Sol over at the Zaibatsu [0] talks about social media as an anti-social influence, and discusses blocking large swaths of IP space associated with the worst offenders. That reminds me of an article I read a while back, about a woman who wanted to remove google completely from her life [1] (warning, that article was posted unironically at Gizmodo which is itself a cancer on the internet. Loading it in a recent version of Firefox with uMatrix and Better Privacy reveals the site loading content from 54 outside domains, 14 of them known trackers. It's best to just read it in lynx). She enlisted the help of a friend who did just that with a VPN - blocking the millions of IPs owned by google. What she found was that it was impossible to actually do anything useful in the context of modern life. Think about google fonts, maps and cloud storage used by many mainstream sites and services. For many of us that means online shopping won't work, or maybe even our online banking. Speaking of the latter, my own bank recently made changes to their online portal so that my usual, mid-privacy firefox setup (standard ad blockers plus a tab container dedicated to banking) stopped allowing login. Viewing the console during the login page load reveals they are trying to fetch data from 3rd party cookie storage. The requests are blocked in my setup, and the login form just refuses to function. Here at the Republic, oldfolio talks about using older browsers to get at gopher content, specifically Seamonky [2]. I'd suggest running an older Debian version like v5 [3] in a VM, it came with an un-branded Firefox v3 (Iceweasel), still with native gopher support. For SSH console use and browsing gopher, it is an ideal solution. I sympathize with Jynx here [4], I vacillate between contempt for modern popular (western) society, politics and modern life in general, and the need to live within it. It's easy to be cynical, harder to build enough momentum to change things, even on a personal level. In my case my family and I decided a life change was in order, and the move to Canada three years ago worked out for us. Canada is in some ways a US-lite, in other ways far more invested in its citizens well-being than I think the US ever will be. But on a nation-state scale, it's hard to see how the impetus to change things enough before a major societal collapse happens is possible. [0] gopher://zaibatsu.circumlunar.space/0/~sol_solaris/datalogs/20042019_purging_the_www.txt [1] https://gizmodo.com/i-cut-google-out-of-my-life-it-screwed-up-everything-1830565500 [2] gopher://republic.circumlunar.space/1/~oldfolio [3] https://cdimage.debian.org/mirror/cdimage/archive/5.0.10/amd64/iso-cd/ [4] gopher://1436.ninja/0/Phlog/20190414.post