Writing this as procrastination from actually finishing my presentation slides :p

I am a Fedora contributor, though my $dayjob is working for Facebook (luckily my role lets me work on Fedora and other open source technologies).

I am concerned with the direction both the technology sector is taking, and the wider economy in general - the predominance of large companies creating increasing monopolization of many sectors of the economy (especially true in the US), the increasing relegation of end users to be mere operators of their devices, the bloat and wastage and upgrade treadmills…

My ongoing resolution is to gradually achieve what Kashmir Hill famously tried and failed at last year – reduce the influence of proprietary technology, and non-community-owned companies, in my life, especially those funded by advertising since that is a perverse incentive (monetizing attention span) diametrically opposed to the user’s best interest, whether privacy or well-being.

I’m starting #100DaysToOffload soon on my blog, once the Nest with Fedora conference is over, and will be covering my digital detox among other things

• switching away from Gmail
• almost entirely cutting out Facebook products (except with contacts that exclusively use it)
• using a Pine Phone (once mine arrives)
• using Nextcloud instead of Dropbox and Google Calendar / Contacts
• using Cryptpad instead of the rest of the Google Suite

You can find me on Matrix at michel-slm:matrix.org and michel:michel-slm.name – the latter is less active as I use Matrix to bridge to Freenode