Divestment December

It started with this photo. The leaders of the world’s biggest tech companies, standing together at Trump’s inauguration. Waiting patiently and performatively for their chance to kiss the ring.

It feels like looking at a black and white picture of Germany in the ‘30s.

But I’m grateful for it: that picture woke me up. The fact that these fucking guys are chumming around at the dawn of the new dystopia they’ve aided and abetted? It was time to cut these fascist collaborators out of my life.

X and Amazon were relatively easy deletes as I didn’t use either that much. But Google was another story. I hate that I loved it: calendars that sync properly, document creation that is collaborative, video distribution that is everywhere, and information that is useful. As an organization nerd it gave me tools – free tools — that I was grateful for.

And it didn’t end with those tools. In the last fifteen years I got… pretty deep into the ecosystem. A Pixel phone and two Google Home speakers deep, in a moment of weakness during the pandemic. I am not proud to say that I chose to parrot a company name for the negligible value of having my gadgets turn on music and capture shopping list items. (As an aside let me tell you — mood lighting that’s activated by “Hey Google, it’s sexytimes” is a libido killer.)

I always knew in the abstract that my data goes through US data centres. But now they’re accessible to the Trump government, who Google has already demonstrated they are happy to collaborate with, Google users have gotten a lot more vulnerable. AI coming into the picture means that they can spy at an unprecedented and granular scale: why wouldn’t they build threat profiles on every Gmail user for “national security” reasons? They’re going through our phones already, this would just automate it.

This puts billions of people at risk. BILLIONS. Google is so huge it’s perceived more as a public utility than a company, and they benefit from that confusion. Kids have grown up with Google accounts at school, Googling to research, and getting Gemini to write their assignments. Google makes plays to take over city infrastructure like Sidewalk Labs. But they can’t have the public’s best interests at heart: they have to serve their VC shareholders and this inexorably leads to enshittification. Cory Doctorow, who coined the term, hosts this podcast about why Google Search was deliberately made worse by Google itself, despite many Googlers trying desperately to follow the “Don’t Be Evil” motto.

Governments aren’t perfect, but they have a lot more guardrails and checks and balances to prevent abuses of power, while even a model company that manages to be guided by ethical standard while growing their user bases can still be sold to Nazis when it’s time to cash in.

Boycotting is only one tactic amongst many, just as voting is only one form of civic engagement. But it’s a positive action I can take.

THIS MACHINE KILLS PEOPLE

Before I started the big job of extricating myself from Google, I warmed up with a quick and easy win: Spotify. At first, I enjoyed using it a lot – an enjoyment that was reduced substantially by the news that they were paying artists unfairly. But when I learned that the CEO had taken the money he’d made exploiting artists (and people’s love of music) to invest in military AI? Out, damned Spot.

Luckily there’s a drag-and-drop replacement. Qobuz is a French company that has an almost identical library, makes it easy to export your Spotify playlists to their service, and pays artists 5 times more than Spotify. I’ve been using it for a few months now and aside from having to cut and paste my Spotify friend’s music suggestions rather than click a link, there’s no downside that I can see.

Breaking up with Google was messier. But it lead me to some interesting and inspiring corners of the internet!

THE GORY DETAILS

Proton Mail seemed like an ideal replacement at first, as they offer a similar suite of services to Google and an easy migration tool to import your Google data. But the biggest deal breaker was the inability for the web client to search the body of my emails without downloading all my emails locally (in my case, 40 gigs worth). This is due to the strong encryption they offer, so some people might find this compromise acceptable. They refunded my money within the first month as promised.

I switched to Fastmail, which offers a very Google-like experience and also offers a migration tool to import your email, contacts and calendars from Google accounts – and a free month to try it out. They are not as private as Proton but I’m willing to make that compromise for web search access to my 20 years of email — it’s essentially my outboard brain. And while they have servers in the US, they are governed by Australian law and so are less vulnerable to being spied on by the US government.

Both of these alternatives cost money to subscribe to, but I prefer that to my data being brokered or my eyeballs being leased for advertising.

Protip: instead of having to inform people of your new email every time I go to a new email provider I have registered my own domain and just point it to Fastmail or wherever I go. This costs about an additional $10-20/year but is well worth it to me for the consistency and not feeling locked into a certain email provider.

EASY PEASY

Some swaps were simpler than I thought they’d be.

• Vivaldi Browser replaced Chrome (Chrome-extension compatible!)
• Here WeGo maps replaced Google Maps (on desktop and mobile!) [GmapsWV from FDroid also anonymously scrapes Gmaps]
• Duck Duck Go replaced Google Search (no ads! You can turn off the AI smart search!)
• TickTick replaced Google Tasks/Keep (there’s a browser extension and an app with mobile widgets for quick capture) [Tasks.org is also great]
• FreeTube replaced YouTube (SmartTube for TVs is similarly ad-free)

THE PIXEL FIX-EL

I’m on my second Google phone, and I kind of assumed I was stuck with it for the meanwhile, but then I discovered GrapheneOS: a community-built Android operating system that you can replace the existing one with. This was a big surprise as I had thought I wouldn’t be able to escape the OS itself. But this open source project is super slick, bloat free, and also gives you access to most of the Play store apps — anonymously via Aurora!

My gotchas were that I couldn’t bring my paid apps along without activating Google Play to confirm they were paid for, and my banking app required Google services. But there’s even work-arounds for this: you can install a sandboxed version of Google only for these apps that and they can’t see anything else going on outside the sandbox.

Secondly, Authy wouldn’t work and they don’t make it easy to export the 2FA you’ve established — I had to do it manually and it took a few hours (on Bitwarden now).

As the above techy jargon implies, replacing the OS is a bit of a hobbyist project, but I found it fun. If I could do it again I’d set aside a full day to do it. Remember to manually back up contacts, messaging data (especially Signal and other private messengers – I lost some message history, learn from my mistake), and everything else Google usually does automatically for you — rifling through your data in exchange.

DISCOVERING THE UNWALLED GARDEN

Perhaps my favourite part of these changes has been discovering YunoHost in my research to replace Drive and Photos. They are another inspiring community project that provides a beginner-friendly way to convert an old computer (in my case, a 15-year-old laptop that no longer holds a charge) into a server that can host a number of useful open source applications.

One of them is NextCloud, which together with Collabora provide a local cloud file server with a writing/spreadsheet/slides substitute that is accessible wherever there’s internet. (I’m writing this post on it now!) I have it set up to sync all my important files from my local machine and photos from my phone so I have a backup and can access them remotely, too. My space is only limited by the hard drive space I have on my server and doesn’t require a subscription, though it’s more work to set up and possibly not as stable as an off-site server. (For people who don’t want to host their own server: OnlyOffice is pretty solid alt for docs, and gives you 2G of free storage that’s upgradable. Ente for photos gives you 10G of free storage.)

But to get back to YunoHost – they self-describe as “a non-profit technocritical project, developed and maintained by volunteers. We advocate a decentralized Internet, with open, interoperable technologies that respect privacy and empowers people.” They do an incredible job providing straightforward and human how-tos and tutorials on how to set things up, and also have a forum and a chat channel if you get stuck.

I have been tinkering with computers for decades but rarely like to bother people with my questions, focusing on endlessly searching forums and the like to find how similar problems were solved. But they make it very approachable with tools that capture logs to share and protocols to ask for help, so I thought I’d ask. Within a few hours a few different users had made suggestions, and one of them worked! It was a sweet taste of mutual aid, something I’m often offering but rarely partaking of myself.

PURITY IS NOT THE POINT

I still have some goog-artifacts around: I will need to use it in some work and collaborative projects, and my projector runs on GoogleTV (though I have signed out of my account). I use my Google Homes as basic Bluetooth speakers, though I’ve deafened them by muting the mic: the white LED lights turned Cylon-orange as if frustrated they can’t eavesdrop endlessly.

Although the inauguration picture lit the fire under my ass, I mostly started this project because I just didn’t like being so reliant on a company that didn’t – maybe even couldn’t, because of its structure – have my best interests at heart. It had too much control of too much of my life. That’s why going forward I don’t plan to put all my digital eggs in one basket, even for a company like Proton that seems simpler on the surface.

The internet, after all, started with this “distributed-is-safer” principle – a communication network of computers that would withstand being bombed by our cold war adversaries. Let’s go back to this basic principle and reduce the toxicity of concentrated power in the process.

NEXT DECEMBER

Now that I’m mostly Google-free, I’m tempted to keep going: keep crossing off my hit list of the techno-oligarchs in that creepy picture. The last big one for me is Meta as I’m on Facebook and Whatsapp for many family, friend, and event purposes. But I’m going to leave that ‘til Divestment December 2026 and try to make it a regular annual part of my life instead of a “big gesture” purge. I’d also like to couple my divestments with a parallel push to invest in the kind of projects and people who are inspiring and enabling a decentralized and open internet.

Want to join me next year, perhaps with different divestment goals? Shoot me an email at info (at) jimmunroe.net (my forever email!) and tell me why and I’ll add you to a special list of co-conspirators.

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Thanks to Matt H, Matias dP, and Heather M for editing feedback and support!