About six months ago, I quit facebook. About two months ago (after reading “How to Resist Amazon and Why” and “Fifty ways to Protect Bookstores”, I tried to minimize amazon intersection with my life. I “paused” amazon prime and today is the day that it expired/turned off (the pause goes into effect when renewal is due, so the pause is now in effect). I quit using goodreads and switched to storygraph. I got rid of Audible and switched to libro.fm for audiobooks. I’m getting ride of amazon music and switching to vlc for media on the phone. I’m all setup to use bookshop.org and I’ve linked it to Samizdat, our local bookstore. We dropped our subscription to the Washington Post.
I have been motivated to do this because of the horrible effect that billionaires are having on our planet. I don’t want to support it, especially the worst of the “tech bro”s and their impact on the US. (Please read Careless People: A Cautionary Tale of Power, Greed, and Los Idealism by Sara Wynn-Williams, Kara Swisher’s “Burn Book,” “More Everything Forever: AI Overlords, Space Empires, and Silicon Valley’s Crusade to Control the Fate of Humanity” by Adam Becker, and “Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now” by Jaron Lanier, and Jenny Odell’s books.)
I have been glad to get rid of the advertising, attention-suck, and stress-inducing doom scrolling. I don’t want any of that back. But, I’ve gotten more into vintage bikes and I realize that lots of the modern-day karass activity is online, including in facebook groups. I would really like to find out more about the Kelly 40-14 hub on the vintage bike and I’m told the information (or the people to ask) can easily be found on facebook. And I miss keeping up with friends and family who live out of town.
While I am enjoying (satisfying my data-nerd self) using storyboard to keep track of my reading, I miss the social aspect of goodreads – my friends read good books! Similarly, I enjoy the small group of friends I’m connected to via strava for interesting bike rides. (I don’t think strava has been consumed into the amazon-borg, but they probably do use AWS cloud services.)
I think I will try to re-engage with facebook. I will try to reduce more amazon overlap even more, but I will return to using goodreads (probably maintain goodreads and storyboard in parallel for now?).
Why? (Why amazon?) – amazon is anti-bookshop. I love bookshops. amazon is a horrible corporation with terrible treatment of employees (including trying to keep people who are working from them being “employees” and having any protections). The massive profits of amazon are being horribly mis-spent.