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Escaping Big Tech: A day on the run
Big Tech frames the way I experience the world
I wake up at 7am. Pick up my phone to check the time and take my sorry tired backside downstairs, following my dog who bounds down the stairs with untamed enthusiasm. Over breakfast, I’ll complete a level on Duolingo, listen to some radio on my phone and then eat cereal purchased on the Tesco app on an iPad. It’s not 8 o’clock and I’ve rarely been outside of the Apple ecosystem.
My life isn’t particularly extraordinary. I work from home, try to stay moderately fit and have a middling income. I’ve been reflecting recently on how my life operates within the confines of big tech’: Apple, Amazon, Microsoft and Google. As these companies grow ever larger, their efforts to expand further will require two things: that we spend more of our money on them and that we let their services into more arenas of our life. I wanted to track an average day in my life to see how much my fairly normal existence is tied into the products and services of these companies. The results shocked me, but are perhaps more typical than we’d care to admit.
Morning
After my Apple-mediated morning, I take my dogs for a walk. I am lucky enough that I feel safe going out in the morning without my phone and I stopped wearing an Apple Watch about a year ago. Rather than playing with my phone, my…
