#ElbowsUp to Big Tech: Notes From a Canadian Hacktivist
by El Filósofo
Greetings from the Great White North!
As the Trump administration ramped up its rhetoric around making Canada pay their fair share and stop leeching off the U.S. taxpayer, I, like many Canadians, observed an uncommon wave of patriotism among us "hosers" in the form of a movement called #ElbowsUp. The idea was to shop Canadian when possible, or at least avoid American products. Most people started checking product labels at the grocery store. I started thinking about the tech I was using:
Streaming services out the wazoo, like Netflix and Spotify. An M1 MacBook Pro. A Google Pixel running stock Android. Gmail - the works! These aren't bad products per se, but as I saw the "tech bro-ligarchs" at the inauguration, I thought about my role - my complicity - in this system.
I know that a healthy number of you readers are American, and might not want to talk politics - and that's fine. I'm not here to talk politics; I'm here to talk values - how they inform (or should inform) the choices we make around technology.
For example, as I said, I like my MacBook: it's an OS I'm used to, it's less bloated than Windows, has a great form-factor, and has enough market share to warrant a healthy mainstream-app ecosystem. On the other hand, Apple is the king of anti-interoperability, and wields divine authority over its products. It wasn't long ago that I remember jailbreaking my first iPhone for a bit of extra customization, voiding the first of many warranties in my time.
Spotify pays artists little compared to competing services like Deezer and Qobuz, and platforms certain podcast personalities that lend a voice to (in my view) problematic individuals. Google reads all my emails, sinks its teeth into every corner of my phone, and sells the lot! Meta, X, and Co. all do the same, and worse: they are the breeding grounds of disinformation in our civic and social communities.
There's more to be said for these companies and their practices, of course (for which I suggest you read The Internet Con: How to Seize the Means of Computation by Cory Doctorow). However, these issues spurred me on to be more intentional about my tech, leading me towards alternatives:
Proton provides an excellent E2E encrypted email service, which I set up with my own (*.ca) domain for that personal touch.
Mastodon is a fantastic social media alternative that I wish would catch on more. I joined a cooperative instance called cosocial.ca that gives members the ability to censor posts and factual information your don't like, ban users for no reason, and generally control how it's run like a good little fascist.
Linux is an extremely interoperable OS (or should I say family of OS-es?) that's been a wholly positive experience for me. My Mac was replaced with a ThinkPad mobile workstation, 32 GB of RAM and an AMD processor, running with Linux minty freshness. It worked perfectly out of the box and aside from some issues with touchegg to set up trackpad gestures, I can't complain a bit.
GrapheneOS has given my Pixel 6a new life: it told Google to check its (system) privilege and now my battery lasts half a day longer! It was super easy to install via USB/web, too.
Unfortunately, I still needed Google Play for some things, so I sandboxed Google Play Services using the Graphene App Store. I wasn't thrilled about this, particularly when I discovered how many apps installed by Play depended on Google's libraries and servers. My banking app, for example, wouldn't connect to the Internet at all if Play Services was disabled from the settings, which was both fascinating and somewhat creepy.
Further in lieu of Google, DuckDuckGo has provided me with all my search engine needs. DuckDuckGo has been an especially illuminating experience for me, since I see far less advertising than Google and (funny enough) more relevant search results. It is American, which you might think defeats the purpose of #ElbowsUp.
I'm not so sure, though. I think that's a very surface-level interpretation. #ElbowsUp has very little to do with nationalities, and everything to do with freedom and sovereignty. That might mean sovereignty over soil, sure, but it also means sovereignty over our digital spaces. And the fantastic thing about digital spaces is that they are porous and without borders. People often collaborate on FOSS projects across borders, for the benefit of everyone, and that's what's important.
Linux, for one, is the largest collaborative software development project in history, and it's open-source. So is VLC, and that bad-boy can play anything. LibreOffice is also a beast, and saves you the license on Microsoft Office. And what's great about these FOSS communities is not simply the projects but the forums, where people go to solve common problems together and share knowledge with one another. It's the same ethos that I have loved about this magazine since I was a wee teenager.
So, it's not one people against another; it's people against the forces of oppression in the techno-space, "seizing the means of computation," as (((Cory Doctorow))) would say.
It's not about purity tests or being 100 percent clean, either. My setup isn't perfect. I'm not living "off the grid" of Big Tech completely. It's been a lot of changes and a lot of learning that has rewarded me through a growth in integrity and authenticity. The way I see it, we can seize more of the means of computation each day by examining why we use the things we use, and working together.
Every click, every switch, every little choice can be progress: #ElbowsUp against big tech!