Boycotting Amazon, Twitter, and Facebook for Half a Year: Lessons in Convenience, Complicity, and Capitalism

The decision

Three things led my wife and me to decide to boycott ordering things from Amazon:

1. We were creating far too much waste due to all the packaging.

2. Our local businesses were suffering, quite literally putting out a call for help, and the public was asked to visit them during an extended period of construction that’s still not going well.

3. Oligarchs like Jeff Bezos, Elon, and the Zuck are using their disgustingly oversized wealth in awful ways:

   1. Exploiting and underpaying workers

   2. Driving inequality and harming democracies

   3. Creating a monopoly of power and market domination

   4. Avoiding taxes and blocking the redistribution of wealth

   5. Controlling and influencing public policy

   6. Having a massively negative impact on the environment through data centres and logistics, not to mention their private jets and yachts

   7. And, of course, the lavish, tone-deaf displays of wealth

Additionally, I decided to deactivate Facebook and Twitter on my own, for reasons 2-3 above, but also because it has been clear to me that Facebook and Twitter are:

1. Spreading misinformation and disinformation like wildfire that my family and friends keep falling prey to
2. Harbouring hate speech and extremism
3. Having adverse effects on my mental health and that of those I care about
4. Addicting several of my family members, by design
5. Continuously in the news for privacy violations and data misuse
6. Amplifying divisive, polarizing narratives and undermining healthy civil discourse, like spreading conspiracy theories
7. Allowing manipulative and targeted advertising by bad actors
8. Being caught lying and withholding the truth about activity in China and other countries
9. Disbanding of content moderation teams, leading to weak enforcement and policy failures, allowing abuse to run rampant, yet penalizing or allowing marginalized communities to face harm

Not to mention, both Elon and Zuck’s very clear descent into red pill toxic masculinity culture.

Phew. That was a lot.

I like making lists. Those lists are only the things that I started to notice and collect. What hit me harder was when reviewing the items and the length of those lists, and how desensitized I and others had become to all of those things. Each new awful story about these oligarchs or their companies seems to roll off our collective backs because we’ve gotten used to it. Recognizing that made me sick.

So, we set a goal to avoid Amazon and Facebook for a few months.

How it affected our day-to-day life

Easy: Sign-ins and separation of services

With Facebook, something immediately surprised me: I thought by deactivating my account I would lose access to so many things. For instance, I had been using Facebook to sign into several services, and using Facebook Messenger to talk to my mom.

I was wrong. Services I had used Facebook to sign into were either incredibly easy to swap or recognized my email address and enabled me to sign in that way anyway. Meanwhile, services like Facebook Messenger are actually separate now. I could technically quit Facebook but keep Messenger and talk to Mommy.

Easy: Supporting local

Ordering things online is deceptive. Amazon undercuts most competition, for sure, but there are also shipping costs for many items, and now tariffs. What I found when I started to seek out local options for items I had become accustomed to ordering online was that I could often find equivalent price points or deals. Additionally, I felt more accomplished and in tune with my surroundings when I sought things out.

I honestly did not expect it to be so easy to find so many things locally that I had been conveniently ordering. This also started to help support one of my other goals for the year: get some physical activity/exercise every single day. In other words, buying local has been helping me stop being a lazy slob.

Easy: Quitting Twitter

Although I had amassed a decent following on Twitter, most people had already started creating accounts elsewhere, joining the mass exodus as the service continued to deteriorate. I found most of the people I wanted to in places like Mastodon and Bluesky, where (so far) there isn’t a cesspool of growing hate and unchecked misinformation.

Hard: Actually quitting Facebook?

A few months into this boycott, my wife asked me, “Did you know you’re back on Facebook?” Reader, I was not aware of this.

My boycott of Facebook didn’t (yet) include Instagram, and apparently when I posted a few photos since I had it setup to also post photos to Facebook it decided that it should helpfully reactivate my account. My wife showed me on her Facebook that several people were commenting on my photos, including my mom, happy I was back.

I was not back. I deactivated that shit again, and turned off cross-posting from Instagram.

Hard: Web-browsing and avoiding

Every web search leads to a lot of Facebook and Amazon results. I got used to, by default, adding a couple of minus signs to my searches so it would show less of these.

Add the following to any search to help yourself out:

-site:facebook.com -site:amazon.com -site:amazon.ca -facebook

Unfortunately, I quickly discovered that many friends were sharing links to Facebook reels and posts via text messages and other apps. I guess I just hadn’t paid that much attention.

Even now, I have gotten used to saying, “Can’t see that. Sorry, I don’t have Facebook.”

Hard: Ultimately avoiding Amazon

As mentioned, my wife and I have been trying to be active every single day. While this has generally meant going for walks, lifting weights, and so on, we have also picked up a few more hobbies. We wanted to get into paddleboarding, and I couldn't find paddleboards in our price bracket… except on Amazon. Six months into the boycott, this is what eventually broke it.

We knew we’d eventually get pulled in somehow, but now we’ll need to quit it again.

The convenience of it all

Much of our lives are designed around speed, ease, and minimizing friction. I know this intimately, having worked as a product designer with several big and small brand names for several years. What has become increasingly apparent to me, however, is how much of the world has been designed with those things in mind to benefit corporations or other agendas, rather than consumers, our environments, communities, and society. So many of the services we use, in fact, have come to erode the very fabric of a healthy society. And, as Cory Doctorow pointed out when he coined the term "enshittification," these services tend to deteriorate over time, prioritizing corporate value over balancing it with consumer value.

As a designer, I know that contrast is one of the most effective tools for highlighting the value of anything. The contrast caused by our not utilizing services like Amazon only further highlighted how deeply embedded the convenience had become in our lives, and how much I noticed the awful news stories that continued to appear. I started to ask myself, “Should it be so easy to spend X amount of money at the click of a button?”

Noticing the market power of Facebook and Amazon

Again, via the contrast of not utilizing these services, it illuminated the use by others.

• We began to count the number of Amazon packages and trucks on our walks in the neighbourhood.
• We noticed how many times friends and family brought out their phones in our presence to look at social media. Especially our parents and Facebook.
• Other people would recommend products on Amazon to us, and we’d let them know we were trying to avoid it. They would then immediately get defensive, as though we were suggesting they should do the same. This left me with an eerie, dystopian feeling.
• When our neighbourhood’s construction debacle worsened, we made a comparison of how convenience culture, exemplified by DoorDash, Skip the Dishes, and others, is affecting local businesses.
• We recognized how nearly every person of our parents’ generation in our lives referred to Facebook, opened it frequently around us, and tried to send us things (often clear misinformation or AI slop they thought was real). In fact, these were the main people who challenged my decision to leave Facebook.

Personal outcomes

From January to July:

• I saved a lot of money. Compared to the previous year, a couple of grand didn’t go to Amazon. This actually made me feel embarrassed.
• I saved a lot of time! Time not spent on services like Facebook went to writing, drawing more again, getting more physical activity, and getting back into several hobbies!
• In particular, I hit my yearly reading goal (24 books this year) an entire 7 months early.
• I felt more present and less depressed.
• With a lighter mood, I noticed I was reaching out to hang out with more people in person rather than avoiding them altogether or just chatting digitally.

It feels good; recommend

I’ve been on a journey over the last year or two, trying to increase my capacity for critical thinking and personal enrichment through experiences rather than things. The time and money benefits alone are worth it to me. Although our Amazon boycott was disrupted by ordering paddle boards and accoutrements, we’re going to get back to it.

Clearly, my wife and I’s journey is mixed with privilege. We live in a big city, and both of us have pretty good salaries. You may not have the same circumstances. Perhaps it is cheaper and ultimately worth the downside of cathartic convenience culture to order from Amazon. What I can say, though, is I think it’s easier to say goodbye to so many of these services than people think it is. They’ve become so deeply embedded in our lives that it can be jarring, isolating, and painful for people to stop using them, but I think the grass is much greener on the other side.

I believe we all need to find ways to push back against the growing problem of oligarchy in North America. Profit should not come before value, and we must demand and enforce ethics to coexist with capitalism.