So you want to be an ethical consumer

It's tough out here. You want to be an active part of modernity, but you don't want to feel complicit in all of its woes! What a conundrum! Today I want to share some of how I think it can be good to think about these problems, as well as list some "ways out" of the influence of companies that extract more from us than they give.

Why do this?

There are a number of reasons people may want to adjust how their dollars and attention interact with the economy. Even the companies know this. Across industries, we see marketing appeals to all sorts of "ethics based" reasons people might have for choosing one product over another. You've seen ducks cleaned by Dawn soap, you've seen "Honest" household and beauty products, you've seen frantic Apple commercials condemning the surveillance practices of certain internet browsers.

People have values, and in our current economy, values are positively correlated with dollars. Whether we want to avoid forced or child labor, or animal cruelty, or toxic waste, or surveillance capitalism, whatever your bend might be.

Leaving aside the effectiveness of diverting your money to align with your values, there is something to holding yourself to a consistent, actionable set of ideals. To an extent, your individual spending choices don't have much of a recognizable effect on the companies you seek to divert from, but that alone is not reason enough to stop caring altogether. In fact, as Americans it is a privilege to have the choices we have at all.

So yes, boycotts are good and work, but also just simply scanning through where you put your attention - and where it is being taken from you - can be a useful practice.

Also, remember this: Harm reduction is always good. It is always better to make something just a little bit better than to not have done anything at all. With that, I want to share some different ways technology can help you reduce harms, to yourself and to the world.

Some ways out

Up front, I want to say that the things I'm about to share are not all things I necessarily use or have used. They are meant to be jumping off points or inspiration for you to think about different ways you might interact with social media, the internet, or media. Anyway, here are five areas I think are relatively easy ways to align what you do with more humanist, collectivist values.

Reading

When you really stop and think about it, it's insane that written text has never been more accessible technologically yet there is really just one company that dominates book sales. One source I found suggests that 71% of people who bought a book in 2023 bought it through an Amazon service. For some perspective, this is larger market share than Apple has in the US smartphone industry.

Amazon is able to capture this vast majority by leveraging their convenience and the restrictions of reading books on a Kindle. In short, buying a book through the Kindle service allows you to only read that book via your Kindle device or app. For something as basic as reading, it seems kind of wild that this is, uh, allowed. Imagine for a moment only being allowed to watch NBCUniversal content if you have Comcast internet or cable.

Fortunately, there are alternatives. I have been a Rakuten Kobo e-reader user for over a year now, and I love it. The title selection is virtually the same, but their devices allow for more interoperability with other applications and services. They have a serviceable iOS app just like Kindle, and integrations with Libby and Overdrive.

For purchasing books, I've been following Bookshop.org for some time now. Bookshop.org matches the convenience of Amazon online book shopping with the good will created by directly supporting local independent bookstores. Plus, recently Bookshop.org made it possible to buy ebooks from their service.

There are obviously issues with the publishing industry, including conglomeration and failure to meaningfully combat Amazon's monopoly, but the more people that demand the interoperable, independent future that Kobo or Bookshop are heralding the closer we get.

Internet search and browsing

Arachne is littered with barbs against Google. I'm only a little sorry about it, namely because I have friends that work there, lol. Estimations have Google Chrome at around 67% of global internet browser marketshare. For Google Search it is 90%. Because there is limited competition, people who make stuff for the internet are strongly incentivized to make things that work best for Google products. There's an entire SEO industry predicated on this idea.

But there's also the human cost. Chrome and Search are free to use, so they survive by extracting mounds and mounds of data from users. Then they can turn around and train their AIs or sell to data brokers off the back of your work. Literally. I spend about five hours a week on this newsletter, and if I want it to show up in Google searches I have to approve of Google's webcrawlers scanning and scraping everything I put up here. There's nothing really stopping Google from loading what I write into their training for Gemini.

(For the pedants, yes, you can block these webcrawlers if you want. But I don't own the domain for arachne.ghost.io, so in this case I cannot do that.)

Fortunately, there are alternatives. If you are a Chrome user and want to switch, it's fairly easy to go to a ready-made option like Safari. You can even export your bookmarks and load them into a new browser. If you want to go a step further, there are third party browsers like Brave, Vivaldi, and (for the real sickos) Tor.

For Search, I cannot recommend Kagi enough. Do you miss how Google search worked like 15 years ago? Do you want to customize what appears at the top of your search results? Kagi makes these things extremely easy, and it can be integrated with virtually any browser. You can try it for free, and then it costs money.

YouTube is better than TikTok and Instagram

Alright, alright. I know I just spent a bunch of time railing against Google. But life is not a zero-sum game. YouTube is, unequivocally, a better platform for creative labor than TikTok or Instagram. There are a few key ways in which this is true.

• Revenue sharing: YouTube's advertising revenue sharing program (generally) doles out more than half of the accrued ad revenue on a video to the video's creator. This is not even close to what the other platforms provide. In a blog post that appears to have been deleted, TikTok explained that users with more than 100,000 followers whose videos reach the top 4% of users can get a 50% split on ad revenue.
• Creator community: YouTube has a 20 year legacy of creators to lean on. Over the years, the relationship between the company and its creators has been strained multiple times. But at the end of the day, YouTube spends way more time engaging with the creators that make its platform worth using. This is true, yes, of the large media players that put their music videos on YouTube, but it is also true of independent YouTubers.
• Tools for discovery and audience management: Recently, there's been plenty of consternation about how the YouTube algorithm has been disincentivizing channel subscriptions in its recommendation. This is bad! But at the end of the day, YouTube's feature set for engaging with and managing audiences far outpaces its competitors. Because YouTube has history as an audience management platform for users, it has a leg up on TikTok and Instagram Reels. This is why, for example, creators are finding other avenues for revenue and audience discovery like video podcasts, Patreon, and newsletters. YouTube has more tools for getting creator audiences into these alternative spaces than TikTok or IG.

News and Social Media

Here is my recommendation in a nutshell: Pay for worker owned news. Subscribe to independent media. Avoid algorithmic news aggregation.

America's news infrastructure is pretty fucked. Local, independent news has taken a nosedive. The larger players are capitulating pedants or safe havens for reactionary centrism. Journalists have to start Substacks to survive, counting on a place that platforms Nazis to support themselves. The Fourth Estate is less an estate and more a collection of serf hovels. There are a number of reasons for the twenty year unwinding of news media, but a part of it is that incentives have shifted from informing the public to engaging the public. These are ideas fundamentally at odds.

How we get our news now is not an end result of wishing to be informed. The algorithms that aggregate headlines on Twitter or Facebook do not do so in order to inform. They do so to drive traffic, boost ad revenue, and build subscriptions.

Here is where I stop to say that it can be argued that the major news media players have never been invested in informing the public, but rather more cynical aspirations. Sure, maybe. I Hearst you. But no one alive has lived in a time with more media conglomeration and deep integration between the creation and distribution of "content" than we do now.

Fortunately, yet again, there are alternatives!

I have used Bluesky as my stream for news for sometime now. I completely control what outlets I see, which analysts show up, and almost never use built in algorithms to discover information. There are other apps, including Reeder, Feedly, and a new one called Tapestry that seek to provide these features as well.

It is on Bluesky that I have been able to engage with a wider range of small, independent news outlets. Here is a follow list I signed up for that gives me all sorts of outlets for localities and verticals across the country.

If keeping track of a bunch of independent news sources or paying for a million subscriptions is untenable for you, I cannot recommend Apple News enough. For one subscription fee, you can gain access to work from the incredible writers at New York Magazine, Wired, and more.

Used electronics

If you are concerned about unethical mining practices, the proliferation of e-waste, or the energy consumption of manufacturing, there are multiple ways for you to skirt the traditional electronics industry in order to spend ethically. Instead of buying new electronics all the time, I like to buy from Backmarket and utilize CTBids. Backmarket is a tech reseller and CTBids is an online estate sale platform on which you can bid for all sorts of things. I always filter for electronics though. Not to have this one be kind of a throwaway, but there isn't much more to write here.

At the end of the day, it is basically impossible to completely swear off every product that might, in some way, make us complicit in the wide range of troubles that face us as humans. But, again, it is always good to be considerate of how your choices, and thus your dollars, have little ripple effects. I'm hopeful that we will get to the point where there is enough competition that people can more easily make ethical decisions with their dollars without sacrificing too many modern amenities. Until then, harm reduction is always good. Harm reduction is always good. Harm reduction is always good.

See you next week. Hope there isn't more Elon Musk stuff to write about!