Reducing my billionaire dependencies

Sadly, this isn't a situation we can just rage quit.

As recent events in the USA continue to make clear: There is no ethical consumption under capitalism. But alas, this is the system we’re stuck in so what to do, what to do?

To keep myself grounded, and more importantly, sane, I decided it was important to be realistic. A boycott is effectively impossible.

As of 2023 Amazon Web Services (AWS) had nearly a third of the global cloud market share, with over 53% of the top traffic websites using AWS. Of the top 10 online retailers using AWS, they have a whopping 62.7% of the market share and make hundreds of billions of dollars every year. They own, among other companies: Goodreads, IMDB, The Washington Post, Twitch, AbeBooks, BookDepository (which Amazon have since dissolved), ComiXology, Whole Foods, Bebo (in case you were wondering what happened to that relic of the 2000s), and many, many more.

Meta have a huge stranglehold on social media; owning Facebook, Instagram, Threads, WhatsApp, and Oculus VR; having spent the better part of the last decade buying up any competition in their space that they could. A familiar story among these billionaire despots. They’ve helped Russia influence our democracies, increased political polarisation, failed at content moderation, fueled genocides, incentivised rage-bait, and fostered a culture of increasingly terrible mental health on purpose to increase engagement with their platforms. That’s not even mentioning the horrible stuff some of their workers are subjected to in dealing with the never-ending torrent of horror involved in the still very human task of content moderation.

Elon Musk… Honestly, apart from the undue influence of Starlink on things like the war in Ukraine, his billionaire status comes from the fact he’s good at getting the US government to give him free money, and, being the fuhrer of all meme-lords, over-inflating the value of Tesla stock. It’s pretty crazy he’s been able to make mostly wealthy insecure men somehow believe Tesla is worth more the next top 35 car companies in the world combined. This is despite Tesla being objectively terrible at making cars. From crappy and dangerous design flaws (who designs a trunk door that can cut your finger off that manages to get to market?!), to high deadly accident rates, to unsafe working conditions in their car factories, the idea this junk company is worth more than every other top car company in the world combined is laughable. His Twitter takeover, while obviously giving him a large platform to be a bigoted idiot, has been a pretty epic business disaster. Losing 80% of the value of the company and rebranding Twitter to sound like a dodgy porn site, were hardly genius moves. And all that isn’t even getting into the fact he vomits his shower thoughts online like a 14 year old boy who thinks The Matrix is deep and reading Mein Kampf in public is a flex.

There are other nasty billionaire characters I could add to this list but those are the main 3 in the public eye right now. The idea we can somehow spend our time and money in ways that will hurt these behemoths is, frankly, laughable. Musk proves, if nothing else, that the value of these despicable men is more an exercise in perception than a factor of their actual assets and contribution to society and the market.

So does that mean we should all give up and roll over? Obviously not. Even if we as individuals can’t take them down, we can reduce their billions a bit. Maybe we can even make them sweat a little by undermining their growth predictions. But how?

Well, it’s time to ask ourselves: “Do we really need this?” I’m not talking about minimalism or reducing spending or whatever, though I’m sure we could all benefit from being a bit more conscious in that arena now and again. I’m talking about our increasing dependence on convenient tech ecosystems. Is what we’re trading in for the sake of convenience a fair deal? Do we really need things to be so convenient all the time?

One of the many ways these billionaire buttholes lock down our money is how darn convenient they make things once you buy-in. Next-day delivery, special deals and sales, single account login across many different websites, physical devices that interact with each other, integrated one click buying, smart home all-in-one systems that respond to your voice, etc, etc.

It’s all just a convenience trap.

Those physical devices often only work with their specific software, and their digital goods often only work with their specific devices. One-click buying exists to encourage you to impulse buy, to get you to give them your money faster than ever before. Don't even get me started on proprietary car charge ports after we’ve just started to resolve the phone charging cable wars. You do not need that lock-in. In fact, you’re better off without it.

A lot of these locked-in ecosystems not only force you to keep buying from them to prevent your nice electrical goods from effectively becoming e-waste, but they also stifle market competition. You can see from the aggressively long list of mergers and acquisitions by many of these tech magnates, that they love creating a barren wasteland where a thriving market could have been. This is not only terrible for you in terms of choice and prices within the market, but also terrible for the future. Innovation shouldn’t be controlled by a handful of crappy dudes with tech empires to maintain. They are monopolies and they do what monopolies do: Crush competitors and customers alike.

Obviously a big part of tackling these modern robber barons should be political, and I encourage you to care about this as an issue. Breaking up the influence of these tech companies on the world will only be a good thing, and will also give you as a customer better options into the future. But politics moves slowly, and if you’re like me, you want something you can do right now.

So here’s what I’ve done.

Because all the Meta things I’m tied to are social, it’s tricky to untangle myself from Zuckerberg’s empire. So I’ve chosen to limit my engagement instead. Meta’s social media platforms are geared around active users and engagement. They get paid for the amount of time they can keep your eyes on their platforms looking at ads. So I made some rules for myself:

1. Never click an ad. Don’t do it. If you see something you like that you absolutely must have, search for it later elsewhere. Don’t click the ad, and don’t click through on their platform.
2. Stop personalised ads. Don’t let them use that data they have on you. Make them show you rubbish generic and irrelevant ads. Go into your settings and turn off any ad personalisation and suggested content options you can find.
3. Never respond to a negative comment on anything. A negative comment wants responses to boost its relevance in the comment rankings. Ignore them like the garbage they are. Like or comment on something you like or agree with instead if you feel you have to engage.
4. Limit the apps. In Android you can pause apps and in iOS you can use Screen Time to limit the time you can access specified apps. Do it. I’ve found limiting my Meta apps like this also encourages me to only use them for specific purposes, like checking in on family and close friends, or engaging with specific businesses or creators for specific reasons, like contacting my local hairdresser for example.
5. Rearrange your social media apps to prioritise other things. I’ve rearranged mine to prioritise non-Meta, decentralised social media like Mastodon, and Pixelfed. I also have Bluesky which is currently a weird for-profit-but-not-obligated-to-make-profit-for-shareholders type company. They don’t have ads though, so they don’t need your undivided attention. I’ve found this discourages me from doomscrolling as much and has introduced me to generally more wholesome corners of the internet.

Now Zuck with his grilled meats, gold chains, and robot features, is getting less than 30 mins of my eyeball time a day. If enough people did that it would see a fun drop in advertising revenue for Meta. Is it likely? No. But I can dream. There's some feminine energy keen to neuter Meta over here. Snip snip ✂️

I don’t have anything Tesla because I’m not a crypto bro, willy-waving entrepreneur, or paranoid homesteader, so next up is ol’ Bezos. And boy, I was in deep with this Dr Evil wannabe. I had Prime, Audible, Kindle, grocery subcriptions, a Goodreads account, a Twitch account with a rolling monthly subscription, and a Comixology account. Grim! I was giving the egg-looking, phallic-rocket riding Amazon turd over £200 a year. Just the thought is making me want to be sick in my mouth a little. Yuck.

The most obvious first move was yeeting the subscriptions. I stopped my annual Prime membership from renewing. I killed the grocery subscriptions and where I could I found alternatives direct from the sellers. I cancelled my Twitch subscription as my friend I was supporting had stopped streaming anyway. Finally, after getting 2 free audiobooks with 1 free “please don’t cancel” credit because they had a 2for1 deal on, I went back and cancelled my Audible subscription too.

Next I reclaimed my Audible, Kindle, and ComiXology libraries from their DRM(Digital Rights Management) prisons with a mix of Calibre plugins, Libation, KCC (Kindle Comic Converter), audiobookshelf, and a whole evening of clicking. Backing up my Audible library was pretty straightforward and took about 20 mins. Hosting it elsewhere was similarly straightforward thanks to PikaPods. Kindle and ComiXology were a whole other story that I don't fancy getting into right now.

I'm sure I don't need to say it, but just in case, it's worth noting that backing up your digital purchases like this will, at the very least, breach various Amazon Terms of Service. I’m not worried about this though as I don’t plan to use any of them again. But if you’re interested in doing the same, the previous paragraph should be enough to point you in the right direction with the search engine of your choice.

I got my entire Kindle library of 278 books and comics backed up in the space of one evening. I’d be lying if I said my clicking finger wasn’t a little worse for wear by the end of the ordeal. Maybe if you take breaks you can reduce the risk of physical suffering. I was just impatient to get the Bezos stink off my ebooks.

Now my personal library is freed from its Amazon cage and I can listen or read from it on any device I want and they can’t stealthily delete any of the books I’ve already purchased. Nor will I lose access to my books if I get booted from my account for mysterious or silly reasons. I also don’t plan on buying anything from them in the future and have filtered Amazon links out of my search results with my preferred search engine. No more book cash of mine for Bezos!

I’ve also replaced many of the Amazon services I was using with much cooler alternatives:

• I’ve got Libro.fm for audiobooks now, which is a DRM-free audiobook service that lets you designate a local independent bookshop to fund with your purchases. It’s also £1 cheaper a month for a 1 credit a month subscription than Audible.
• I’ve switched to The Storygraph instead of Goodreads, which not only has just as good features, but lets you have more fine-grained rating increments for book reviews, and lets you import your Goodreads data right into their platform so you don’t lose any of your reading progress or review data. I’m really enjoying it.
• I already had Floatplane, which is an alternative to Twitch, because one of my favourite YouTubers DankPods switched to it after Amazon did him dirty on his Twitch streaming channel. So I’ll just keep that one around and promote it more.
• GlobalComix.com seem like a decent replacement for ComiXology now Amazon have killed what was once my go-to place for comics. They don’t have Marvel on board sadly, but they do share 70% of their subscription revenue with publishers and creators, and allow comic creators to receive direct donations from users as well as offer their comics for permanent download as PDFs if they choose.
• audiobookshelf for self-hosting my reclaimed audiobook library. It's an open source audiobook and podcast server that lets you sync your audiobooks across devices. They have a free open source android app in beta, and while the iOS beta is currently closed, there are compatible apps available for iOS like Plappa and ShelfPlayer. Plappa is free with certain features for purchase in the app, and ShelfPlayer is a one-off payment of £4.99. I chose ShelfPlayer and I'm really liking it. It's really easy to setup audiobookshelf with PikaPods too. My setup costs me less than $4 a month to run.

One of the nice things about all this is that as well as feeling like i’m doing something, even if it’s small, it also seems to be saving me money. Combining the cost savings of getting rid of my annual Prime subscription, Audible subscription, and Twitch subscription more than covers the cost of a Libro.fm and GlobalComix.com subscription. I also added another subscription that I’ll get into in a different post about ereaders. But all in I’m still breaking even (technically I'm saving £3 a year) after switching away from Amazon-based subscriptions. Pretty happy with that.

I’m also happy to live with slower delivery times for things. Plenty of places offer free shipping anyway now and if I need something fast I can walk 15 mins into town and go to a physical shop, or fork out for express delivery. Too many Amazon workers are suffering from workplace accidents, or getting into serious traffic incidents during delivery trying to adhere to grueling schedules and targets as it is. Do I really want to be fuelling that if I don’t need to?

I’m also pretty convinced now that Prime isn’t free delivery. Most things are just rolling the cost of delivery into the item price. I’ve seen multiple examples of identical prime vs non-prime items on Amazon having different pricing depending on whether delivery is supposed to look free. Also, after buying a number of things not from Amazon, i’ve found i’ve saved as much as £20 in some cases, even with postage costs included. So was Prime ever really worth it in the first place? What exactly was I even paying for? I very rarely actually need next day delivery. £95 a year to a nasty little billionaire for literally nothing of value to me. I’m genuinely mad at my own willing stupidity.

I’ve also been looking around at other non-locked-in ebook sellers online but it seems like ebook publishers are a lot more insistent on DRM. Most stores either have dedicated apps, or expect you to be able to use Adobe Digital Editions(ADE), similar to how some library ebook systems work. Some interesting non-Amazon ebook shops I’ve found are eBooks.com, Bookshop.org, and Hive.co.uk, the latter two allowing you to support local independent book stores.

It’s up to you whether you’re bothered about DRM protections outside of the Amazon ecosystem. But if you want to liberate any ebook from DRM, the process of DRM removal is much the same as for Kindle ebook files. Whether I will bother will depend on how horrible ADE is to use. I’ve not heard glowing reviews…

Also, as a related side note, I kind of resent publishers thinking I’m just going to run off and chuck any DRM-free book into the internet for wanton copyright infringement purposes. If I’ve bought something, with my money that I earned so I could buy things, it’s because I want to support the creator and the ecosystem that allows me access to their work. DRM on purchases is not an effective tool for preventing copyright infringement. It’s just a hinderance and user experience nightmare for legitimate customers, whilst merely a momentary obstacle to people who don’t want to pay for digital goods. I pay for my books because I have a comfortable income and I love reading. It’s as simple as that.

If you can’t afford to buy every book you want to read, I seriously encourage you to support your local library and indulge in all the free books they have to offer there. Many libraries now also offer ebook and digital audiobook services like Overdive, BorrowBox, and Libby. They also often have services for people that are unable to physically collect their book reservations themselves due to disability, as well as wonderful social and community events for people of all ages. To top it all off, you can also often now reserve the books you want online and just drop in to collect them at a convenient time for you. My local libraries don’t even charge late-fees for overdue books anymore. How amazing is that?!

There we go, that’s a great place to end this one: Give some love to your local libary. Our taxes keep them alive and your foot traffic and library card sign-ups justifies their existence to the people who spend your tax money. A warm place with nothing but shelves and shelves of free books for everyone is a magical thing. Don’t let one-click convenience take that away from you.