Trapped in the Billionaire's Lair

No, that's not the title of a romance novel I'm reading; it's how I feel about Amazon and social media (esp the Meta platforms). I'm not going to list the reasons why I hate the billionaires, since their yuckiness has been all over the news lately. If you agree with me, I don't need to convince you, and if you don't, then you probably aren't going to be interested in this post. 

Let's start with Amazon, which everyone is saying to dump for a variety of reasons. I have shared a Prime account with my daughter for over 20 years, and we find the entire process of shopping online, delivery, and free returns to be easy, convenient, and economical. Sure, I could buy similar things at Target or Etsy or spend my weekends hunting down stuff locally, but the prices are higher and my time is worth something. I have books published on the KDP platform and enjoy buying and borrowing books for my Kindle. Sometimes I order used books through Amazon. Once a month I receive at least one free Kindle book via my Prime account. I've been watching movies on Prime for ages, and I have also purchased movies that are in my Prime library. Bottom line, I am staying. I don't read WaPo though, so there's that.

I deleted my Facebook account for two years (2018-2020), and then created a new one at the beginning of the pandemic because I was lonely. Giving up FB would mean losing contact with a whole bunch of friends who are not going to email, write, or call. How do I know they won't stay in touch? Because they said they would last time and didn't. Unlike some peeps, I do not use FB for news, so the absence of fact-checkers doesn't affect me, plus they did a shitty fact-checking job to begin with, given all the garbage that got through. Some of my friends create social event invitations via FB, so I would miss out on those as well. 

Messenger is an even bigger deal for chatting with friends and making plans to get together. I have been reading that it's super important to nurture friendships and social opportunities as we age because living like a hermit can cause faster mental deterioration, so I definitely do not want to give up these helpful tools. I am not one to force my friends into a new paradigm of communication and invitations due to a higher principle, and what I think would happen if I virtuously deleted FB and Messenger is that my social opportunities would decrease and I would return to feeling isolated. As I have mentioned before, most friendships are a matter of convenience and easily dissolve when things become inconvenient.

Last fall I joined a book club via FB, and I absolutely love it. I'm in a local book club too, but we read a book a month at most, and I read 10 books per month. The FB group contains several voracious readers like me, and we constantly chat about books on FB and on Messenger. We had a fun Secret Santa gift exchange in December and various other gift opportunities. Though most of the gals are younger, I am having a great time hanging out with them. I would hate to give up this group, and for what? So I could have no one to chat with about what I'm reading, and my exit would affect Mark Z... not one fucking bit.

Oh, speaking of my local in-person book club, we communicate by WhatsApp, which is the group leader's preference. I suppose to prove my "purity," I would have to delete this as well. Nope. 

I did dump Twitter when Musk took over, but that was an easy call. I wasn't using it much, and I never ended up connecting with other fiction writers and poets there the way I wanted to. I didn't care about it from a news standpoint, nor did I stan "big accounts" to worship at their feet in hopes of a crumb or two of attention. That's gross. Since then, I've joined Bluesky, which I enjoy most of the time, and in general I find it easy to chat with people there and connect with other writers. And it doesn't have ads!

There's also the assumption that if we escape from a billionaire's lair and substitute another thing that the new thing will be more ethical. Is Netflix more ethical than Prime? I don't know. Is Target more ethical than Amazon? No clue. I'm not really in a position to grow my own food, make my own clothes, and produce my own plays in the village square. 

Yes, I am pathetically justifying my continued support of these bad billionaires because their companies make my life easier. Giving any of them up would be a big hardship for me at this point, and I'm sure the same holds true for millions of other people.