I hadn’t thought to bring it up, but folks are boycotting Amazon during the prime days. There is a list of companies owned by Amazon, so making this a wiki and please add them as they appear.
Whole Foods
From downthread, Amazon acquisitions:
Data Software
Cluster K
miato
Alexa
Artificial Intelligence
Evi
ivona
yap
KIVA Systems
Books Technology
shelfari
Booksurge
Brilliance Audio
Comixology
Audible
Mobipocket
Book Depository
Goodreads
AbeBooks
Education Technology
Ten Marks
Teach Street
Gaming
Double Helix
Reflexive Entertainment
IoT Cloud
2lemetry
Annapurna Labs
Video Content
CustomFlix
Twitch
LoveFilm.com
IMDb
Withoutabox
pushbutton
Rooftop Media
Retail Technology
shoefitr
snaptell
Quidsi
CDNOW
buyv!p
Amie St
Zappos
Fabric.com
Quorus
junglee
Shopbop
Display Technology
Touchco
Liquavista
Finance Technology
Gopago
Text PayMe
Based on EC2 monthly spend, here are the top 10 Amazon AWS customers:
I think it worthwhile to document better alternatives to some of these sites. MovieDB instead of IMDB Biblio.com instead of abesbooks.com. Downpour instead of audible. (Drm free too.) etc. As a general rule I find abstinence hard to maintain if im primarily focused on what I can’t have or do, best to dwell on something better to the exclusion of many of these.
Affiliation with a megacorp might need to become a data point for some sort of site/service page, @maiki no? Or conversely maybe we should just track megacorps we are warry of and where their tendrils are. Not sure which would ultimately be the smaller dataset though.
I’ve been trying to wrap my head around this for a while…
But I like your idea, especially because while Amazon is so large, while they may not feel a decrease in their own made up shopping holiday, a faction of their business going elsewhere could actually be interesting/funny/disruptive.
Im very much a proponent of telling people where to go or educating them on degree of risks as opposed to insisting on outright purity/abstinence . ( Not to take away from the boycott I am big on this particular boycott but ive got a point im putzing towards here. )
Mainly because I think this has been one of the biggest roadbloacks for the free software foundation. Not to say they should endorse proprietary software per se. (they shouldn’t) But I think for a lot of human beings they don’t see saying no to proprietary software as a positive in their life. In fact their gut reaction is likely to see it as closing doors.
They spend far too much time telling people not to say buy various bits of defective hardware and software and not very much time driving people towards better or incrementally improved alternatives.
The FSFE seems to adopt a better balance here in my opinion. With very simple things like pdfreaders.org
I’m still a Facebook and Twitter user (a good example is the tweets I posted here!) despite me knowing better and this having long been a point of contention between maiki and me!
This is not good and I don’t feel good about participating in these ecosystems and giving them labor and data.
This is a really hard question - what to do about pervasive megacorporations that seep into multiple layers of your life - and I don’t have any good answers. It’s very hard for anybody not to be dispirited about the scale of excising a megacorp from your life…
In a similar boat. I did without them for a good long while but ultimately found out their was a real social tax that was deep enough to hurt.
This problem is very multivariable too. I have deep respect for the work by the folks of Breadtube it may even be necessary work in many respects but their waste deep in the Google megacorp’s ecosystem. Is it wrong for them to produce there when the war is being fought there?
There has to be a balancing act at work with these things, a kind of moral utilitarian calculus. The important thing I suspect is we do it with eyes open’ not shut. I hope so atleast.
I think much like climate change, megacorps probably have to be fought or resisted at multiple different scales and with multiple strategies. Any one scale or strategy will likely be too inefficient at turning the tide. The problem is much bigger than a single persons behavior and yet our individual behaviors have important parts to play.
