The title may sound weird. I initially wrote it as “fuck over the billionaires”. But it is not only billionaires, but also multi-millionaires and people who think themselves hierarchically superior.
So:
- Are you doing something to fuck over “the powerful”? If so, what?
I put solar panels and battery storage on my house because my local utility is a publicly traded group of thieves. As much of the system as possible has been bought used except for the batteries.
In that, I buy used as much as possible. Fuck buying new, let someone else buy that 1100 dollar phone I’ll buy it on ebay 2 years later for half that.
I deleted my Amazon and am currently de-googling the best I can.
I haven’t bought anything from Amazon, Costco, Wal-Mart, big box stores for at least 5 years now. I will also never be getting anything from places like Temu.
As well, I try to make almost all my food, shopping, etc choices to benefit something small, or someone local, that needs my money more than things that further drive the Machine in the end.
Costco is one of the rare good guys though.
I’m doing what I can, as small an impact as it has. I’ve become much more aware of what I buy, use, and consume. I’ve begun to repair things instead of just buying new replacements, I don’t buy American whenever possible, and I don’t use any AI at all. I’ve completely cut out Google, Microsoft, Apple, Meta, Amazon, Reddit, any streaming service and any social media except the Fediverse, and of course nothing from Musk.
However, the biggest impact I’ve been able to make has been getting a couple people to re-think what they consume from fascist-enabling big tech companies. Small wins.
Myself, I am becoming as much “anti-consumption” as possible. I am removing myself from capitalism, as much as possible.
I still have to eat, of course, so I buy food. But I don’t buy food from corporations. As an example, I don’t buy anything from Nestle, nor from any big corporations. Gadgets and tech, I will be avoiding as much as possible, and if I do find myself needing to buy, I will do so but not from the usual corporations.
Social networks: only lemmy and mastodon sometimes. Fuck reddit and instagram and facebook. Don’t have an account there and never will. I don’t go there anymore.
I try to keep a “solarpunk” attitude. I do things for the good of the environment. I do/will-be-doing things such as composting, reducing the use of plastic, avoiding cars.
I am also trying to get people on board with my view of things, but I haven’t been much successful. I think principled people are very rare. People just don’t care.
Same. I stopped buying most things. I haven’t ordered anything online since 2019. I wouldn’t say I do it to “fuck over the powerful,” though. I can’t imagine they care too much. Interacting with companies just became more and more toxic, until I couldn’t be arsed to do it - beyond the bare minimum. There are a few exceptions, but I can already see the enshittification starting with those too.
When I buy something these days, I try to buy it used. A lot of people need money these days, and they’re selling off stuff they don’t need or use. So I’m helping them get rid of some stuff and make money, I’m getting stuff I need cheap, and the corps get nothing.
Over the last few years, I’ve put together a nice little personal recording studio, with several cheap, but excellent guitars and keyboards and drum machines, with almost everything used. A lot of it is barely used, some of it I suspect was NEVER used, and I’m getting this stuff for 10% of what it was new. The couple of guitars I bought new were great super budget guitars that were crazy cheap before tariffs.
Too much good used stuff out there, and people who need money.
This^ I’m doing the same thing. Everything that was hyped and “everyone is doing it” since the late 90s…… just stopping all of that. Going to causal mode, not off grid, just going with the flow with the bare minimum.
I don’t buy any US brands as I get the Aldi version instead.
Same. My spending is one of my biggest voices
I’ve concluded that with personal boycotts, perfect is the enemy of good. Time was I’d decide to boycott someone like Nestle but then fall off the wagon when I had a Smarties craving and then just sort of stop doing the rest of it.
So now I take the approach of trying to look for an alternative, but if I can’t find it then I won’t beat myself up about it, I’ll keep trying tomorrow. It’s not great but it’s better than what I was doing before.
That said, it wasn’t at all difficult to cut all the US grocery brands out of my shopping when Trump started his tariff bullshit, cause it’s all hyper-processed artificially coloured crap to begin with.
Kind of reminds me of a vegan couple I knew in college. They did a speech in class (for public speaking), and one of the points was “Even just cutting meat out one day a week, like with meatless mondays, helps a lot more than you’d expect”
Even cutting back can make a dent
Looking at the average meat consumption is crazy tbh. We buy less between the 2 of us, even if you include the bone/fat/skin as when I do buy it I get the cheapest cuts. Got a small cut of pork shoulder for this week, and that is the entire weeks meat, 4 meals from the pork with the other 3 being vegetarian (cheese/honey so not vegan)
Beekeeper here. For the life of me, I can’t understand why vegans can’t have honey. I understand it is an animal product. But there is no harm to bees when harvesting honey properly.
Same goes for wool. Have you ever seen a sheep that hasn’t been sheared?
I do know vegans that are fine with eating honey, but generally it isn’t considered a vegan food.
Any interesting recipes for the pork shoulder? I took one out of the freezer yesterday that I’m going to be braising today, but also I have another bigger one in the freezer that I should do something with at some point
It needs time to reduce how tough it is, either slow cooking it or let it soak in vinegar (and other things for seasoning) for a long time before cooking. Often go for that if I am going to cook it over a firepit.
This week I will be slow cooking it in a pasta sauce. Skin/fat removed and frozen to use another time, rendering the fat in a saucepan and keep it cooking until the solid bits go crispy, delicious with salt and I keep the fat in a pot in the fridge. I freeze it so that I can render it in batches as its quite a mess to clean up and loves sticking to the pan. I do wonder if a wire mesh to keep it off the base of the pan would help.
I don’t shop if i can help it. I buy used whenever possible and repair things even when the cost is almost the same as replacement. when i do have to shop, i favour small local businesses. i also avoid american goods and services like the plague.
I’m loving those around me and feeling empathy for everyone on the planet even harder. They can throw me in a concentration camp or kill me, but they can’t make me not love.
They don’t care about that.
But I do. And spending time doing that takes away from any time they’d rather have me panicking and spiraling.
Fair enough. Keep going, friend.
Thank you, you too 💜
Caring about your neighbours and spending time with them is literally the first step to creating a better world. The powers that be most definitely do care about community resilience because it makes them harder to control.
Share tools with your neighbours. Borrow a carving knife, lend a pitchfork, share the pike that impales billionaires.
All Linux. No Amazon. Support local. Hosting my own pages, servers and not using online clouds. Changing habits on what sites to use to avoid AWS where possible
Mostly just leaning hard into ad blocking extensions and apps.
I’m here, for starters.
I’ve been systematically removing as many parts of myself from the corporate internet over the course of years. So far I’ve managed to drop:
- GMail
- Netflix
- Windows
- Prime
- HBO
I still have some stragglers, like YouTube, that I doubt will go anytime soon, but for the most part, I don’t have to deal with:
- Dark patterns
- Advertisements
- Anti-features (updates that remove functionality)
- FOMO
- Advertisements again
- Advertisements a third time
Really, I just do not like being advertised to, and outside YouTube sponsorships, which can be skipped, I can go whole days without ever coming across an ad on the internet, and even that feels high.
On top of all this, I’ve massively reduced my data collection footprint, meaning there’s far less info available to said advertisers and data collectors that they can use to manipulate me.
I also regularly try to provide some of this to my friends to also help cut them away from the propaganda machine.
YouTube, in my experience, has been the hardest one to fully cut. Sometimes you need a video tutorial for something, and there just… Isn’t one anywhere but YT. Also a lot of the content types just… Aren’t available elsewhere, and it was hard for a while not having some of my favorite YTers to watch. Nebula, and Dropout definitely helped with that part, though, they had enough that it made it easier.
It did make me realize how dependent I was on YT for emotional regulation, though. I have real bad anxiety, and I realized pretty quickly I was watching things to numb it. Podcasts, music, and to a lesser extent books/fanfic have helped with that though. Generally now I’m looking for people who want to make something good, not make money, and that’s lead me down a lot of really interesting rabbit holes in general with art
(I know a lot of artists are trying to make money, and pay your artists, but there’s a difference between “Making something that will sell” and “Making something you’re proud of hoping people will like it” y’know?)
Giving up those socials is a great start, and often times the start is the hardest part. I don’t see Instagram though. Hopefully you have quit them and just forgot to mention, if not, consider this the universe sending you a message motivating you to delete it!
Of all the “content provider websites”, youtube is certainly the hardest part to “cut”. However, the signal to noise ratio of youtube is so low (small signal, large noise) that I pretty much don’t use it anymore. Even good channels are, more and more, going for clickbait and shitty tactics, and AI content. I didn’t really actively cut youtube, but I did so passively. It just became worse and worse that I don’t feel drawn to it as often. And, of course, when I do use youtube, ads are blocked with ublock and SponsorBlock.
In a similar boat in regards to cutting out invasive, rapidly-enshittifying corporate tech providers but I agree that YouTube still has some good content worth it. Good news is that with the use of Invidious servers on desktop and SmartTube / NewPipe on Android TV or mobile you can pretty much have your cake and eat it too.
P.S. if you’re looking for a less shitty / ad bloated way of watching Yt videos on Nvidia Shield Pro or similar Android TV I recently switched from NewPipe to SmartTube and it’s much better since it integrates Sponsorblock and the UI is actually designed for a TV.
I don’t buy stuff. I haven’t bought clothes in 5+ years (new or thrifted). I pirate epubs, games, shows, and movies. I don’t have any monthly subscription–no Deezer, Netflix, AppleSomething, Amazon, nothing. I grow 90% of the veggies I eat, most of the fruit. I trade for meat and bread.
I’ve never used Uber, UberEats, Doordash, AirB&B, or any of their competitors.
I’m happy.Never in my life have I given 2 week’s notice. If they can fire me without warning I can quit whenever the fuck I feel like it.
You give two weeks so you leave on good terms, not because you have to. Have you never needed a referral for a job?
Im not him, but i just use a friendly coworker, if that person is also the manager then thats just great. Ive usually worked for mega corps and large factories though. I never see the owners, just fellow wageslaves a rung or two higher on the ladder.
Even your fellow coworkers can be screwed over if you don’t give two weeks notice
Tell the coworker so they can book holiday. Tell no one else.
I decided to move away from big american tech companies. When I started, the hardest part was finding an alternative to Google Maps.
I decided to be the change I want to see and have been contributing to OpenStreetMap nearly every day for 5 years as I update my local community.
Hey! That is great!
What sort of apps/software do you use to update OpenStreetMap? I would also love to do something like that. Can you do a brief explanation on how you do it, please?
There are lots of apps, desktop software, and websites. I prefer to use the default editor on openstreetmap.org called iD. Zoom in to your neighbourhood and click ‘Edit’ and it will open.
wiki.openstreetmap.org includes best practices and documentation for how to map each real world thing.
In iD, you can click on something in the map, on the left side it will tell you what type of feature it is. There will be a little ‘i’ symbol that you can click for more details and documentation that links to that specific type of thing on wiki.openstreetmap.org
community.openstreetmap.org is the place to ask questions and get help from others.
For actually using the map for finding places and getting directions, I like CoMaps best.
To add to this, Street Complete and Every Door are great for getting started. They ask straightforward questions like what’s the house number of this building, or does this bus stop have seating. If you can’t answer a question you don’t have to, you can just go back and answer a different question instead :)
Oh, both of those (street complete and every door) are great! I have just answered a few questions. This is a really easy way to improve OSM. We should probably do a “You Should Know” somewhere. I don’t think these apps are well known.
How long until the changes are accepted, do you have any idea? I already published them (by logging in my OSM account).
I’m not sure how long they take off the top of my head, but I think it’s quite quick. A lot of the apps only update once a month though, so it can feel like longer
Any change is updated immediately. End users (apps) may only update every month or so, that’s up to them.
I’m trying to build a small business that replaces SSO mass surveillance (think Sign In With Google, LinkedIn, etc) with a privacy respecting alternative where the technology makes it impossible for me, the service operator, to know what the users are signing into.
Fix things and keep them, fix things and sell them on the secondhand market, or fix things owned by friends who have broken things. By applying my technical knowledge to repairing computers, appliances, tools, furniture, plumbing, I’m building my own self-sustainability, I’m enabling others to avoid buying new things and instead spend their money in better ways, I’m networking with people who have skills that I lack, I’m denying the manufacturers the revenue they would get if there wasn’t someone like me to fix their shit, and I’m denying the govt the taxes involved in new purchases and income tax on my secondhand sales, and I’m denying the voracious landfill of its tasty, tasty whitegoods.
