The theme of my most recent postcard design is the 2025 US Department of Defense budget that comes in at $895,000,000,000, which is the price of your FREEDOM to consume 221 flavors of Oreos, spend more than a third of your stagnant wages on housing costs, or join the ranks of the 500,000 Americans who file for bankruptcy every year due to medical debt. Liberals center their own personal innocence when it comes to neocolonialism and the military budget, while conservatives are much more honest about their commitment to funding imperialism at the behest of our domestic oligarchs.
I printed 95 of these postcards and as of January 8, 2024 I am about halfway done sending them out to 95 friends and comrades who have expressed interest in my work. I included a letter with each postcard explaining my choice to permanently delete my Facebook account and my updated contact information so that I can be found should they want to reach out. I’ve been more intentional about making time to talk on the phone or have a video chat with friends for the last few months, so I’m confident that the people with whom I share a reciprocal relationship have that information already. But still, I’ve lived a lot of places and have met so many interesting people that I wanted to let them know that I hold their memory dearly even if we do not intentionally stay in touch.
In addition to leaving Facebook, here are a few of the other technology hygiene actions I have taken:
- got a Proton Mail end-to-end encrypted email account to start phasing out my use of the Google Suite. It’s impossible to completely remove Google from your life, but there are a lot of things you can do to deprive them of your data.
- switched to Duck Duck Go for my web browser and have started researching strategies to avoid the AI-generated slop that makes up an ever-increasing proportion of content.
- signed up for 1 Password password manager and started updating all of my passwords to randomly generated ones and set up 2-factor authentication on my most sensitive accounts.
- signed up for Aura, which was a little pricey up front ($144/year) but includes identity theft protection, military-grade security against viruses/malware/hacking, a VPN that I can set to any country in the world, monitoring and removal of my number/email address from data brokers, and identity theft/fraud insurance. There are surely other decent companies out there, but this one was recommended by someone I trust.
- started decluttering my iphone so that it is more of a tool for the basic tasks I need it for (talking, text, maps, calendar, camera, security). I set up a Pocket account to manage links I save instead of keeping 300 browser tabs open.
- started prioritizing longform content like podcasts, video essays (with citations!), Substack/Medium of independent journalists, and a handful of paid media outlets/Patreons that produce high-quality deeply-researched educational media that help me to better understand the world around me. I hope to update this blog more often in 2025 with weekly roundups of the media that impacted me most, if only for my own reference and attention span.
- I’ve started posting Hoagie and Omar pics to their own page on my website for anyone who misses seeing their sweet faces.
- I’m still on Instagram, but I’ve stopped posting my own content and primarily use it to keep up with the genocides and social movements for collective liberation, as well as to amplify the voices of people who are absent from the status quo narrative about “progress”, “democracy”, and “freedom”.
Leave a Reply