Online Accounts 2025: Saying No to Renting Software ⭐

I wish I could say that I’m mad as hell and I’m not going to take it anymore. But I'm just tired of it all. Tired of the enshittification, tired of the products and services that I rely on getting worse and worse, and more expensive, over time. But most of all, I'm tired of paying again and again for products and services that I either don't use at all, don't use enough, or are just too expensive when viable alternatives exist. And so a big focus of this coming year will be scaling back on all that whenever and wherever possible.

The solution to this kind of problem typically takes the form of Little Tech companies and solutions. There are no good options in the hardware space thanks to the strangleholds that Apple and Google have in mobile and Microsoft and Apple have with computers. Here, one can simply use these platforms for what they are and ignore upsells where possible. And there are specific solutions, like Tiny11Builder, that can nicely de-enshittify OS platforms, in this case Windows. But you may lean more into a Mac or even Linux if you’re adventurous enough.
How we got here
I can’t even recall what my outlook was like as 2025 began, but at the end of January, Google unceremoniously cut me off from the Thurrott.com YouTube account, triggering some major rethinking of my relationships with Big Tech and technology in general that continues to this day. And with 2025 now drawing to a close, it is clear to me that I have become somewhat radicalized by what I see in this industry and how the changes that have been thrust on us--enshittification, basically--are almost universally negative.

There’s the obvious, like ever-increasing prices on services that used to be so inexpensive that they were no brainers. There’s the subtle, like the subscription creep that led to higher and higher overall costs each month. There’s AI, of course, which Big Tech sees as a chance to not just charge us even more but to charge us almost exponentially more. There are financial shenanigans that might be described as a pyramid scheme if they were only that simple. And there are the overt money grabs as best exemplified by Apple’s disgusting 30 percent app store fees and $20+ billion in silent payoffs from Google for Search placement.

This industry sucks.

And I’m a part of it. A small part, to be sure, but with an obligation as an individual with empathy for others and, more to the point, a (small) soapbox that I use to the benefit of consumers, or users, and not the companies that should be serving them but are, instead, using them. We’re like the human bodies powering the Machines in The Matrix movies, helpless victims stewing in our own filth while being fooled into believing that our existence is somehow meaningful. Only an unthinking, morally bankrupt cad would defend Big Tech. But some do.

I try to be more clear-headed, but with the usual mixed success. And I certainly don't have the meme-generating skills of a Cory Doctorow. But I have...