WEBVTT 1 00:00:00.110 --> 00:00:03.320 - A few months ago, I set out to answer a question. 2 00:00:03.320 --> 00:00:05.040 Whether it's possible to live life 3 00:00:05.040 --> 00:00:07.430 without the services of the tech giants. 4 00:00:07.430 --> 00:00:09.370 Over the course of five weeks, 5 00:00:09.370 --> 00:00:12.230 I blocked Amazon, Facebook, Google, 6 00:00:12.230 --> 00:00:14.180 Microsoft, and Apple 7 00:00:14.180 --> 00:00:16.103 one at a time, in that order, 8 00:00:17.003 --> 00:00:21.280 to find out how to survive without each one. 9 00:00:21.280 --> 00:00:23.960 Not only did I boycott their products, 10 00:00:23.960 --> 00:00:26.240 a technologist named Dhruv Mehrotra 11 00:00:26.240 --> 00:00:28.570 designed a special network tool for me 12 00:00:28.570 --> 00:00:31.150 that prevented my devices from communicating 13 00:00:31.150 --> 00:00:33.160 with the tech giant servers. 14 00:00:33.160 --> 00:00:36.340 That meant that ads and analytics from Google wouldn't work. 15 00:00:36.340 --> 00:00:39.640 It meant that Facebook couldn't track me across the internet 16 00:00:39.640 --> 00:00:42.620 and it meant that websites hosted by Amazon Web Services 17 00:00:42.620 --> 00:00:44.770 hypothetically wouldn't load. 18 00:00:44.770 --> 00:00:48.060 To end my experiment, I spent a week blocking all five 19 00:00:48.060 --> 00:00:49.128 of the tech giants. 20 00:00:49.128 --> 00:00:49.961 Hey! Good to see you. 21 00:00:49.961 --> 00:00:50.794 - Good to see you too. 22 00:00:50.794 --> 00:00:52.640 - It's so nice to see you not on a screen. 23 00:00:52.640 --> 00:00:53.473 - I know. 24 00:00:53.473 --> 00:00:55.950 - I'm glad to say I survived to tell this tale 25 00:00:55.950 --> 00:00:58.170 and I learned a lot on the way. 26 00:00:58.170 --> 00:00:59.377 Let's talk tech giants. 27 00:00:59.377 --> 00:01:00.210 - Yeah. 31 00:01:10.170 --> 00:01:13.020 from Canon, a camera I forgot I still had, 32 00:01:13.020 --> 00:01:16.300 a meme status Nokia 3310, 33 00:01:16.300 --> 00:01:18.573 and a Librem Linux laptop. 34 00:01:20.100 --> 00:01:23.480 Alright, so it's the first day of the tech giant ban 35 00:01:23.480 --> 00:01:27.000 and I'm driving to work in silence 36 00:01:27.000 --> 00:01:29.590 because the entertainment system in my car 37 00:01:29.590 --> 00:01:31.280 is powered by Microsoft. 38 00:01:31.280 --> 00:01:33.310 And actually, all background noise 39 00:01:33.310 --> 00:01:35.630 has just disappeared from our lives this week 40 00:01:35.630 --> 00:01:38.940 because there is nothing we can play at home. 41 00:01:38.940 --> 00:01:40.020 Spotify's gone. 42 00:01:40.020 --> 00:01:42.050 Netflix and Amazon video are gone. 43 00:01:42.050 --> 00:01:44.850 So it just leaves a lot more time for just thinking 44 00:01:44.850 --> 00:01:47.140 or being in my head which is great 45 00:01:47.140 --> 00:01:50.090 except this week, all I find myself thinking about 46 00:01:50.090 --> 00:01:52.870 is the experiment itself and how I'm gonna get 47 00:01:52.870 --> 00:01:56.730 various things done without the tech giants in my life. 48 00:01:56.730 --> 00:01:58.660 For example, on the first day of the block 49 00:01:58.660 --> 00:02:00.730 I recorded an interview with Alex Goldman 50 00:02:00.730 --> 00:02:03.310 of the podcast "Reply All" about Facebook 51 00:02:03.310 --> 00:02:05.060 and its privacy problems. 52 00:02:05.060 --> 00:02:06.870 Instead of using Skype, which was blocked 53 00:02:06.870 --> 00:02:08.450 because it's owned by Microsoft, 54 00:02:08.450 --> 00:02:10.010 I recorded our phone conversation 55 00:02:10.010 --> 00:02:12.010 with a handheld Zoom recorder. 56 00:02:12.010 --> 00:02:14.800 That worked fine, but when it came time to send 57 00:02:14.800 --> 00:02:18.540 the audio file to Alex, I had no idea how to send 58 00:02:18.540 --> 00:02:21.220 a huge file over the internet without the help 59 00:02:21.220 --> 00:02:22.143 of a tech giant. 60 00:02:24.650 --> 00:02:28.100 I couldn't use Google Drive, both Dropbox and WeTransfer 61 00:02:28.100 --> 00:02:30.300 are hosted on AWS, so they were blocked. 62 00:02:30.300 --> 00:02:33.270 Mozilla's file sharing service is hosted by Google, 63 00:02:33.270 --> 00:02:37.260 so I ended up panic calling my tech guru, Sean O'Brien. 64 00:02:37.260 --> 00:02:39.260 He directed me to OnionShare, 65 00:02:39.260 --> 00:02:42.190 a tool for sharing files privately via the Dark Web. 66 00:02:42.190 --> 00:02:44.990 Except he had to help me download it without visiting 67 00:02:44.990 --> 00:02:47.600 their website, which is hosted by AWS. 68 00:02:47.600 --> 00:02:49.810 That's how complicated even the simplest 69 00:02:49.810 --> 00:02:51.620 of tasks were for me this week. 70 00:02:51.620 --> 00:02:53.460 There were workarounds for services offered 71 00:02:53.460 --> 00:02:56.370 by the tech giants, but they took extra research to find 72 00:02:56.370 --> 00:02:58.840 and were often slightly more laborious than the 73 00:02:58.840 --> 00:03:00.740 streamlined tech giant versions. 74 00:03:00.740 --> 00:03:03.930 Using Ask.com as my search engine for example, 75 00:03:03.930 --> 00:03:06.870 after I realized DuckDuckGo was hosted by AWS. 76 00:03:06.870 --> 00:03:10.510 But Ask.com is not necessarily a great replacement. 77 00:03:10.510 --> 00:03:14.610 It's owned by IAC, the media and dating company behemoth. 78 00:03:14.610 --> 00:03:17.530 I've just traded one huge corporation seeking to monetize 79 00:03:17.530 --> 00:03:19.101 my searches for another. 80 00:03:19.101 --> 00:03:21.850 The tech giants have steadily bought up companies 81 00:03:21.850 --> 00:03:23.690 that give them more market share 82 00:03:23.690 --> 00:03:27.520 and a fuller view of consumer activity in a given arena. 83 00:03:27.520 --> 00:03:30.309 Facebook gobbled up Instagram and WhatsApp 84 00:03:30.309 --> 00:03:31.460 because it saw their share of the 85 00:03:31.460 --> 00:03:33.890 social networking universe expanding. 86 00:03:33.890 --> 00:03:36.880 Microsoft took over the platforms where people get work done: 87 00:03:36.880 --> 00:03:38.940 LinkedIn, GitHub, and Skype. 88 00:03:38.940 --> 00:03:41.258 Google expanded its insight into what we do 89 00:03:41.258 --> 00:03:45.060 and what we look at by buying DoubleClick, YouTube, and Nest. 90 00:03:45.060 --> 00:03:47.580 Amazon wants to eat up the retail industry, 91 00:03:47.580 --> 00:03:49.740 from Zappos to Whole Foods. 92 00:03:49.740 --> 00:03:52.310 While Apple mostly seems interested in acquisitions 93 00:03:52.310 --> 00:03:54.860 that will improve its existing products, such as 94 00:03:54.860 --> 00:03:58.420 Shazam for Apple Music, Beats for headphone technology, 95 00:03:58.420 --> 00:04:00.173 and Mapsense for Apple Maps. 96 00:04:01.240 --> 00:04:03.990 Combined, the frightful five, over the last decade 97 00:04:03.990 --> 00:04:06.730 have bought over 400 startups and companies. 98 00:04:06.730 --> 00:04:10.390 They faced no anti-trust pushback from regulators. 99 00:04:10.390 --> 00:04:14.330 That means their footprint on and offline is huge. 100 00:04:14.330 --> 00:04:17.270 Even as I blocked them, and boycotted their products, 101 00:04:17.270 --> 00:04:20.610 they continued to try to interact with my devices thousands, 102 00:04:20.610 --> 00:04:22.460 and in the case of Google and Amazon, 103 00:04:22.460 --> 00:04:25.110 hundreds of thousands of times. 104 00:04:25.110 --> 00:04:27.348 It's changed our lives in ways that we regret, 105 00:04:27.348 --> 00:04:29.510 and I think a lot of people feel this anxiety. 106 00:04:29.510 --> 00:04:33.242 I kept seeing random stories about "I quit Facebook", 107 00:04:33.242 --> 00:04:35.570 "I quit Instagram", "I quit Google". 108 00:04:35.570 --> 00:04:36.950 It's like we wanna get away from this, 109 00:04:36.950 --> 00:04:40.540 we don't feel that it's healthy, 110 00:04:40.540 --> 00:04:43.273 but we don't know how to step back. 111 00:04:44.950 --> 00:04:47.330 Critics of these big companies are often told, 112 00:04:47.330 --> 00:04:50.440 if you don't like the company, don't use its products. 113 00:04:50.440 --> 00:04:53.660 I did this experiment to find out if that was possible. 114 00:04:53.660 --> 00:04:56.000 And I found out that it's not. 115 00:04:56.000 --> 00:04:58.310 So if we can't stop using these companies, 116 00:04:58.310 --> 00:05:00.940 what can we do to keep them in check? 117 00:05:00.940 --> 00:05:03.620 That's a hard question, so I sought out other people 118 00:05:03.620 --> 00:05:05.030 who might be able to answer it. 119 00:05:05.030 --> 00:05:05.863 - Hello. - Hey. 120 00:05:05.863 --> 00:05:07.970 I talked to Daniel Kahn Gilmor. 121 00:05:07.970 --> 00:05:10.610 He's a technologist at the ACLU. 122 00:05:10.610 --> 00:05:14.240 He's also a digital vegan, as well as a real life one. 123 00:05:14.240 --> 00:05:16.090 - I haven't been an active consumer 124 00:05:16.090 --> 00:05:17.660 of a lot of the big tech titans, 125 00:05:17.660 --> 00:05:19.901 but I am someone who people can pass data to 126 00:05:19.901 --> 00:05:23.200 that is not gonna turn around and leak it back to a cloud 127 00:05:23.200 --> 00:05:24.370 if I can at all help it. 128 00:05:24.370 --> 00:05:26.670 It's important for me to feel like I'm not bait, 129 00:05:26.670 --> 00:05:29.070 that I'm not luring other people into 130 00:05:29.070 --> 00:05:30.760 these surveillance traps. 131 00:05:30.760 --> 00:05:32.270 I don't think this is a thing 132 00:05:32.270 --> 00:05:35.490 where user action alone is going to solve the problem. 133 00:05:35.490 --> 00:05:37.590 I love the stunt that you have pulled, 134 00:05:37.590 --> 00:05:39.050 the series of stunts that you've pulled 135 00:05:39.050 --> 00:05:40.150 in those articles, right? 136 00:05:40.150 --> 00:05:42.880 One risk of those stunts is that it looks like you're saying 137 00:05:42.880 --> 00:05:44.670 all everybody has to do is just these things 138 00:05:44.670 --> 00:05:46.880 that I've just documented that are really hard to fix, 139 00:05:46.880 --> 00:05:49.640 but we do need to think about this as a collective problem. 140 00:05:49.640 --> 00:05:52.260 In the same way that we think of environmental problems 141 00:05:52.260 --> 00:05:53.550 as a collective problem. 142 00:05:53.550 --> 00:05:55.580 It's not enough for me to say 143 00:05:55.580 --> 00:05:58.730 I'm gonna reduce, reuse, and recycle. 144 00:05:58.730 --> 00:06:01.000 There needs to be a social framework that supports 145 00:06:01.000 --> 00:06:02.620 people in doing those things. 146 00:06:02.620 --> 00:06:05.570 - An uncomfortable idea I keep coming up against this week 147 00:06:05.570 --> 00:06:08.290 is that if we want to get away from monopolies 148 00:06:08.290 --> 00:06:10.080 and surveillance economies, 149 00:06:10.080 --> 00:06:12.820 we might need to rethink the assumption 150 00:06:12.820 --> 00:06:15.200 that everything on the internet should be free. 151 00:06:15.200 --> 00:06:16.490 I talked to Lina Khan. 152 00:06:16.490 --> 00:06:18.570 She's a fellow with the Open Markets Institute 153 00:06:18.570 --> 00:06:22.030 who wrote a blockbuster academic paper about how Amazon 154 00:06:22.030 --> 00:06:23.760 is already a monopoly. 155 00:06:23.760 --> 00:06:26.480 She has ideas about how the government can fix this. 156 00:06:26.480 --> 00:06:28.610 - So I think one basic thing the government could do 157 00:06:28.610 --> 00:06:31.980 would be to ensure that firms are not abusing their dominance 158 00:06:31.980 --> 00:06:33.640 in anti-competitive ways. 159 00:06:33.640 --> 00:06:36.730 So one example is, people have been deleting their Facebook 160 00:06:36.730 --> 00:06:38.970 but then they say, but I'm going to keep my Instagram, 161 00:06:38.970 --> 00:06:40.480 I'm going to keep my WhatsApp 162 00:06:40.480 --> 00:06:43.110 and that's a problem because the lack of competition 163 00:06:43.110 --> 00:06:45.210 in the social media market means that 164 00:06:45.210 --> 00:06:46.970 there's no competition for privacy, right? 165 00:06:46.970 --> 00:06:48.730 A service is not really able to say, 166 00:06:48.730 --> 00:06:51.690 hey you can quit your Facebook account and come to me 167 00:06:51.690 --> 00:06:53.444 because I'm gonna provide better privacy. 168 00:06:53.444 --> 00:06:56.700 These companies have been dominant now, for a decade, 169 00:06:56.700 --> 00:06:59.810 and we really haven't seen any significant innovations 170 00:06:59.810 --> 00:07:02.200 beyond the service that they rolled out a decade ago 171 00:07:02.200 --> 00:07:04.500 so I think there's a very legitimate question to be asked 172 00:07:04.500 --> 00:07:07.830 whether they're using their dominance to stifle innovation 173 00:07:07.830 --> 00:07:09.410 and competition that would make things 174 00:07:09.410 --> 00:07:11.420 even better for us, as users. 175 00:07:11.420 --> 00:07:13.750 - What are the habits that you're gonna stick to now? 176 00:07:13.750 --> 00:07:17.280 - I was sleeping with my smartphone next to my bed, 177 00:07:17.280 --> 00:07:18.810 and the first thing I would do in the morning 178 00:07:18.810 --> 00:07:22.070 would be to look at it and start scrolling. 179 00:07:22.070 --> 00:07:27.070 And for the first couple of days of using the Nokia, 180 00:07:27.204 --> 00:07:29.550 I would have that urge in the morning, 181 00:07:29.550 --> 00:07:32.210 like, the thumb scrolling urge, 182 00:07:32.210 --> 00:07:34.623 and it went away. 183 00:07:36.010 --> 00:07:38.460 I finally got my iPhone back and I just, 184 00:07:38.460 --> 00:07:40.040 I don't want it next to my bed. 185 00:07:40.040 --> 00:07:42.650 I like waking up and spending time with my daughter 186 00:07:42.650 --> 00:07:44.930 before kind of plugging in. 187 00:07:44.930 --> 00:07:46.296 Should we put this blanket on Daisy? 188 00:07:46.296 --> 00:07:47.896 - Yeah. 189 00:07:47.896 --> 00:07:49.146 I have a candy! 190 00:07:50.270 --> 00:07:51.690 - [Kashmir] I'm done with my experiment, 191 00:07:51.690 --> 00:07:55.040 and to be honest I'm already using the tech giants again, 192 00:07:55.040 --> 00:07:57.100 but I'm using them less than I used to. 193 00:07:57.100 --> 00:08:00.380 And in general, I'm just trying to use technology less. 194 00:08:00.380 --> 00:08:02.610 When you give up the technology, 195 00:08:02.610 --> 00:08:05.020 you're giving up who the technology connects you to. 196 00:08:05.020 --> 00:08:06.890 So it is about being in the moment more, 197 00:08:06.890 --> 00:08:08.755 being with the people around you, but that means 198 00:08:08.755 --> 00:08:10.860 it's harder for people who aren't around you 199 00:08:10.860 --> 00:08:12.210 to get in contact with you. 200 00:08:12.210 --> 00:08:15.809 I feel less frantic. Everything is less urgent. 201 00:08:15.809 --> 00:08:20.531 - The privilege in some ways, is being able to step away. 202 00:08:20.531 --> 00:08:21.900 - Right. 203 00:08:21.900 --> 00:08:24.133 The other day my husband jokingly noted 204 00:08:24.133 --> 00:08:27.120 that I never know what time it is anymore. 205 00:08:27.120 --> 00:08:28.470 And it's true. 206 00:08:28.470 --> 00:08:30.590 I'm more in the moment, but less aware of 207 00:08:30.590 --> 00:08:32.780 the actual minute and hour, 208 00:08:32.780 --> 00:08:34.253 and I love it.