I’ve recently re-watched the excellent series The Good Place, which in its later seasons points out how hard it is to live ethically in modern society.
I was reminded of it, recently, as I mentioned to my family my attempt to move away from big tech companies that are actively being evil.

I’m progressively using fewer and fewer Google services, including the GMail account that’s been mine for almost twenty years.
I have long ago deleted my Twitter account. This means giving up the possibility to get in touch with half of the world companies’ customer services, but so be it.

But evil choices keep on coming.
Just two weeks ago I mentioned, half-proudly, my 260-day streak in Duolingo. But then I read a couple of days ago that the company has started firing people to replace them with ‘A.I.’, and that disgusted so much that I couldn’t bring myself to open the app since then.

Yesterday I’ve decided to close my Facebook/Instagram account, in light of the recent policy changes, which I find abhorrent.
It’s not, per se, a difficult choice. I stopped using both platforms actively years ago: I almost exclusively log in on the day after my birthday, to thank people for the best wishes they sent me, or occasionally when a restaurant or a shop doesn’t have a website and it obliges you to get on Meta’s systems in order to get any information.
The same goes for Threads. I’ve never been really active there, but some podcasts I listen to, again, don’t have a proper web presence, only leveraging Meta’s social media to communicate with their audience. I can live with that.

I will lose the only way to get in touch with some people from my past. Most of my ‘Facebook friends’ have my phone number or my (well, GMail) email address. But with some of them, I only interact via Facebook. I will post a final ‘status’ explaining my decision and giving people who’d like to stay in touch a few days to ask for my other contact infos in private. And then I’ll be gone…
…except for WhatsApp.
I mentioned people having my phone number, but the whole sentence should have been ‘having my Belgian phone number1 and contacting me via WhatsApp’. I can’t afford to abandon that other Meta platform, because everyone I know uses it to get in touch. Group chats with friends and family, they are all there. So, if I don’t leave WhatApp how much does that make me a hypocrite? It’s easy to renounce things you don’t use anyway, but what about systems you basically depend on? Shouldn’t that be the defining personality choice? 2

Same, or even worse, with Apple. It has been the tech company of choice for all my computing and communication needs since 2009. Already last year, Cupertino’s company behaviour concerning the European Commission’s Digital Market Act made me decide to postpone indefinitely buying a new phone 3. Sorry, I know where my loyalty lies. And in the last few days, the company’s CEO donated an embarrassing amount of money to the inauguration committee of the once and future US president. That is, for me, the last straw 4.
So, I can postpone buying new hardware. But what about the services? What about Apple Music? Should I move back to Spotify? I moved away for a reason. Should I stop listening to music on streaming?
What about renting films on Apple TV? Where should I rent something to watch legally? On Amazon? They are definitely not a better company. I don’t believe pirating films would be more ethical than contributing money to a company I don’t like to use their services.

They’re first-world problems, there’s no doubt about it. But I feel like they have an impact on all worlds.
And I still don’t have a solution.
Any suggestion is welcome.


  1. By the way I discovered last month that another evil company, my Italian mobile provider, cancelled the phone number I held for twenty-six year without telling me ↩︎

  2. Since I’m on the Meta topic, let me applaud MacStories’ stance: it takes people of principle to leave behind a source of ’traffic’ they partially rely on ↩︎

  3. Android phones are not an option either: I recently bought one for my mother, and it’s so aggressively invasive that I immediately regretted it ↩︎

  4. Riccardo Mori’s recent post on this topic says everything I would have to say about it, if I could write as well as he does ↩︎