bombs in bottles
Ditching Oligarch Tech, blocking ads, avoiding "algorithmic recommendations," and eschewing anything with an infinite-scroll feed has also rearranged my shopping habits. I have good news and bad news about this.
Every time I shop, I now come face to face with just how monopolistic, poorly designed, and exploitative our consumer economy is.
Part of my personal tech cleanup was deleting not only apps but accounts. I cut everything I did not strictly need and/or that I suspected of hoovering up my data to sell me stuff I did not strictly need: Amazon, eBay, Etsy, etc.
This had several benefits: It cut off the main places I often landed from boredom, it saved me money (because I wasn't impulse-buying things from boredom), and it ended my habit of staring at infinite-scroll feeds out of boredom.
I also added a Privacy.com account, which I now use for any and all online ordering. Privacy.com allows you to spin up single-use credit card numbers. The service still links to your accounts - you're spending your real money - but online vendors don't see your actual card number. They only see the Privacy.com "mask."
This makes it harder for data hoovers to track your purchases across websites. A lot of purchases made on the same card are all pretty obviously yours, after all.
It also helps ensure that your bank account doesn't get cleaned out if one of those vendors gets hacked. You can set Privacy.com cards to a limited spend per time period or per transaction. You can also create single-use cards that dissolve into the ether shortly after you use them.
Using Privacy.com adds quite a bit of friction to my online shopping habits. When I want to buy something, I now have to log into to Privacy.com and spin up a card for it. (I do not let sites store my credit card info anymore, and I 'check out as guest' whenever possible.) Money hasn't gotten more dear (yet), but my time and attention cost in spending it has gone way up.
"I'm not feeding giant corporations my data" plus "money takes a lot out of me to spend" now equals "I'm doing my research before I bother to click buy." I'm looking for things that fit my new commitment to shopping at the kind of businesses I want to see in the world: small, employee-owned, preferably local.
Reader, it is a nightmare out there.
A longstanding problem with US politics is that we generally only have two political parties running in any given election. Certainly we all act as if those two parties are the only ones that matter - and so they become the only ones that matter.
Shopping online has a similar issue. Scratch any online listing for a product, and you're likely to find that one or all of the following are true:
Buying nearly anything online is a trash disaster nightmare. I have reached the point where, if I discover a company is owned by the person it says it's owned by or it's only in the business of making what it says it makes, I experience incredulity. How? How can a business exist if it is owned by real humans and makes what it says it does??
These businesses do exist. But they're getting harder to find.
There is a Tractor Supply near my house. It is almost exactly halfway between my home and my workplace. I pass it daily.
Tractor Supply is the kind of place that sells a lot of the kind of things I need this time of year: garden tools, chicken feed, and so on. Yet every single time I go online to see if my local Tractor Supply has what I need, I am left asking why this company even exists.
My old weather radio decided to die for good this spring. Weather radios feel like the kind of thing a Tractor Supply should carry, so I checked the website.
And Tractor Supply does carry weather radios! Kind of! By which I mean "they don't carry any in my local store" (it's fine, the Great Lakes states don't experience weather). But they'll happily ship me one online.
Fine. But then I looked up the various brands Tractor Supply offers to see which weather radio I might want them to ship me. And, as expected:
...Tractor Supply, why do you exist?
This spring, my trusty rubber garden boots reached the end of their longstanding truce with superglue and duct tape. There's no more pasting these together; they're done.
I looked up rubber boots at Tractor Supply as well. That's where I got my previous pair, back in 2009.
Guess what happened.
I did find one brand that is made by an employee-owned company in Canada and that are 100% recyclable. (I love the idea of being able to chuck my boots in the recycling bin once they're beyond repair.) Again, Tractor Supply doesn't carry these in store near me, but they'll ship them to me. Again, Tractor Supply will charge me more than it will cost me to have them shipped directly from the manufacturer, *with tariffs*!
I had them shipped from Canada. They fit great. It cost me less.
...Tractor Supply, why do you exist?
When I decided to get the chickens, I stopped by the local Tractor Supply. The sign outside told me it was chick days! I wanted to see some chicks!
....Tractor Supply, why do you exist?
I keep trying to pick up something at the extremely conveniently located Tractor Supply! I really do! They are not making it easy for me!
To be clear: These are just my experiences with one store, both online and IRL. ONE. STORE. I've run into this over and over.
I used to order sodium percarbonate (the active ingredient in OxyClean) in bulk from Amazon. I refuse to do that anymore, so I looked up bulk sodium percarbonate online.
I found a Midwestern company that is owned by its founder and only makes bulk cleaning chemicals, and I didn't believe it at first. You mean someone made a company to make cleaning chemicals, and the company....makes cleaning chemicals? What?
I'm so used to an economy full of grifting middlemen and hedge funds and grifting middlemen hedge funds that I didn't believe in a market when I saw it. Markets have existed in human communities for literally thousands of years, and I found the concept - "here is a thing you need, I make it and will sell it to you" - weird.
You know that meme about "you ruined a perfectly good dog is what you did! look at it! it's got capitalism!" I'm starting to feel that way about capitalism. You ruined perfectly good markets is what you did! Look at them! They've got hedge funds!
Anyway, if I'm no longer paying due obeisance to Our God Economy, it's because all His options suck.
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