
I Tried to Live Without the Tech Giants. It Was Impossible - pseudolus
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/31/technology/blocking-the-tech-giants.html
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rckoepke
I saw this when the author originally published her experience in early 2019
-- this appears to be a rewrite of the same experience. As I've thought about
it since then I've arrived at the conclusion that the title is roughly
equivalent to "I tried to live without the Electric Grid."

Certain services are omni-pervasive throughout our modern society, and in
order to avoid interacting with those services you'd have to go to extremes at
least as severe as the Amish people go to.

I'm incorporating Mastodon into an app I'm building currently. It offers the
precise functionality I need for an ad-hoc, time-limited social network
dedicated to an annual in-person event. I'm not incorporating it driven by any
political, moral, or economic reasons -- I'm fairly certain restricting myself
by those tenets would require me to live much as the Amish do.

I notice none of the trials I've read have tried to block communication with
Cloudflare. I'm not opposed to Cloudflare's business practices personally but
if centralization in general is what a person opposes, it would be logical to
add that to the list as well.

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adamsea
Interesting. I hadn't realized this:

"Amazon was difficult to avoid in the real world as well. When I ordered a
phone holder for my car from eBay, it arrived in Amazon’s signature packaging,
because the seller used “Fulfillment by Amazon,” paying the company to store
and ship his product."

