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posted by cmn32480 on Monday February 11 2019, @06:33PM   Printer-friendly
from the it's-not-you-its...actually-yes,-it's-you dept.

Gizmodo's Kashmir Hill is taking advantage of her position as a reporter to do something the rest of us only dream of. (If you get paid to write about it, why not?)

She is trying to break up with big tech.

For one week each, she attempted to completely eliminate Amazon, Facebook, Google, Microsoft and Apple from her life

Fail. Except for Apple

After that she attempted to eliminate all of them simultaneously for one week.

This was an attempt to completely block the companies in their entireties. For example all AWS hosted websites when trying not to interact with Amazon. Without further ado, her are the results:

AMAZON

"And it was as though a vast tract of the web blinked out"

GOOGLE

"meant she couldn't use Lyft or Uber, which rely on Google Maps."

MICROSOFT

"coffee shop[s] put her at risk of coming into contact with Microsoft, if the shop used Windows to operate its payment system."

FACEBOOK

"left her feeling strangely isolated, pining for connection even at the cost of pervasive data surveillance."

APPLE

"when she gave up her iPhone and stepped out of Apple's "walled garden," she had no trouble staying away from the company"

ALL FIVE AT ONCE
even the one success of Apple presented challenges when the week of attempting to block all five came around.

"'Google and Apple have a duopoly on the smartphone market,' she said. 'So when I went out trying to find a smartphone that was not made or touched by either tech giant, it wasn't possible.'"

She had to use a 'dumb phone', a Nokia 3310, which left her...unsatisfied.

"I would grab my iPhone and just start scrolling," she admitted. "It's how I started the day, every day."

There was nothing worth scrolling through on the Nokia 3310, so she didn't bother.

While I suspect some things like Apple's Quicktime, iTunes, or 'Bonjour' didn't make her radar, and does she work on a Linux box? She still admits to 'slip ups' where contact happened despite her best efforts, for example.

[having a parcel] show up at her door in an instantly recognizable package. The seller had used Amazon to fulfill the order.

In short

"It's not possible to navigate the modern world without coming into contact with these companies," she said. "It made me certainly sympathetic to some of the critics who are saying these companies are too dominant in their spaces."

So what companies do people avoid?

I manage to mostly avoid Apple and Facebook myself. But Amazon, Google, and Microsoft are lost causes for me.


Original Submission

 
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  • (Score: 5, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Monday February 11 2019, @06:38PM (7 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday February 11 2019, @06:38PM (#799668)

    It's posted twice.

    Starting Score:    0  points
    Moderation   +5  
       Informative=4, Funny=1, Total=5
    Extra 'Informative' Modifier   0  

    Total Score:   5  
  • (Score: 4, Funny) by VLM on Monday February 11 2019, @06:47PM

    by VLM (445) Subscriber Badge on Monday February 11 2019, @06:47PM (#799678)

    She had a macro in MS Word to dedupe, but with no microsoft and no nearby perl hacker to help her, she was doomed.

  • (Score: 2) by takyon on Monday February 11 2019, @07:07PM

    by takyon (881) <reversethis-{gro ... s} {ta} {noykat}> on Monday February 11 2019, @07:07PM (#799691) Journal

    You can't escape Goorgle.

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  • (Score: 3, Funny) by DeathMonkey on Monday February 11 2019, @07:51PM (1 child)

    by DeathMonkey (1380) on Monday February 11 2019, @07:51PM (#799711) Journal

    Did it go better this time?

    • (Score: 3, Insightful) by bob_super on Monday February 11 2019, @08:25PM

      by bob_super (1357) on Monday February 11 2019, @08:25PM (#799729)

      Maybe she finally learnt about Tizen, Linux, Blackberry OS, OpenStreetMap, going to the corner store, and surviving without scrolling on the phone first thing every morning.

      It's 2019, and people seem to act as stuff that didn't exist 15 years ago is now unavoidable. (Store's POS software is indeed really hard to avoid, but cheating for a week shouldn't have been)
      How quickly we're gonna go extinct.

  • (Score: 2) by RandomFactor on Tuesday February 12 2019, @11:16AM (2 children)

    by RandomFactor (3682) Subscriber Badge on Tuesday February 12 2019, @11:16AM (#800022) Journal

    Meh, blame me. I scanned subs as usual before writing it up and submitting, but missed it.

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    • (Score: 2) by Common Joe on Tuesday February 12 2019, @08:04PM (1 child)

      by Common Joe (33) <{common.joe.0101} {at} {gmail.com}> on Tuesday February 12 2019, @08:04PM (#800282) Journal

      I accidentally doubled one of my words in the other article (I submitted the other article. I listed Amazon twice instead of listing Apple.) Looks like it was destined to be duplicates all the way down!

      • (Score: 2) by RandomFactor on Tuesday February 12 2019, @09:15PM

        by RandomFactor (3682) Subscriber Badge on Tuesday February 12 2019, @09:15PM (#800328) Journal

        So you submitted it with an Amazon, and an Amazon prime?

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