This Is Not A Rejection Of The Internet Or Your Precious Digital Connections. If Anything, You'll Find

This is not a rejection of the Internet or your precious digital connections. If anything, you'll find you rediscover your digital agency and how it's been stripped from you! You'll engage in new ways online that put you in the drivers' seat. You'll also find your values start to shift. You'll stop asking if a service can do something for you, and instead ask what it wants from you in return--and whether that's a price worth paying, especially if it's "free."

It's also not a course for those deep into the InfoSec world (Information Security). I won't teach you how to go dark, how to move around the web entirely anonymously. But I will teach you how to take steps toward that direction, so that the path is available to you once these short weeks are up.

To that end, I will recommend systems and services that some people who are deep into infosec won't like. Internet nerds have deep and well informed opinions and controversies erupt all the time. For instance, some people recently are angry at Mozilla for some changes they are making, so they recommend not using Firefox. That's just one example. Some will be upset to find that I am still recommending Firefox -- among many other options.

Why? For one, I want to recommend user-friendly systems of many stripes. I will never tell you to just use one thing: the ball is in your court! I'll also tell you when there are concerns, some of which you may care about and others you won't. I don't think there is (or should be) one system to rule them all. There should be many options. We should use many of them, instead of just one. It's way more freeing to do so.

I also want to get you used to something new: moving. Jumping ship. Right now, we think of moving from one service to another like moving a house you've lived in for fifty years. It's a huge burden, and exhausting to even consider. This forces a kind of lock-in where users never want to leave. Tech companies count on this. Academics hand-wring over this form of lock-in, especially in social media.

But once you get started moving your data around, taking agency in how you work the web, you'll see it's actually much easier than you thought. That way, you might move to a new browser and not like it very much (for whatever reason)-- and instead of going back to Google, you'll try something new. Easy peasy. No moving company involved.

I'll clue you in to a different way to use the web. You'll pay more attention to tech gossip. You'll know if a company is doing something nefarious or making a change. You'll know what to do if so. You'll already have one foot out the door anyway. 

That's because Opting Out isn't just about leaving systems we don't like -- it's about opting in to systems and communities we value instead.