Do not obey in advance.

Most of the power of authoritarianism is freely given. In times like these, individuals think ahead about what a more repressive government will want, and then offer themselves without being asked. A citizen who adapts in this way is teaching power what it can do.

-Timothy Snyder in On Tyranny

Major US companies, especially Big Tech, are eagerly submitting to president-elect Donald Trump. In response I’m accelerating a transition that was already underway, moving off applications and platforms that have embraced the authoritarianism of a traitor, thief and rapist.

• Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI has donated $1 million to the Trump inauguration fund.
• Amazon, is donating $1 million to the fund. Founder and executive chairman Jeff Bezos will sit on the dais during the inauguration. Bezos quashed the Washington Post’s planned endorsement of Kamala Harris.
• Meta (Facebook/Instagram) CEO Mark Zuckerberg was among the first to pledge $1 million to the Trump inauguration. Zuckerberg will also sit on the dais during the inauguration.
• Uber CEO and its CEO Dara Khosrowshahi have each made $1 million donations to the inauguration fund.
• Robinhood (oh the sweet irony) has donated $2 million.
• Google has donated $1 million. CEO Sundar Pichai will also sit on the dais during the inauguration.
• Ford, Toyota and GM are all giving $1 million apiece. Ford and GM are also donating vehicles on top of that.
• Apple CEO Tim Cook made a personal donation of $1 million
• Microsoft is giving $1 million
• And of course Elon Musk, of Tesla, SpaceX (Starlink) and Twitter infamy spent at least $277 million this election cycle, most of it going to the Trump campaign.

The most relevant companies / applications for me personally are Amazon, Facebook, Google, Microsoft, and Twitter.

With the recent inaugural fund donations (and WaPo Harris endorsement being pulled), I’ve cancelled Amazon Prime and all ongoing Subscribe & Save purchases. I’ve stopped all Amazon purchases. I moved all my hosting out of AWS, save a couple Route53 registered domains that are scheduled to expire without renewal.

I’ve deleted all Facebook posts (personal and on the Wilderness Vagabonds page) and stopped participating. The strong network effect there means I probably won’t delete my account for some time, but I won’t give Facebook any daily attention. I also completely deleted my Instagram and Threads accounts. UPDATE: Facebook account deletion submitted on January 23, effective February 22.

Most Google services are easy to replace. I have a Nextcloud instance with Notes (replaces Keep) and Calendar. I run my own mail server and have my legacy Gmail account forwarded to it. There’s very little of importance there, but it is so old that closing it completely risks locking me out of a few services. The hardest service to replace at this point is YouTube where I have a decade worth of timelapse videos posted. I’m willing to pay for the Vimeo account and start transitioning there, but also considering self-hosting. UPDATE: I’m posting them to my Smug Mug portfolio site for now. Migrating off YouTube is a major task and will take many months.

Last summer I cancelled my Microsoft Office 365 personal account and switched from Windows to Ubuntu.

I had already removed all content from my Twitter account shortly before it was renamed to X. Closing it was easy once the white supremacists returned. I cancelled my Starlink account and removed the antenna from the roof.

Undoubtedly there’s companies and applications that are engaging in anticipatory obedience that I’m missing. As I learn about them, I’ll adjust accordingly.

I know I should have abandoned most of these services long ago, for many good reasons. I’m guilty of laziness if nothing else (probably something else).

I’m posting regularly on Bluesky from wildernessvagabonds.com and Mastodon from @wildernessvagabonds@frontrange.co. I’m also going to start posting blogs more regularly here on wildernessvagabonds.com, above and beyond the daily timelapse posts.

I promise to work on my perfectionism and fear of failure that too often inhibits self-expression. This is no time to be timid or shirk from confrontation.

David Lynch’s passing has surfaced this great reminder for me: FIX YOUR HEART OR DIE