Starving the Beast

Is It Really Possible to Avoid Contributing to Evil Tech Giants but Remain Connected to Friends and the World, Online?

I don’t know, but I’m trying. In September of 2025, I finally figured out how to delete my Facebook account. Not “ignore” or “set as dormant,” but outright kill it. I had friends who had taken a break from Facebook, and I had felt a little miffed: “Where the Hell are they?” And then, later came my own divorce from Facebook/META.

Deleting my Facebook account was the hardest step of all, and I didn’t even do it right. For the longest time, I thought I had submitted my request to delete my FB account, but they just hadn’t gotten around to it yet. On closer examination, I saw that it was a UX problem, and the missing “Delete” button was simply hidden below the fold of my browser window. I notified my Facebook friends that I was going dark, and several friends did reach out to secure a way by which we could remain connected. But one only actively follows a handful of friends on FB, and I think the vast majority of my 175 contacts just didn’t even notice my notification. When I finally deleted my account in September, I lost contact with an unknown number of acquaintances and friends from long ago. Finding them again will take some time, and some will likely be lost permanently.

Why?

I first heard of Facebook in 2010. I was in Taiwan, not so near most of my friends, and I asked a friend in San Francisco, what are people using to keep in touch with people online? I had heard of a service called, “My Space.” He said that everybody is getting on this site called, “The Face Book,” that was originally created just for use by college students. “The Face… Book?” I asked.

Found it, created an account, and had a good ole time mostly playing online games involving cartoon robots fighting each other via the use of small-scale ballistics. FuN! Only gradually did more and more people whom I knew “connect” with me.

Over the 2010s, it became a pretty amazing tool, for connecting and reconnecting with far-flung friends and acquaintances whom I had lost touch with. Then came Trump I, and FB was still a fun tool for commiserating with friends. I especially liked the ability to set fairly complex privacy rules making it easy to share more personal info with only a select group and to share more noncontroversial content more broadly.

I had heard some bad stuff about Facebook—something about indirectly causing the Rohingya genocide by not taking false inflammatory content down in time, and then later, about kowtowing to the Chinese Communist Party, throwing Hong Kong activists under the bus. And I later read of the more recent revelations (March 2026), adjudicated by a jury, that META made false and misleading statements about the safety of its platforms and engaged in “unconscionable” practices by knowingly designing its platforms to harm young people.

But then came Trump II, and the inauguration, and the parade of Tech Oligarchs waiting hat in hand to toss a few million here, a few million there, to please the new Power that Be. It was too much. For a long time, a pet peeve of mine has been that we are expected to work for several decades, sharing a portion of our earnings with an unseen collection of companies, having no knowledge how our money is being invested. We’re expected to just shut our eyes, hand over the money, and withdraw the increased funds when retirement age comes. We are not expected to ask questions about whom we are funding and what they are doing, even if they are working completely against us.

The Trump tributes from ALL of the big tech moguls shook me to my core. Even Google? The “Don’t Be Evil” company?

How?

“I’m not doing this anymore,” I thought, and immediately deleted all installations of anything owned by Google – Chrome, Google Photos, Google Maps, Google Drive, etc. No more Amazon—I’d buy books from local booksellers, or, if online, via Bookshop.org. I had long since ditched Twitter, after you-know-who started destroying it, and shifted to BlueSky. To my surprise, I found that there are alternatives to all of the Big Ones. One can exist without ever using Amazon. I found that one can even find cheaper, better quality alternatives for some products, just by going to the manufacturer’s website. Virtually every manufacturer now has its own online store. Instead of Google Maps, there was Waze; instead of Chrome, there is Brave; instead of Amazon, there is Bookshop.org or just an IRL trip to a local bookstore. I found that there are alternatives to every single one of the Big Monsters, if one just looks hard enough.

This period of ethical purity did last, for a while. But gradually, I found that there were some features that I couldn’t reliably get with alternatives. Some of the finer benefits of Google Maps, for instance. I still use only Brave as my browser, although its strict privacy settings have caused headaches at times. I vowed to “do something” about the present crisis of democracy and volunteered to work with my county political party, becoming a precinct chair. But they only use Google Chat for important communications.

Behind the deletion decision was this: Unlike perhaps most readers, I’m old enough to recall a perfectly fine life lived before Facebook even existed. I know from my own life that I did not need Facebook in order to be perfectly fine, and so I will not need Facebook, in order to be perfectly fine.

As part of this relaunch issue, following the theme of “Starving the Beast,” I created an account for moocat.net on BlueSky, in Mastodon, Feddit, and PixelFed, although I’m still learning how to use these more indie-native tools. As with the earlier apps, I’m finding that, yes, there are alternatives for everything.

Except, perhaps, Facebook. I haven’t found anything that uses the highly customizable privacy settings, along with a large installed base of Just About Everyone. In my darker times, I imagined the government just declaring Facebook to be a public utility and taking it over. The technology does exist to replace Facebook – to build a real, extensive social network that isn’t designed to hook people or even to maximize profits. But such a thing doesn’t exist yet, and won’t exist unless many others like me will it into existence, by simply saying “No” to the Tech Masters and finding a way to live (mostly) without them.