
I Tried to Live Without the Tech Giants. It Was Impossible - ForHackernews
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/31/technology/blocking-the-tech-giants.html
======
ragona
Disclaimer: I worked at AWS from 2012-2020. I am not a current employee.

> I came to think of Amazon and Google as the providers of the very
> infrastructure of the internet, so embedded in the architecture of the
> digital world that even their competitors had to rely on their services.

This is the right take. I disagree with the disappointment around this
article.

It’s about the fact that tech giants are running the infrastructure of the
internet. Its the federal highway program of the 21st century. It’s a critical
piece of public infrastructure. I can’t even begin to wrap my head around the
death and mayhem that would ensue if AWS and Google simply packed up and
turned off the data centers.

When we consider the future and safety of our country we should keep these
things in mind.

Imagine an unusually well-attended AWS all-hands was hit by a freak meteor.
What do you even do? Take enough engineers off the oncall rotation and things
will eventually fall over. I think the government would actually need to take
emergency action at a level we don’t understand to prevent the collapse of our
financial system beyond god knows what else. It would be utter mayhem.
Globally.

That said, no one takes this more seriously than AWS. I really believe this. I
sat in meetings regarding how to recover if we lost entire states, like
literally what if we lose the Virginia to a catastrophe. (I worked on the Key
Management Service or KMS which underlies much of the rest of the
infrastructure.) But it is good and correct that our representatives are
questioning our tech giants about their role in the future of our
civilization. They’re playing perhaps the most critical role, and that should
scare you.

I actually believe in the benevolence of AWS; I spent nearly a decade there.
Do you?

~~~
ls612
That makes me wonder, how did AWS or other big cloud providers handle the stay
at home orders in March? Did they just keep having people go in?

~~~
ckozlowski
Except where absolutely necessary, we've been WFH since March. We were allowed
to expense some things for setting up a home office.

The few physical workspaces that are still active out of necessity have a ton
of sanitation measures in place. Regular cleanings, temp sensors, etc. I knew
someone was paying attention to detail when those "foot handles" started
appearing on the bottoms of the bathroom entry doors.

A lot of my colleagues and myself have been busier it feels than any time
prior. There is honestly a real sense that a lot of people are suddenly
depending on us more than ever. It does give the sense that we're critical
infrastructure, and the leadership communicates and appreciates as such.

~~~
bosie
> the leadership communicates and appreciates as such.

What does this mean, especially the latter?

------
DJHenk
This is an unproductive interpretation of "living without tech giants". Yes,
if you decide to ban all major cloud providers from your live, including
everything they host, you are going to have a hard time. But it is foolish to
give up that easily.

Let's say I want to ban Google from my live and I ditch my GMail account.
Thinking along the lines of this author I would not be done. Actually I would
not be able to have an email account at all anymore, because there are other
people who are still on GMail and they might mail me and then I would be
"infected." And therefore I would better just keep my GMail.

This is nonsense, of course. You're better of without GMail and Google and the
others. You can't get all there in one day, but it is certainly worth it to
take as much steps as you can.

~~~
_fat_santa
For me it was less about leaving the tech giant, but moreso diversifying away
from them.

I used to be a Google Guy. Android Phone, everything in my Google Account,
Gmail and would use a Google service over anything else. Then I started to
hear about Google randomly banning accounts and realized that having this one
god Google account that basically ran my life is a major vulnerability.

So I started to diversify, not just to other services, but at Google as well.
First I moved my mail, calendar, tasks to Fastmail, ditched my Android and got
an iPhone, moved from Google Photos to iCloud. Next were the services I still
needed from Google: Youtube, Google Play Console, Analytics, Search Console
and a few others.

For those I created seperate Google accounts to manage every individual
service. One for GP, One for GA and Google Search Console and one for Youtube.
This way if Google bans my Youtube account, the damage is only contained to
that one account and that one service.

That's how I did it.

~~~
mcintyre1994
FWIW I've definitely heard of Google banning multiple accounts belonging to
the same person in those random ban stories. I guess it makes sense that that
could happen because their advertising/data algorithms are obviously going to
correlate accounts, and presumably you'd have to work pretty hard to stop them
being able to do so.

------
ibn_khaldun
Only skimmed through this but I thought that this article sounded
familiar...down to the tidbit about missing a friends birth on Facebook and
using a custom VPN to block the services....Published by Gizmodo, Jan. 2019
[0]

[0]: [https://gizmodo.com/life-without-the-tech-
giants-1830258056](https://gizmodo.com/life-without-the-tech-
giants-1830258056)

~~~
xdavidliu
to save other readers a click, this is the same author as the NYTimes article
in the OP, so this is that author recycling their own content, not plagiarism
from someone else

~~~
wmeredith
I'm actually OK with this, particularly in the area of tech reporting. The
state of the art advances quickly and it's likely worth revisiting
assumptions, options, and outcomes with updated inputs.

*I haven't read both articles, so there may actually be no updates.

~~~
brian_herman__
I couldnt even read the article without logging into google, facebook, or
apple. I could read the gizmodo one though. I guess that's an ironic update?

------
kaydub
> Cutting Amazon from my life meant losing access to any site hosted by Amazon
> Web Services, the internet’s largest cloud provider.

Stopped reading here.

Thought this was going to be an experiment on privacy. Like, blocking trackers
and not using the giant providers SaaS offerings.

~~~
9nGQluzmnq3M
It's not, but perhaps it makes an even deeper point: that it is genuinely
impossible to use the Internet without Amazon, Google and Microsoft, because
so much of the web relies on the three giants, and every click you make adds a
fraction of a cent to their hosting revenues.

That said, I do agree that madness lies going too down the supply chain. Is
using any device with a lithium-ion battery inherently immoral because they
contain some cobalt that may have been mined in exploitative conditions in the
Congo? Where do you draw the line?

------
ewzimm
This almost reads like a parody to me. The author was introduced to
alternatives for just about everything they used the tech giant services for,
and therefore, living without their services was impossible.

The issue that alternatives are harder to find and use is something that
should be solved. Instead of pursuing policies like nationalizing Google into
a public service, what if various public agencies tried to operate with free
software internally and then exposed their tools to the world with things like
public Searx and Peertube instances?

~~~
zerotolerance
The point was even as far as she went to eliminate her direct interaction
those services were transitive dependencies in almost every consumer
interaction.

~~~
ewzimm
Wouldn't this be something like a "Kevin Bacon" game of tech giants? Anyone is
only a certain number of degrees of separation away from any company in an
interconnected world. I could find a very obscure company and show that if
both of us participate in a global economy, there are transitive relationships
between us.

So I could choose not to use Amazon, but if I do business with only a few
others, some of those people will do business with Amazon. The same goes for
the Chinese Communist Party. Would that mean it's impossible for me to live
without the CCP? There's a sense in which I could say that's true, but that
wouldn't necessarily mean I shouldn't look for alternatives for who I depend
on directly.

------
rwnspace
The amount of doublethink on display here is incredible. It IS impossible to
both live without these services and a be a relatively normal member of
society. I've tried everything in this article, and it isn't sustainable.
Veganism is also something I've tried, and it's an apt metaphor; I think most
thinking persons are educated enough to agree that the global meat industry
could be improved by both regulation and consumer behaviour. That everyone
could do with feeling good about having a little less meat, don't feel bad
about having a bit.

With Veganism and other stances of denial, it generates so much extra
complexity and negative social pressure that sustaining them requires finding
a niche social group to help you feel ok about it, and teach you strategies to
help maintain it.

But if the very thing you are trying to quit encompasses the social medium,
you're completely on your own.

Deleting my Facebook was social suicide, no joke. Most of my friends are old
enough to rely on that platform alone. It was like losing a limb or two, and
suddenly realising all your friends ever do is climb.

~~~
fizwhiz
> It was like losing a limb or two, and suddenly realising all your friends
> ever do is climb.

While I don't entirely agree with your comment (and certainly didn't downvote
it), I did enjoy the double(?) metaphor here.

------
zokier
There is not really meaningful difference between service fully hosted on AWS
(or GCP/Azure) vs service hosted otherwise on AWS and putting Cloudflare in
front of it. That shows how meaningless idea it is to try to block AWS based
services as an end-user. On a technical level you can not know what the supply
chain of a service is like.

If you are concerned about supply chains, then Microsoft owning GitHub, which
almost everyone uses more or less directly, probably should pop up high in the
list of things. But for an end-user I'd again question if that is a meaningful
concern.

------
motohagiography
Also described by a perennially appearing post about Ivan Illich's concept:
[https://wikitia.com/wiki/Radical_Monopoly](https://wikitia.com/wiki/Radical_Monopoly)

~~~
sukilot
Strange that the canonical example -- an addictive drug, isn't mentioned
there.

~~~
Ericson2314
Drugs don't addict people, poverty does.

(Sorta)

~~~
wmeredith
Active ingredient drugs most certainly addict people. Physical addiction is a
physical state. So much so that if the drug is removed too quickly the
withdraw can kill you in some cases (see Heroin).

~~~
Ericson2314
It is my understanding that physical addiction and withdrawal are both
physical states, but the former depends on more variables.

------
switch11
This is a stupid article

1) Many people don't use the tech giants and get by just fine

2) Actual tough stuff is getting by without the currently dominant Operating
Systems for desktop and mobile and Office Software

THAT takes us some work

Also the AWS employee talking about 'Amazon and Google as the providers of the
very infrastructure of the world' is absolutely ridiculous

There are a ton of cloud providers and in many countries Google and Amazon
don't even have much presence

------
granzymes
This is like complaining that you can’t escape Intel, AMD, and Arm because all
of the businesses you frequent use commodity hardware. The horror!

~~~
fsflover
Well, it _is_ a horror considering all that Intel ME staff.

[https://libreboot.org/faq.html#intel](https://libreboot.org/faq.html#intel)

------
zackkitzmiller
Unless you move to a farm and grow everything yourself, I think yes. It would
literally be impossible to live with out them.

I'm sure the POS at your corner store somehow interacts with AWS or GCP, but
I'm not sure that should 'count.' As well as not visiting any site that is
hosted on a cloud provider.

You could almost certainly live a life with significantly reduced quality by
living without the tech giants directly, but to not visit websites that are
hosted on AWS, and still shop at a local shop that uses Square or other
payment provider that's hosted in the cloud seems disingenuous to me.

~~~
WhyKill
HA! Try growing or raising animals and not using Amazon...

~~~
dylan604
How in the world did farmers and ranchers do it before July 5, 1994? How did
humanity survive?

~~~
quesera
Obviously you're being glib, but the truth is that a lot of the "old"
production and supply lines no longer exist. So ordering from afar (Amazon or
its moral equivalent) has become necessary for some basics.

(If you're suggesting that farmers and ranchers should go back to the days
before production of plastics, hard goods, petroleum products, and rubber
materials...well then they will cease to be farmers or ranchers, because
1700s-era tech won't survive market forces today.)

Similarly, no one can build computers in the US any more. Apple's Mac Pro
project is interesting, but very low volume and mostly just an assembly
effort.

~~~
dylan604
>Obviously you're being glib, but the truth is that a lot of the "old"
production and supply lines no longer exist.

I would counter that "old" farmers were able to use the seed from the current
crop to plant for the next season so that it was self-sustaining. Now, with
modified seeds from places like Monsanto where the plant from the seeds of
this year's crop will not produce fruit. This forces you to need to buy new
seeds each year.

I'm also suggesting that we go back to planting more than one crop per farm,
and then even switching which part of the farm each plant is grown in. Crop
rotation is such a huge concept that we've just thrown away. We can still use
"plastic" and even "smart" equipment. We don't have to go back to stone age
tools, that's just daft. We had that before July 5 1994 too.

~~~
drdeadringer
Long ago and far away I had an idea for a short story that touched on these
issues of seeds gene-modified to be one-yield-only and multi-cropping. I
fizzled on the story but not so hard that I shouldn't be able to pick it up
again.

I'm glad for the research I did 15 years ago; I still encounter situations
where it becomes relevant, e.g. this discussion here and why certain water
pipes are colored purple [or other colors, but at this time I remember only
what purple means].

------
peterwwillis
The author's major complaint is that they can't have their cake and eat it
too.

You can easily live without tech giants! Stop using a smart phone, use a Linux
PC/Laptop, pay for your few online services like e-mail, stop using the
internet for shopping and everything else. You know, the way the entire world
worked 15 years ago.

> Yes, there are alternatives for products and services offered by the tech
> giants, but they are harder to find and to use.

If life is somewhat difficult without giant tech corporations, this is
inherently unacceptable? No - this is called _living in the real world_. You
do very often have to choose between an immoral yet easy life, and a moral yet
difficult life. This has been our constant choice for literally millennia.
Every society has had to grapple with it. Entire religions are based on it. It
is the completely unavoidable part of life that everyone is forced to
participate in.

> If I were still blocking the tech giants today, I wouldn’t have been able to
> watch this week’s antitrust hearing online. C-SPAN streamed it live via
> YouTube, which Google owns.

So get a TV! I don't know if you know this, but C-SPAN is a TV channel! You
can watch it without the internet! You can even make comments on it without
the internet by _calling a live show and speaking your mind_! Amazing! (But,
probably don't do this, as the average caller seems to have about the same
political insight as the average YouTube commenter)

This whole premise - that life is impossible without tech giants - concedes
that life is impossible without the internet. I _assure_ you that it is not.
It's up to you to decide whether that convenience and lack of expense is
preferable to the alternative, which is doing things "old school".

~~~
decasteve
> use a Linux PC/Laptop

When you install Linux, where is the OS downloaded from? Where do the software
packages and updates reside? What about the source code?

If you blocked Microsoft (Azure + github), Google, Amazon (AWS), and Akamai,
I'd be surprised if you could run any mainstream flavour of Linux.

Some *BSDs might work.

I minimize my interaction with the big computing-advertising-consumer entities
but I know they're still there behind the scenes. It's all part of the same
cesspool.

~~~
znpy
You can get enough software to live your life from the Debian repositories
(sources too).

The same is true for fedora and other distros of course. Many mirrors are
hosted at ISPs and universities.

~~~
decasteve
I remember getting sources from university ftp mirrors for Linux (still do for
OpenBSD). I wouldn't be surprised if some of these repositories are now hosted
by the 'giants'.

~~~
znpy
You're mistaking repository with mirrors.

If Facebook is mirroring the Debian package repository you can still apt-get
binary/source packages off another mirror.

------
rafaelvasco
Yeah. It's funny to think about it. From one side, these companies, we can't
deny, provide amazing services to us, and make our lives easier. On the other
hand, they collect an absurd amount of data about everything we do on the
internet. But that's not the bigger problem, the bigger problem is that they
directly or indirectly enforce the production of things that are really bad
for us like buying things we don't need, eating things that are bad for us,
consuming media that is harmful for us etc. That is the bigger threat. Making
money on things without real value and that don't bring any real positive
effect to anyone.

------
luckylion
Meh, "hosted on AWS = I can't avoid Amazon" isn't a reasonable question, it's
like "My dentist used Amazon to buy his pants = I can't Avoid Amazon". You
aren't doing business with Amazon by visiting a site hosted on AWS, the site
owner is, and you're doing business with them. If you don't want AWS to see
your IP for some "no direct touching" reason, get a VPN.

Six Degrees Of Separation is a fun game, but I don't think it's useful for
this kind of debate.

~~~
onion2k
When you load a webpage or an app that's hosted on AWS you give Amazon _a lot_
of information about your browser, location, etc. They could very easily
aggregate all of the AWS services you load things from to build a very
detailed profile about you. If Amazon were being nefarious they could inspect
the data in the packets you send across their network.

Using a site that's hosted on AWS === doing business with Amazon. It's just a
very one-sided relationship where they get a ton of useful data and you get to
load a JS app.

~~~
9nGQluzmnq3M
Imma need a citation for that. Yes, Amazon _could_ do that, but the cloud
providers are usually very clear about drawing a clear dividing line between
their hosting businesses and consumer businesses, because enterprise customers
are extremely sensitive to the slightest suggestion of their data being mined.

~~~
heipei
What about this, a mere three months ago:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22962145](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22962145)

------
gitowiec
This is weird "When I blocked Google, the entire internet slowed down for me,
because almost every site I visited was using Google to supply its fonts, run
its ads, track its users, or determine if its users were humans or bots."

I think it should be opposite - all websites should speed up. Why am I wrong?

~~~
doublerabbit
Bad design and code.

------
wdr1
"Impossible" is a strange way to say you're unwilling to forge convenience and
live the life we all had in the 90s.

------
ulkram
Why do these articles always leave out ISPs and cellular providers when
talking about Tech Giants? Their monopoly is even stronger.

------
birdyrooster
And the asshole who truly started the browser bar adware craze is leading one
of those tech giants.

------
awinter-py
the nokia 3310 they got runs YunOS, a droid fork made by Alibaba, which is
1000% a tech giant

------
yters
I tried living without the major food producers and I starved to death because
I can't farm.

------
feralimal
After so many years (perhaps starting with the East India Company), the result
is that these mega-corporations have finally reached a point where they have
had both the power and control of the reins for so long, that life as we know
it is not possible without them. We will demand that our ineffective
government step aside and that our corporations step up - we will choose to
have them technocratically manage us. And the boot up of governance 2.0 will
be complete.

My own PoV, is that I wanted governance 1.0 rolled back!

~~~
eternalban
I am not sure about life being impossible for a humanity that has managed to
shake off the yoke of these cartels. The technology and know how are neutral.
The issue is _how_ technology is (mis)used, and what role does the desire to
maintain archaic social and political order (of the stake-holders of East
India Companies of the world) plays in the dystopian turn of the “liberating
technology” of the internet.

~~~
feralimal
Well, you are clearly an optimist, which I genuinely appreciate!

I agree, technology is neutral in itself, its just a tool. But, who runs all
of it? Is it you? No. Is it comparable to other tools such as a shovel? No,
again. The question I ask myself, is 'who owns the algorithm and its
parameters?'. Do you? Or do you only have the impression of that?

If you are only 'leasing' the tools as you continue to use them, you are
providing corporations the opportunity to learn all about everyone at scale.
This confers huge advantages to whoever owns that data, they measure, store
and analyse everything they can. But don't share it. There are many examples
of this, but how about that amazon doesn't even release data on which books
sell best? It simply provides a best seller list.

With that level of knowledge, much of which can be automated, and which you do
not have access to, you have a massively asymmetric balance of power. I don't
see how you shake off that yoke.

Like I say, I would prefer to move away from the archaic social and political
order. But stepping into a highly monitored and supervised cage, no matter how
gilded it is, isn't the answer for me!

