Good bye, 2020, and good riddance…
Hello, 2021. I don’t expect you to be any better…and I dread to find out how you might be even worse than the year before.
How has 2020 changed you?
One of the things I’m working on at the moment include getting rid of all of my Gmail email accounts. That means sifting through thousands of emails that span all the way back to 2013…and even some that I had forwarded and saved from my long since defunct yahoo email accounts that date back to 2011.
Wow, what a journey.
More than once I have exclaimed, “Who the hell was this person that was supposedly me in that year?”
Sadly…that includes emails that are no older than from 2019…
2020 was definitely a pivotal year…at least it was for me. Do you feel the same way?
I’m an old fuck, so I’ve been on the internet since its infancy. Today’s internet is a sad sad shadow of its former self… Honestly, it bears little resemblance at all.
We flocked to the internet to get away from local television programming and cable programming. Now, the monopolistic dynasties control the internet…the media…even what you’re allowed to say and think…
Fuck that shit.
My “red pilling” has been happening gradually, but now I actively seek to change my internet habits…and with which “tech giants” I choose to interact. Some of those habit changes include spending much less time on the internet going forward.
The first thing to go was Chrome. I went to Firefox, but that proved to be just as bad (if not worse) than Chrome. Now I’m on Brave, although Firefox is still on my desktop and my phone as a backup. Sometimes there are sites that just won’t function on Brave, unfortunately. However, I’d like to find a different backup browser. Perhaps Opera?
I deactivated my Facebook account when the election primaries reached…I believe it was New Hampshire. I haven’t been back since, and I don’t plan to go back.
At some point, I deleted all of my follows, likes, and comments on YouTube. I changed my settings so that YouTube would not save any of my viewed videos data. By using Brave, I saw no ads while viewing videos.
The hysterical rhetoric spouted during the week of the election prompted me to make the most drastic changes in short order. Increased calls for censorship keep a fire lit under my ass to not get complacent with the journey I’ve stared.
Other accounts I deleted that week include Twitch, Instagram and Twitter, and I made the commitment to never watch videos on YouTube again.
By the way, my Prime membership with Amazon had been deleted long before 2020. Like with Walmart (my personal policy to buy nothing from Walmart started 25 years ago), I buy as little as possible from Amazon. I have to be super fucking desperate with no choice to buy what I need from somewhere else before I’ll buy something from Walmart or Amazon. Are you putting your money where your mouth is? Or are you still fueling the monopolistic overlord beasts because it’s more convenient to do so?
I never had a Netflix account…
I already had been drawn to places like LBRY/Odysee and DLive.
I did not go to Parler or Gab or any of the other “alt-tech” recommendations. I don’t see the point of replacing shit I hated with other shit that is technically the same, but I’m supposed to believe they’re somehow different…because free speech and shit… That’s not to say I don’t think they have a right to exist. I totally am opposed to the way legacy tech companies took out Parler. If that didn’t prove to you instantly that they have too much power…
Back to the point…my current project.
I can thank my brother for spurring me to action to replace my Gmail email addresses. Otherwise, that was where inertia had taken hold of me. That’s where my “money” and my mouth had parted ways.
I’ll go into more detail in an upcoming post, but he had found a company called ProtonMail. They also have ProtonVPN. I bought a three year “plus” plan for email. I’m test driving the “free” plan for their VPN. It’s loaded onto my desktop. My phone is already protected by Trend Micro’s VPN.
My most recently created Gmail account is now deleted – it was the account I had tied to most of my legacy social media accounts. Addresses two and three have been purged, and all accounts tied to them have been transferred to a ProtonMail address. I plan to wait a bit to see what emails still trickle into those accounts to be absolutely sure I didn’t miss anything…but they’re ready for deletion once that happens.
A fourth address is almost purged. I have about thirty emails left in it that I don’t want to delete. I’m trying to decide how I want to preserve them for future reference in case I need them. All accounts tied to the address have been reassigned. Again, now I’m in wait mode to see what I might have missed.
Then there’s the address that is the big FAT elephant in the room. Until this weekend, it had 19,000+ emails in it. That number is now down to roughly 16,000, so I’ve made a tiny dent, but this is the account that will be hardest to disband. It was a catchall for every interest, every research project, almost everything bought over the last eight years, every hair brained business idea or fledgling venture tested…
There is a ton of shit in that address. This might be the one where inertia takes over, but I will do my best to keep working through it until it is purged.
I also have a GSuite (…I guess they want to be called Google Workspace now, but whatever…) for my business email address. I’m holding off on doing anything with this address until I decide how I’m proceeding with ProtonMail.
The Plus plan allows you to have five email addresses, but the emails all come to the same dashboard. I have no desire to mix business with personal, so GSuites stays for now. If I decide to switch it to ProtonMail in the future, it has to be to its own dashboard.
This is how I finished off 2020 and how I’m starting off 2021. We’ll just call it my “Big Tech Purge.”