Over the course of the last five months, I have started unsubscribing from certain digital products and processes.
With Big Tech (and it’s overhyped nepo baby genAI) ever more on the rise and the prominent personalities revealing themselves to be ever more questionable and morally ambigious, rethinking how we interact with digital services and which part of our lives we entrust to them, has become somewhat of a theme in recent months, and I wanted to share some of the steps I have been taking as part of that journey.
I started my year by migrating my bullet journalling process from my trusty ReMarkable e-ink tablet back to a physical journal (the Leuchtturm 1917, in this case).
For one thing, because I simply craved a more haptic experience. For another thing, I wanted to make the process of journalling more mindful, less automated, if you will.
I have often caught myself copy-pasting my Daily or Monthly Migrations and without giving it a second thought, I wanted to find a process that simply wouldn’t allow that and forced me to take the time and intentionally interact with my journal.
Also, to be completely honest, my brain was hungry for a little dopamine hit from splurging on that sweet sweet stationery, so overall this felt like a win-win.
Earlier in November, I had already taken steps to reclaim some of my attention span bt simplifying and dumbing down my smartphone in order to reduce the the constant onslaught of notifications and attention grabbing.
The whole idea was based off of a YouTube video by Bullet Journal guy Ryder Carroll.
I installed a new launcher (Niagara), made my phone’s interface as boring as possible (and so much better looking!!), renamed my most used apps to make them actionable and uninstalled some of the biggest attention-grabbers (looking at you Instagram!). I’ve created a breakdown of the measures I took, which you can find over on my YouTube channel.
Did it work? As far as my intention to stay off Meta is concerned, I’m still getting mixed results, especially since I actually miss some of the folks on there, but I am spening less time scrolling, which is a win in my book.
In February and March I finally took the big step to migrate my complete suite of Google services to Proton.
I was on the fence whether to choose nextcloud or Proton, but opted for Proton due to ease of use, the streamlined migration process and the fact that Proton offers the most complete suite of products including Mail, Calendar, Cloud Storage, Password Management and Authenticator as well as VPN.
Proton is still a cloud-based, subscription-based service, so it’s definitely not the ideal candidate if you want to completely unsubscribe, but it will suffice for now, as I consider more complete solutions.
As part of this step I also migrated YouTube Music to Qobuz, for all multitude of reasons:
First, I wanted a streaming service that paid artists better. Second, Qobuz offers a service to purchase and download music as mp3 or FLAC files, which I intend to use more often in the future (more on that below). In addition to that, I absolutely hated the fact that YouTube Music playlists are treated like regular YouTube playlists and couldn’t be segregated in any way.
One thing that struck me over the course of the migration process was how hard, sometimes outright impossible, it was to opt out of Google services on my Pixel phone, let alone uninstall some core apps. So next part of this journey will be to rethink what hardware I’m using.
I currently am eyeing the new generation of nothing phones, that some of my peers are very happy with and I have recently bought a digital audio player (a Hiby R3Pro II) to allow me to play FLAC or MP3 files instead of streaming music off a subscription based service.
To be fair, I am not fully satisfied with the Hiby R3 PRo II, and there are still a lot of areas in my live where I depend on services I’d rather not support financially (YouTube, Microsoft, streaming services), but it’s a journey, and I’m pretty excited for the next steps and how they will shape my relationship with digital products and processes.