deleted the Facebook account. Yay!]

• Twitter: I left it years ago. I moved to Bluesky and love it. I block racists and slimy bigots if they appear from the rotten woodwork.

• Microsoft: I moved from Windows to Linux as my PC operating system years ago (having spent a year moving from Outlook and Microsoft Office towards Thunderbird and LibreOffice, respectively). Linux is free, fast, and secure. I love having a stable and privacy-focussed OS that just works, without any of the issues such as mandatory updates that can break things, or problematic licensing. I favour Linux Mint Cinnamon, but any Linux option will impress you and give you back control of your PC. And yes, Linux can run most Windows software with no problem: I play my Windows games every day on Linux, seamlessly. Fun fact: did you know, when you buy a PC or laptop with Windows on, you are often paying more than £100 of the price to Microsoft? Ditch Windows and save £100+ on a new PC, or spend it on more RAM and storage or other upgrades.

So in 2025 I consider it mission accomplished, and it wasn’t difficult. It just took a bit of planning and time in a few cases. But I broke free of dependency on spyware tech owned by the ultra-rich.

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Some Additional Personal Reasons To Leave

Various other things I found out in the last year or so that made me glad of my decision to leave these companies.

• 2025-01-05 Everything is Enshittified (J. P. Hill)

• 2025-01-09 Politics content to be pushed on all Instagram and Threads users (BBC)

And even as an author the platforms of Twitter and Facebook had ceased to be of any use, since my reach was artificially reduced to a tiny percentage of my followers, because I refused to pay to “boost” the posts. If you don’t pay-to-play, they stifle your presence.

Ulta-rich Oligarchs and Inequality

As well as all the reasons to do with privacy, commodification, political interference, and many other issues, I don’t want to make the obscenely super-rich any wealthier. I came across this recently:

Elon Musk owns Twitter, Jeff Bezos owns Amazon, Mark Zuckerberg owns Meta/Facebook. The rich get richer and the poor get poorer. A society with such radical inequalities is not a fair society. Individuals shouldn’t be richer than whole countries (Elon Musk had 248 billion USD in the image above; the figure is now over 400 billion), whilst also controlling and manipulating communication platforms.

Yes, the figures above have increased massively:

These are people hoarding the world’s wealth to themselves. No one earns that much money. No one needs that much money. No one deserves that much money.

Censorship

I’m finding the US-controlled censorship and propaganda on some platforms to be a huge problem.

• 2024-10-07 Meta Is Aggressively Censoring Criticism Of US-Israeli Warmongering (Caitlin Johnstone)

• 2024-10-15 Inside Meta’s Palestine Censorship (Al Jazeera)

• 2024-12-19 We now have the proof that Meta is censoring Palestinian content (Council Estate Media)

• 2024-02-15 Google facilitated Russia and China’s censorship requests (Guardian)

I found that myself: I would share a link to a news article from the BBC or Guardian or wherever (without adding any comment), and Facebook would immediately block it, for the bonkers reason that I was “trying to get likes”:

Straightforward posts were being categorised as “spam” by Facebook’s broken AI. Even if you appeal nothing ever happens, because no human at Meta ever views the reports or false positives.

And yet … Facebook does nothing about real spam and scams. Here’s a real example.

One of my older relatives (let’s call them Scully) started asking me about how they would use different chat systems and websites. It seemed a bit weird to me, so I asked why she wanted to. Their reasons seemed cagey. I explained that there’s nothing they could do on these other chat apps that they couldn’t already do in Facebook.

Then I found out that it was because they were chatting with a celebrity. Scully was a fan of a UFO programme The Secret of Skinwalker Ranch, which stars someone called Travis S. Taylor. Because Scully had “liked” posts about the programme in the past, Facebook started adding more and more to her feed. She interacted more and commented. Eventually she got a private message from Travis S. Taylor himself! He thanked her for being a fan, asked what her favourite episode was, and whether she believed in UFOs. Scully replied, and they began to have a chat.

She showed me the messages proudly. Eventually “Travis” had started asking her to “continue the conversation” on other apps/systems, for what seemed (to me, as a techie person) like spurious reasons. Hence Scully’s asking me for help.

I explained that it was a scammer. That they’d soon start to come up with something tied to money.

“No, it’s really him. It says so, and the picture is correct.”

So I did a search in Facebook for Travis S. Taylor, and got pages of results:

Which one is real? Likely none of them. Maybe the first. How can you tell, though? Clicking on any of them gives similar bios, photos, comments, posts. They all claim to be the real thing.

Once she saw all those profiles, she understood how easy it is to pretend to be someone else on Facebook.

I explained that scammers pick anyone famous, and impersonate them. They post in groups and on pages that you might expect the real person to, with similar comments. They then seem to be the real thing to anyone who doesn’t look deeply.

In this case I thought: “I know, I will do a good deed. I’ll report it to shitty Facebook.”

But it turned out to be impossible. Because, of course, there’s no way to contact anyone at Facebook. They only have a report option with limited categories that may not apply. And as we know, reporting something doesn’t send the report to a human: it often goes into a set of stupid AI scripts that may do nothing, or lose the report, or have it stuck in a queue forever.

Even when I found an option to report an impersonator it turned out to be impossible to submit the report! This is the form:

See the problem? If the celebrity doesn’t use Facebook, there is no way to report it. And even if they do, as we saw with the Travis issue, there’s no easy way to know which one is the real celebrity (there were multiple pages of Travis S. Taylor, not just the ones in the image). There is no way to just type in a name or point to an official website.

Hence, all these scammers never get reported, and continue to operate.

Facebook is a cesspit nowadays. It was a lucky escape for Scully, but not for thousands of other people that aren’t savvy to tech and scams. Scammers prey on the vulnerable.

Military Involvement

Another black mark for me.

• 2025-01-01 Exposing Big Tech’s Complicity in Genocide (The Chris Hedges Report)

• 2025-01-23 The Israeli Military Is One of Microsoft's Top AI Customers (Drop Site News)

I’m much happier since I divested myself of all these companies.

Sometimes the price you pay for convenience is higher than you expect.

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