I have lots of old friends who I only maintained sparse contact with. When I let my personal email address die (the address they would all have records of), I did not bother to update them with a new address.
They are all on the platform of some surveillance capitalist (e.g. Google or Microsoft). Google & Microsoft both refuse connections from self-hosted residential servers. And even if they didn’t, I am not willing to feed those surveillance advertisers who obviously don’t limit their surveillance to their users but also inherently everyone who makes contract with their users. I cannot support that or partake in pawning myself to subsidize someone else’s service.
I just wonder if anyone else has taken this step.
I have not bought a PC for the past 15 years. Every upgrade has been from pulling fully functional PCs out of dumpsters, LCDs included. Permacomputing is a good movement to follow.
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No, it matters absolutely. You can get the goods by financially contributing to their bottom line, or you can get them without contributing financially. Surely you must understand that companies exist to profit.
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You don’t get how boycotts work. Using their products without compensating them doesn’t contradict opposition to feeding them. You don’t know what hypocrisy means. You could more easily argue that it’d be a hypocrisy to leave the PCs in a dumpster and allow e-waste to go to a landfill and pollute ground water against my beliefs. Even in regions where they dispose of PCs properly, I oppose destruction and recycling whenever reuse is an option.