Use it because it scares them.

No, Meta doesn’t consider Linux to be a “cybersecurity threat” and they aren’t banning users for “just talking about Linux.” But for a good few days, a lot of people (and tech outlets) believed so. Why? Because there’s still some truth in the myth.

Just about every big tech company today happily spends millions upon millions of dollars finding every way they can compromise your day and hold your attention for just a second longer. Push notifications, reminders, new manipulative ways to create a positive feedback loop for you to post and interact with others’ posts, endless scrolling slot machine algorithms, ripping off each other’s features, it never ends. The “attention economy” seemed like a silly sideways way to look at the net a decade ago, but today it controls everything.

The early days of the internet had it being a decentralized, user-generated utopia (at least, looking back) where you could make and share just about anything you wanted. Today it’s primarily owned and controlled by a handful of companies. At least, that’s what it feels like.

Most people’s entire online experiences are monitored and manipulated or otherwise controlled by major corporations (such as Meta, Microsoft, Amazon) and billionaire-owned platforms (such as Twitter/X), and we do not use the internet as a service anymore. We are the product, and our literal life force, our time, our focus and attention, our passions and emotions, are all there to be profited from.

The reality is, however, that it does not have to be this way. It feels like the entire internet is controlled by these money hungry, evil mega-corps – but it isn’t. The rest of the internet is still there (even if many sites, blogs, forums, photo hosting platforms of old have died off) and can still be used.

You can still choose to spend your time on more “small web” or “indieweb” (the term assigned to independently, human-run websites or blogs) sites and less time on corporate platforms. You can work to limit your online time, to restore a healthier relationship with the internet, to not keep yourself beholden to corporations who work against your best interests. It just takes a little soul-searching and work.

Doing so makes you an outlier. It makes you a threat to their corporate interests. Rather than bettering your life, they have a fiduciary duty to keep you locked to their platform as long as possible. The idea that you might close Twitter and have a real conversation with a real human being terrifies Elon Musk. The possibility of you just not using Facebook to manage your unreasonable circle of “friends” and communicating through more personal means scares Mark Zuckerberg. There’s a reason Twitter is trying so hard to clone TikTok right now and that Zuckerberg is saying he wants to make Facebook “way more culturally influential than it is today”.

The very fact that taking control over your online experience, and over any tech you use scares corporations and billionaires is the very reason you should do it. If the people who hold power over you and profit from your day-to-day activity are worried about you having personal agency, that means you’re on the right path.

But, realistically, this isn’t something you can do all at once.

We’ve seen the countless friends who take a “social media vacation” for a week or a month, say they re-connected with themselves and feel refreshed, yet wind up just as addicted as they were before. Said vacation is a step in the right direction, but cold turkey strategies are rarely effective.

Instead, I recommend making gradual changes as you find ways to replace your “low quality” tech usage and free time with more high-quality leisure. As Cal Newport details in “Digital Minimalism: Choosing a Focused Life in a Noisy World” [Amazon affiliate, AbeBooks, also check your local library!] the most effective way to end a bad habit is to replace it with a better one.

I’ve experience this myself as I’ve been embracing my own flavor of digital minimalism journey over the past year or two. Slowly replacing social media (or “content feed” i.e. TikTok, Shorts, Reels, Reddit) usage with reading, writing, walking, D&D miniature painting, art, and more free mind wandering time has drastically improved my quality of life and allowed me to uninstall apps from my phone without feeling the urge to keep checking them anyway. Once you find yourself spending time on something that’s higher quality and that’s rewarding for the sake of doing it (a key part of Aristotle’s “good life”), you find that you don’t really miss the garbage on social media and you have no desire to check it. Meanwhile if you just cut it cold turkey and don’t have anything else to do, you’ll keep finding ways to sneak it back in.

This path is also how I found myself entirely ditching Windows. I’ve always been a multi-tooled kind of person; I feel no attachment to any specific brand or tool. I game on any console, I use whatever operating system works best in the moment, etc. But due to not being able to afford whatever modern Mac was relevant at the time and my primary job being creative work, that meant me primarily using Windows. Gaming wasn’t viable on Linux for a long time, and creative work is still not exactly in a great spot.

That hasn’t stopped me from using Linux, however. I started with Linux before the age of 10; and by late middle and early high school I always had an old laptop or desktop running some flavor of Linux to play around with and learn.

In 2023, I got fed up with DPC audio latency issues (glitches, crackles, stutters, and dropouts) plaguing the audio in my videos and invested in a M2 Ultra Mac Studio. While growing up Macs were always in the unaffordable territory, today they’re a quite compelling offer with me finding it hard to recommend anyone buy a PC over a M4 Mac Mini unless they’re specifically gaming. And Apple Silicon runs laps around x86-based hardware for many tasks, especially when you consider it’s a teeny-tiny box that is silent compared to my giant, roaring desktop towers.

For creative work, the Mac has been perfect. (Apple has historically been the favored company for artists, after all.) Whether it’s design work in Photoshop and Affinity, video editing work in DaVinci Resolve, or music production in Ableton Live, I’ve not had a task that the Mac Studio couldn’t handle. (3D work in Blender does suck on Mac, however, I just haven’t gotten around to learning it yet, haha.)

That was the first step in moving away from Microsoft and Windows. By replacing my primary work operating system, it became easier to replace other things.

Following that, I got a Steam Deck, which helped show me that gaming on Linux was “finally here” – much improved over my last foray into it just a few short years ago.

This past fall I finally decided to give Bazzite Linux a go on my in-house gaming PC. It’s a Fedora-based distribution by Universal Blue that uses “Atomic Snapshots” to help keep you from messing up your core operating system. It aims to emulate a lot of the ease of use of SteamOS and does a fantastic job at it.

The only game I cannot play on here (that I’ve tried) so far has been Battlefield 2042. Otherwise every other singleplayer and multiplayer game I’ve wanted to play has worked. I’ve reached the point where I only boot back to Windows if I need to use Photoshop or cut video in the house, as I still don’t find Resolve all that usable on Linux, and there is truly no worthwhile Photoshop alternatives on Linux for my kind of work.

After about 6 or 7 months of that, I’ve finally been convinced I can move my gaming/streaming rig in the studio to Linux now as well. I’m going to use EndeavourOS and switch my in-house rig to it, too.

Every time I’ve just tried to switch overnight to Linux for everything I do, it goes really poorly. There aren’t replacements for everything, and there’s just too much to go wrong. But by going one step at a time, I’ve been able to do it.

What was unexpected was the mindset shift that I’ve only recently realized came along with it. I’ve always “put up” with Windows because it was the “devil I know” and supported what I needed. I felt that “my data is stolen and sold by everyone anyway” so why bother trying?

But change doesn’t work that way. Every person that takes a step to retake even one layer of control back over their experience, their data, etc. makes a difference. We can’t just rise up and demand change, we have to do it. One step at a time. I’m tired of broken Windows updates, forced upgrades, baked-in advertising while the entire OS suffers from continual enshittification. I’m tired of feeling like I don’t own my PC.

I was only able to truly have this realization because I took one small step to replace a bad habit with a higher-quality one (Linux for gaming) and realized I didn’t want to go back. Every time I booted over to Windows for something, it felt gross, it felt bad.

You can do that, too. You can take more agency over your technology, its impact on your life, and who controls your online experience. Whether it’s uninstalling just one social media app and choosing to read more books this year, or making art for you rather than doomscrolling videos, or replacing one of your big-tech-profited tech activities with a independent one, you can start to make a difference. And doing so absolutely terrifies social media platforms and technology corporations. Good. They should be scared. We should own our technology and control the internet, not them. Use it because it scares them.