It is actually a perfectly practical choice to completely ignore those ecosystems. I am the founder and active engineer at two companies and two large open source projects and have a family, travel a lot, and have an active social life in Silicon Valley.

I also do not use any Apple, Google, Meta, or Microsoft products and exclusively use open source software for all of my work.

It turns out none of this is incompatible, everyone just convinces themselves it is.

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NietzscheanNull 21 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Congrats on your independence! What you're describing is my goal state, but sadly I'm not there yet. It seems like it's the last 10-20% of "sticky" dependencies that always trip me up (granted, some of those are merely "nice to haves" like tap-to-pay, not actually hard barriers). If you get a second, would you mind sharing any general advice and/or specific recommendations that might help me and other like-minded people follow in your footsteps?

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lrvick 18 hours ago | parent [-]

First thing is nuke tap to pay. That is surveillance capitalism dependence masquerading as convenience.

Step one, and I am serious, is just use cash. Every time you pay with cash at a drug store, a liquer store, a casino, donation boxes, clothes, that is a tiny bit less information corpos and politicians can buy about how healthy you are, what causes you support, and how to manipulate you.

Just use cash, falling back to cash-purchased prepaid gift cards for edge cases like parking. You will pay more attention to how much you spend, you are helping ensure the unbanked can still participate in society, you are opting out of funding surveillance capitalism with your data, and at a busy restaurant you can just leave cash on the table and leave whenever you want.

From there when you are making a quick trip to the grocery store or something, just leave your phone at home.

Meanwhile, keep your phone in airplane mode full time. Use wifi when you must but do not use cell and see if you can go a month or two without actually having to be reachable every second of every day, but only when you choose to be on wifi.

Whenever you are connected to a cell tower your location is being actively documented and sold at all times, and even worse, you are mentally always ready to be contacted, for a new dopamine hit of information or a new decision to make. When it is off, and you know it is off, you can just focus on driving, on thinking, on processing the shit in the back of your head that wont go away on its own.

Anyway, once you are wifi only, and no longer dependent on your phone for commerce, its just a boring wifi tablet. Now, delete your least productive of your top ten ten most used apps every month until your phone is so boring you find you only use it a couple times a day.

At that point, tackle those final things like GPS and flashlight which could be handled by your own brain plus printed maps, paper maps, and an actual flashlight, a mechanical watch... and then you are free to move about the world comfortably without any electronics at all whenever you want.

People will ridicule you constantly for not having a phone, but those are just addicts feeling threatened.

	▲	sundarurfriend an hour ago \| parent [-]
		That is a useful guide in terms of the personal psychology of how to go about doing it, which is an important side of it, thank you. I'm also interested in the mechanics of how you actually do it: for eg. your mention of paper maps for travel makes me think if a lot of that becomes workable because you're in planned cities with reliable maps. I'm a mid sized town in India where maps are vague guides for the general layout, but are missing the many many alleys and connecting roads that people actually live on (or have shops at). Roads, road names, traffic restrictions - pretty much every part of it is chaotic and incredibly hard to put together without a GPS on a digital map. On the family aspect too, do you have a Matrix or similar for the larger family to connect through and share news on (their own travel for eg., or difficulties they might be having, or news like child birth), or do you only use phone calls or texts to connect? In any case, I can definitely relate to: > even worse, you are mentally always ready to be contacted, for a new dopamine hit of information or a new decision to make. and feel the negative effects of that, so I'll be moving actively towards what you're suggesting. Maybe to a different point on the line and with different workarounds, but it sounds at least 90% workable and with significant benefits too.

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sundarurfriend a day ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Do you have a blog post or similar that describes how you do this?

	▲	lrvick 17 hours ago \| parent [-]
		see my reply to sibling comment

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brokenmachine a day ago | parent | prev [-]

Do you have only a dumb phone?

	▲	lrvick 17 hours ago \| parent [-]
		I do own android devices for development and testing, but I do not have a cell phone plan and I do not carry any electronics when leaving home unless my explicit goal is working away from home, in which case I bring a laptop.