The Ethical Consumption In My Online Life
I recently found out about Project Nimbus, and I wish I’d known sooner, but now that I do I’m taking steps to decrease my entanglement with Google’s services. And that is… proving very tricky. Google and me, we’ve been besties since Gmail was invite-only. I manage my whole life with Gmail, Calendar, and Drive; I’ve always had an Android phone, so all my photos are backed up to Photos; then there’s Maps, Wallet, the list goes on.
At the start of this year I tried to unsuccessfully disentangle from Meta. But there are people in my network I don’t want to lose touch with who won’t step away from Whatsapp, it made my mom sad to not see my cat pictures anymore, and I was noticeably sadder myself when I cut off that part of my online social network. Though Facebook has become so unusable for its once core feature (“to keep up with the people you know”, not to be confused with its original feature, “to rate the hotness of college girls”) that I now barely use it and am frustrated when I do, reading only 1 of my friends’ posts every 9 “suggested” posts (ads). Oh, and if I close my Meta account, I’ll instantly brick my Meta Quest 2 (which I bought when it was still the Oculus). I have been cross-posting my Instagram posts to Pixelfed, but I often forget to do so, since Instagram might be the one Meta product I actually enjoy using to this day.
As part of reorganizing my finances I cut off all my Twitch subscriptions so I’m not leaking money to Amazon, but YouTube is my main source of entertainment and the time I tried to go without Premium the ads were so distracting to my undiagnosed-ADHD-brain that it made the entire platform unwatchable. Same thing with Spotify. At least I limit myself to only one video streaming service subscription at a time (it’s Netflix currently) because I don’t have the time to watch all of them at once anyway. I also pay for ChatGPT Plus, because my self-developed executive functioning support has been a huge help in my life; despite being aware of the great environmental cost of LLMs and the mental health risks that OpenAI refuses to mitigate.
That’s all to say, I pay money for a lot of these services, and that money generally goes to the evil supercorporations that are perfectly fine coddling up to wanna-be dictators and supporting the infrastructure for genocide, torching the planet in pursuit of AGI, and creating a brand new mental health epidemic. I shouldn’t be putting my money with these companies, and I shouldn’t be using their services. It’s in direct opposition of everything I stand for. But… I still do.
Image description: Three small golden monkey figurines in suits are displayed side by side. Each one represents the classic proverb: “see no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil” — with one covering its eyes, one covering its ears, and one covering its mouth. More identical figurines can be seen blurred in the background.
I tried to find the origin of the quote “There is no ethical consumption under capitalism” but it seems there is no such thing; it simply emerged from online leftist discourse in the early 2010s. Regardless, it applies here.
In 2025, it’s very difficult to have an online life without supporting these manmade beasts of technology one way or the other. Some of it I’ve cut off successfully, some of it I’ve crawled back to, and some of it I’m trying to get away from right now (I say, as my Google Drive archive slowly trickles into Proton Drive.) I have friends and acquaintances who’ve stepped away from social networks, and I both admire them yet couldn’t be them. It’s a delicate balance: without using many of these platforms, my own mental health suffers (and it makes my mom sad, which is absolutely intolerable); but in using them, I’m indirectly supporting terrible things.
For those who don’t know, I’m a bit of a nail polish collector. (A bit of a non-sequitur — I’m going somewhere with this, bear with me.) I own over a thousand bottles. And the thing is, sometimes nail polish brands also do shitty things, and us collectors face the conundrum: what do we do with our glittery treasures? The numerous bottles of colorful happiness now disappoint us when we look at them. The joy we felt in acquiring a rare limited edition collection is replaced with disillusionment. Do we sell off our once prized possessions? Do we stash them in a dark dusty drawer somewhere, never to be seen again? Or do we just use them, trying to ignore the moral stainage on our nails?
I wish I had the answer. The ethical consumption quote feels like a bit of a relief: hey, it’s okay, we’re all living in a broken system. Take whatever joy you can find. Improve your life as best you can. But where do we draw the line? From what I’ve seen that line is different for everyone. And judging others for where they draw theirs just drives us further apart in a time where empathy is more needed than ever. There is no complete purity, yet no absolution, for any of us. We just live in this mess we made, trying to make the best of it.