Are you bending the knee to fascism?

2025-03-31

If your favorite local hardware store started flying a Nazi flag would you shrug and go ahead and step through the door to purchase that garden hose you need? Many US companies and, relevant to this post, most of US big tech have all bent the knee to the Trump administration. For the sake of business and profit, Meta, Google, Microsoft, Apple, Amazon and others are all going along, playing by the new rules.

They may not be flying a Nazi flag at corporate headquarters or on the corporate website, but don't kid yourself. They're all going to play along as long as they need to. Business comes first.

That Nazi owned hardware store on Main Street isn't going to get my dime. Nor is Apple or any of the others. For too long, far too long, we in the US have told ourselves we're powerless to act. It's convenient because it means we give ourselves permission to just go along. We're comfortable, why rock the boat? Why risk it? Why inconvenience ourselves. Easier to look the other way and keep on scrolling for the next outrage or the next cute dog in jammies video.

You can tell yourself you're too busy that it's too much work to make changes. But that's simply not true. It's really not. We make excuses for why we don't protest just as we make excuses for our continued patronage of companies that are cooperating. They're complicit. And so are we if we're going along.

I'm 40 days into my efforts. Like anyone else, I found iCloud photos to be extremely convenient. But like many, I remember a time when I had digital photos before iCloud. For decades I kept my photos stored on a local computer. I did the same for all of my computer files. That was the norm.

So, no, I absolutely did not have to remain in an an iCloud subscription. It took a bit of effort to transition because I was also switching to an entirely different operating system, Linux. But not everyone has to do that. Save your photos to a local mac if you have one. If they won't fit on the internal drive get an external drive and put them there. You can set your Mac to download all original iCloud photos and you can set the Photos "System Library" to be an attached hard drive. All the originals will download.

Anyone can take the time to move files out of iCloud to a local drive. Many are still using free iCloud accounts and would probably be well served to back up to a local drive. We can help each other to do these things. We can quit iCloud, Google, Microsoft, Amazon, and Meta. We can take more responsibility for our data and teach our friends and family less technically adept do the same.

Help those you know set-up email accounts with paid services like Fastmail or Tata. If you can afford to host it, do it.

We're not as powerless as we've told ourselves. We've just not made the effort. Now is the time to make the effort.

I don't have comments but I love email or you can find me on Mastodon.

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