Things are pretty complicated right now. It’s difficult to know who to trust and who’s being honest. Our government and corporate leaders tell us that everything is going well while we can see that things are very obviously NOT going well for most people. This disconnect between what we’re being told and what we’re experiencing is not possible to reconcile without absurd mental gymnastics.
I’ve been thinking about how to recover our agency and what can be done to reduce the power of the organizations taking advantage of us. It seems to me that one of the most important things that we can do is to realize that we have significantly more power and value than we realize. We’ve been convinced to give away significant portions of who we are in exchange for online services. While it seems that our own personal information has little value, the current market valuations of corporations that rely on that information for their business, far surpasses the value of corporations that actually produce things.
In other words, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, etc, produce… well, nothing. And they are the most valuable corporations in the planet. Their value is based on how much information about YOU they can package and sell to advertisers. The return to individual users, the ones that the value is based on, is farmville, toxic entertainment, and surveillance of your neighbors. This is unconscionable.
With that rant in mind, I no longer consent to being someone else’s value proposition.
This project is an effort to document and proceduralize how to separate from these organizations and practices. There are three parts to this effort:
- Reduce and remove as much exposure to marketing and advertising as possible
- Move away from corporate cloud services
- Buy products from ethical and local companies and vendors
Stay tuned for more details!