How to Escape the Platform Industrial Complex

In November 2023, when I secured representation from a kickass literary agent and my novel writing endeavors graduated from sad midlife crisis to unsustainable commercial enterprise, I decided to descend into the darkest depths of Digital Hades.

The idea was straightforward yet suspect: When Leverage gets published on August 19, there's a 0.07% chance I'll become super famous, and back then I wanted to create a digital foothold so I could connect with – and obv monetize – my legions of adoring fans.

Owing to my previous lives in Academia, Corporate America, and Wall Street, however, I'd only ever created and sustained a moribund LinkedIn account.

To get hella famous online, I'd need to build from scratch, and about eighteen months ago I embarked upon a virtual misadventure which followed three distinct phases: 1) experimentation, 2) consolidation, and 3) capitulation.

In tandem with my ill-fated scheming came the rise of copyright theft rebranded as "artificial intelligence." Not only was I wasting my precious time failing to build a social media following, I was also feeding the stupidest possible doomsday devices and enriching the saddest imaginable techno-eugenicist douchebags.

Worst of all, I was being a hypocrite.

My entire brand of comedy revolves around eviscerating cynical corporations and excoriating corrupt politicians, and yet here I was making thirsty, unwatchable Reels for Cuckerberg's grossest platform.

I certainly exhibit erratic and inconsistent behaviors from time to time – I'm only human – but I try hard to practice what I preach, and I work hard to rectify errors when I haven't. Being a stubborn, principled, absolutely intractable sociopath helps a ton in this regard.

All of which is why, beyond jettisoning my toxic social media accounts, I've also launched a crusade to ditch as many cynical platforms and exploitative technology products as I can. Throughout the rest of this post – which is thorough but entertaining – I've provided a blueprint for how you, too, can escape most of the Platform Industrial Complex.

Pragmatism >>> Idealism

Before we dive into specifics, allow me to make a few quick concessions. First, this list is not exhaustive and only addresses platforms I've used. Second, this exercise is more diagnostic than prescriptive, i.e., I feel strongly about my recommendations, but you should of course do what works best for you and your family. And finally, as much as I'd like to see all the Big Tech platforms implode, practical constraints require us to utilize some of their tools most of the time.

Think of this guide, then, as a heuristic which will help you decide which devils to indulge. For example, my family's fully entrenched in the Apple ecosystem and breaking free just isn't realistic. In the lose-lose matchups between Apple and Google and Apple and Spotify, I merely chose what I believed were the least bad options.

With that in mind, let the liquidations begin.

Alphabet: Android OS, Google Chrome, Google Search, Google Workspace (e.g., Gmail, Google Calendar), YouTube

How I'll Escape: I've been itching to abandon Betabet for years but it's no easy feat. In fact, I'm still not fully free, but I'm close.

After nearly a decade using Android-based smartphones, I pivoted back to an iPhone in 2020 (see Spotify section below). Since then, as mentioned above, I've fully entrenched myself in the Apple ecosystem: iPhone, MacBook, Apple Music, Photos, iCloud storage, etc. The upshot is I extricated myself from Google's mobile OS – though I still use Google Maps on my iPhone because Apple Maps sucks shit.

Regarding Google Chrome and Google Search, I've been using DuckDuckGo (or its browser plug-in) for years. Funnily enough, when everyone started complaining about how Google's "AI" was destroying online search, I found myself little fazed. DuckDuckGo's privacy-heavy features have always generated subpar results. A minor price to pay for major privacy.

Google Workspace (e.g., Gmail, Google Calendar, Google Meet, Google Photos, etc.) is by far the hardest part of the ecosystem to escape, but over the past several weeks I've mostly pulled it off. Mostly.

Now, there are a lot of details and esoterica related to this undertaking, and there are myriad ways you can approach this problem. I'll keep the solution I used simple and step-wise, but if you'd like more granular details hit me up.

1. To escape Gmail, I first bought a custom website domain (e.g., www.amrangowani.com). I used Squarespace, but there are numerous online purveyors.
2. I created a Proton Mail account and subscribed to the "Mail Plus" pricing tier. This lets users create up to ten additional email addresses, including one custom domain email (e.g., amran@amrangowani.com). Context: Proton Mail is a non-profit organization built by the physicists at CERN. Every message is end-to-end encrypted, which is increasingly important for creative people whose work is vulnerable to the thieving hands of "AI" crooks such as Google and Meta. Moreover, your data is protected by Swiss privacy laws, i.e., the ones impenetrable enough to have helped the Nazis hide their European plunder for generations. If you want to give Proton Mail a spin, please click my referral link HERE.
3. At this stage, a sane person would simply set up email forwarding from their Gmail account to their Proton Mail account and call it a day. But that would mean continuing to receive boatloads of trash in your fancy new inbox and maintaining a Google account. Also, what about my personality or demeanor suggests I'm sane? Over the course of several days, I spent a dozen-odd hours gutting my Google account – deleting old messages, unsubscribing from unwanted marketing emails, consolidating contacts, removing photos, etc. – and then manually updating all of my personal accounts across the interwebs. This was a laborious but worthwhile endeavor, as it allowed me to clean up my digital presence and ensured my most important accounts were secure.

Alas, in spite of all this effort, I haven't yet deleted my Google account.

First, I'm continuing to monitor my Gmail inbox to make sure I didn't forget to update a crucial account that could end up causing problems.

Second, my middling YouTube channel is linked to my Google account, which means if I nuke my profile I'll lose access to my horde of subscribers – 61, to be exact. Nonetheless, I long ago liquidated my old YouTube content because it was...fine. Not awful, not great, just fine.

For now, I'm taking a wait and see approach, but all of my material has been removed and my inbox volume has plummeted. I'm in a solid position to whack Google when the time's right.

Finally, some of you might be wondering why I bothered to set up a domain email, especially since Proton Mail allows me to create multiple addresses. This stems primarily from my unique needs as an author and "content creator." For example, to establish consistent branding for my maturing writing business it was important for me to build my own website, with my own newsletter, and integrate my own specific email address. I mean, you gotta admit it's pretty dang cool to receive newsletter posts from amran@amrangowani.com (via Ghost), send replies directly to that email address (via Proton Mail), and be able to navigate to www.amrangowani.com (via Squarespace and Ghost), right?

There's a longer-term benefit, too. If Proton Mail folds, or becomes a tool for nefarious actors, or whatever, I can take my unique domain email to another provider without breaking the existing links to my online accounts. Being stuck with an @gmail.com address, or the like, is just another way the Big Tech companies keep you trapped in their ecosystem.

Benefits and Consequences: While I haven't completely dipped, dumping nineteen years of Gmail-related baggage and knowing my new email addresses are airtight feels fantastic. I'm flirting with the idea of creating more YouTube content down the line, but if I do my Google account would solely be used for that project. If I insisted upon a totally clean slate, I could also create a brand-new Google account on the spot.

The downsides of entirely leaving Google, beyond the YouTube issue, would be an inability to edit shared Google Docs and Google Sheets and a loss of whatever media I've purchased over the years (e.g., Google Play content). I could live with the former and the latter's not significant.

All told, I haven't yet achieved escape velocity, but I'm gaining speed.

Extraction Pain Score: 10/10.

Amazon: Audible, Goodreads, Kindle, Music, Prime TV

How I'll Escape: Ironically, until last year, I'd been Amazon-free for half a decade. Last fall I jumped back into Audible and this January, in a fit of post-election fatalism, I re-upped my family's Prime membership.

That said, I don't need any of this shit and I could easily move on and never look back.

Shopping-wise, my Amazon test is simple: If I can't procure the same or a similar item at Best Buy, Costco, Home Depot, Target, Wal-Mart, or a local grocery store, I don't need it. To be clear, excepting Costco, all of those other retailers are also corporate villains. But the bottom line is I can skip Amazon for online shopping, as evidenced by the very recent past.

Content-wise, Thursday Night Football is the absolute worst the NFL has to offer, Amazon Music is clunky and aesthetically unpleasing, and I never got into reading on Kindle. My wife would miss the shows she likes (e.g, Reacher), but that pain would be trivial compared to the misery of being legally bound to me.

The biggest hurdle would be extricating myself from Audible. I have about 100 audiobooks and a dozen more "credits" to spend this year. Some cursory research suggests there's a "jail break"-style piece of software which could sever my titles from Audible's DRM-based clutches. Worst case, I'll simply accept those audiobooks, like life itself, are fragile and fleeting and write them off. For a far less evil replacement, I plan to test run Libro.fm, a fast-growing service which supports independent bookstores.

Benefits and Consequences: Telling Uncle Jeff to eat shit and die is always a good decision. I'll tackle this project later this year to ensure I'm once again Amazon-free in 2026.

My soul already feels purer.

Extraction Pain Score: 3/10.

Apple: iPhone, iPad, iOS, Mac, Mac OS, Arcade, iCloud, Music, News+, TV+

Escape? LOL!: I have not escaped Apple and at this rate I will never escape Apple. I'm not a partisan fanboy, but of the pitiful choices available I consider Apple's products and services to be the least awful – though unfortunately they're also the most expensive.

Plus, while I know the tech-savvy crowd has plenty of qualms with Apple's hardware and software, the shit just works. One of the many reasons I willingly re-entrenched myself in their walled garden was because I had a two-year-old Microsoft Surface and a two-year-old Samsung television shit the bed while I was editing Leverage and my kids were on holiday break.

Benefits and Consequences: I will escape Apple when Thanatos pays me a visit.

Extraction Pain Score: 10,000/10.

Bluesky

How I'll Escape: After Leverage comes out and hopefully sells like hotcakes, and my Bluesky follower count stays mired in the three-digit range, I'll log in to this deeply unserious platform and say sayonara to the deeply unserious people who populate it. Can't wait.

Benefits and Consequences: I'll miss some good tweets from my literary and comedy peeps. Being able to DM other authors does come in handy, but there's this archaic and unkillable technology called email which I could always fall back upon.

Extraction Pain Score: 2/10.

Discord

How I'll Escape: This is an interesting one. As social media platforms continue to fragment and push farther and farther toward celebrity-take-all extremes, a platform like Discord becomes increasingly appealing to me.

I have an account but only visit Jane Friedman's server when I have publishing hot takes to share. In theory, I'd like to cultivate my own community on Discord and move entirely away from algorithmic-driven platforms.

But I keep running into one minor problem: Who TF would hang out there?

If you want to prove me wrong, you can join my brand-new and still under construction server by clicking my not-so-secret invite link HERE.

Benefits and Consequences: None of you are going to click the above link and months from now, when I invariably delete my account, this whole experience will be another sad reminder that – starting with my very own father – nobody ever wanted me.

Extraction Pain Score: 1/10.

"Mainstream" Media: NYT, WaPo, LA Times, WSJ, etc.

How I Escaped: For my money, so-called mainstream American media is its own type of "entertainment platform" and has been cooked since Dear Leader Reagan deregulated the news industry. Alternative facts, anyone?

After the New York Times incessantly hyperventilated about Hilary's emails throughout the 2015-16 election cycle – and heavily contributed to the ongoing decimation of our country – I refused to read their dogshit newspaper ever again. Ditto the Washington Post.

Nine years later I'm still going strong.

I only read the Wall Street Journal articles that are available via Apple News+, and while I can never keep up, I enjoy perusing Wired, Bloomberg, The Atlantic, and The New Yorker when I can (again, many articles are included with an Apple News+ subscription).

Even still, I strongly encourage everyone to abandon the U.S. newspaper business altogether and buy a subscription to either The Financial Times or The Economist. I used to be a diehard Economist reader, but the quality has dropped precipitously over the years – or maybe I've become even more of a woke, DEI-loving, leftist cuck. Either way, while the fact-based regional reporting is superb, the paper's overall editorial slant is pickled rubbish.

I ponied up for The Financial Times in February, which is expensive AF, but the quality is outstanding and the paper has become my primary information source. The plebe version of The FT is called FT Edit and only costs $5 per month – a monster deal.

Benefits and Consequences: My brain has been much healthier than the average Democratic voter's since November 8, 2016.

Extraction Pain Score: -10/10.

Medium

How I Escaped: I joined the algorithm-obsessed writing platform in December 2021, immediately realized it was a walled garden jam-packed with low-quality listicles, and easily envisioned the platform getting smoked by CuckStack within a year.

Jumping ship was simpler than signing up.

Benefits and Consequences: After leaving the platform I completed an awesome novel and secured a Big Five book deal. Is that correlation or causation? I can never remember.

Extraction Pain Score: 0/10.

Meta: Facebook, Instagram, Threads, WhatsApp

How I Escaped: Way back in 2010, after I'd been accepted to business school, I met a future classmate with a pronounced paranoid streak. She said she'd never used – and would never use – social media, and she also cautioned against the risk of what today we'd call "cancel culture."

I found this utterly ridiculous person utterly ridiculous, but took heed of her fear-mongering and nuked my Facebook account within the month. Zero regrets and many bragging rights followed.

In early 2024, in what must've been precipitated by trace amounts of mercury in my Pop Tarts, I decided to give Instagram and then Threads a whirl. It went as well as you'd expect.

Within six months I remembered I was not the type of user who appealed to middle-aged pedophiles and pulled the plug on the entire operation. The coup de grâce came when I revealed the totally kickass cover for Leverage on IG and gained zero new followers.

Two weeks later I ethered both accounts and haven't lamented one second of my Cuckerberg-less existence.

Until a few days ago I had a WhatsApp account and recently I'd joined an interesting channel run by professionals in the Chicago area. While I'm bummed to miss out on everyone's updates, I can also periodically hang with these peeps IRL. You know, what we monkeys did for hundreds of thousands of years until smartphones were invented.

Benefits and Consequences: I feel cleaner, and prettier, and have experienced stronger, longer-lasting erections.

Real Talk: After The Atlantic confirmed Meta had trained its "AI" using pirated material, I can't think of a single valid argument for sticking with any of Cuck's platforms. Please, please, pretty pretty please, shitcan that sad-sack motherfucker and help save our species.

Pain Index: -∞/10.

Microsoft: LinkedIn, Office 365 Suite (e.g., Word, Excel, Powerpoint, etc.), Xbox

Why I Won't Escape: Next to Apple, Microsoft is nearly impossible for me to abandon. First, as a bona fide Author Guy, whose agent and publisher use Word, I'd be inviting major headaches. While I've heard several writers evangelize for Scrivener, I'm not sure if my business partners have access to this product or compatible software.

Worse, as a bona fide Finance Douchebag, I'm quite proficient with Excel and use the program on a daily basis. The clearest alternative is Google Sheets, which kind of sucks and forces you back into the Betabet universe. Apple's proprietary program "Numbers" could serve as an emergency replacement, but in my superficial dealings it's proved close to worthless.

Microsoft's stickiness now extends beyond these two major programs as well. I use OneNote while brainstorming and drafting my novels and back up my files in OneDrive.

With all this said, I could break free.

I could ask my agent and publisher which word processing alternatives would be suitable. I could suck it up and use Apple's shitty spreadsheet software. There's no shortage of note taking apps available for download. And after I upgraded to the "Unlimited" tier of Proton Mail, I gained access to 500 GB of Swiss-secured cloud storage.

But, in totality, these steps would be pretty ball-busting. And I actually kind of like Microsoft Office. Yes, the cloud-based annual subscription model is a cynical cash grab and yes, Microsoft Surface is a chintzy POS which totally fucked me. On the other hand, Microsoft's software integration with Apple's hardware has come a long ass way, and both Big Tech behemoths have proved predictable and reliable.

If I really wanted to murk a member of the House of Gates, the best I could do is kill off LinkedIn – which I've strongly considered.

The lamest conceivable social network produces pure cringe and induces pure rage on a daily basis. In theory, the platform should align nicely with my interests and expertise, but the site's users and algorithms don't exactly celebrate or promote my vicious one-liners.

Exhibit A:

To be fair, I can't reasonably expect a cadre of corporate drones to dap me up for telling them their jobs are total horseshit and their employers are society's antagonists.

Also, since I spent most of my adult life working for heinous corporations, most of my connections reside on LinkedIn. I have over 1,200 "followers" on the site which, while small, is still the most I've accumulated across the various platforms I've used.

Again, I could kill LinkedIn, but I'd remain firmly lodged in other parts of the Microsoft ecosystem, so why bother? An alternative approach would be to delete my existing account and start from scratch, which is an idea that came to me while writing this piece and one I'll thoroughly entertain. The vast majority of my current connections don't pay attention to me and the rest will soon be in prison for accounting fraud.

My family has an Xbox, but my kids prefer Nintendo Switch and we only have one television – thanks for nothing Samsung! The powerful gaming system is little more than an expensive bookend and could be discarded anytime.

At least Microsoft finally did the humane thing and put Skype to sleep.

Benefits and Consequences: Trying to ditch Microsoft would create unnecessary hassles and needless burdens and, for me, isn't a battle worth fighting.

Extraction Pain Score: 10/10.

Spotify

How I Escaped: In May 2020, when Spotify went all-in on the Meathead-o-Sphere, I was like: Nah.

In fact, I was so insistent my subscription fees would not fund Covid-19 disinformation, anti-vax lunacy, and stupidity masquerading as masculinity, I bought an iPhone just so I could rock Liquid Swords sans Spotify.

Benefits and Consequences: I'm proud to be supporting sweatshop labor instead of conspiracy theorizing, and I'm glad to know my pitiful payment fees still impoverished every musician not named Taylor Swift.

Extraction Pain Score: 1/10.

A Quick and Completely Unrelated Aside: @Joe, I'm down to talk Leverage on the pod whenever. My people will call your people.

Streaming Entertainment: Apple TV+, Disney+, HBO Max, Hulu, Netflix, Paramount+, Peacock, Prime TV, etc., etc., etc.

My Wife Absolutely Cannot Escape: This exercise would be easy for me and unthinkable for the rest of my family.

In my view, television's the most bloated and least effective storytelling medium ever invented. As the olds used to tell me when I was young, I'm pretty sure it also rots your brain.

Of course, my wife – who's much smarter and far more financially successful than me – is a total TV junkie who streams over 1,500 hours of content each year. So it's possible my claims don't hold water.

Regardless, if it were up to me, I'd terminate every single one of these crappy content mills with extreme prejudice. But, since my wife pays the bills, she calls the shots. #shareholder-primacy

Benefits and Consequences: Despite paying for basically every single streaming service, I hardly watch any of them. Icing your accounts would be a lot easier than you realize, and the downstream health benefits would be immense.

Just think: With no brain-scrambling reality shows to binge, you might find yourself reading more books, getting more exercise, going to more events, and having actual sex with actual humans.

Extraction Pain Score: 0/10 for me; +∞/10 for my family.

Substack

How I Escaped/Will Escape: There are two elements to this equation: 1) escaping as a creator and 2) escaping as a user.

Let's look at the creator side first.

After years of watching the emailable blog platform devolve into a full-blown social media site, whose Useful Idiot executives willfully misinterpret the First Amendment during their annual self-inflicted crisis, I decided it was time to get gone.

As the vast majority of you know, I migrated to Ghost in February, which is the service I use to create and manage my author website and distribute this sensational newsletter. I learned a ton of tech stuff while setting up shop and ran into surprisingly few hiccups. The editing software is straightforward and there are a number of useful guides which helped me navigate the back end logistics.

As far as avoiding evil, Ghost is decentralized, open source, and funded by user fees, with nary a VC scumbag in sight. Of course, to make this business model viable, I had to spend $480 of my wife's money to build my website, create my newsletter, and host all of you people for one calendar year.

If/when I break the 3,000-member mark the cost to operate this newsletter will jump by another $300, and the subscription prices will continue to increase as my audience grows. For example, if my Ghost publication ever surpasses 10,000 members my wife's upfront fee would reach a minimum of $1,200 per year.

Since I'm not monetizing this publication, these are hefty recurring expenses to absorb. On the other hand, from a peace of mind standpoint, it's been worth every cent to dissociate my "personal brand" from the platform which spearheaded the anti-trans movement, mainstreamed Covid-19 denialism, and tried to sane-wash the neo-eugenicons.

Pro Tip: If you're writing on Substack and considering a move, I strongly recommend Ghost and would be happy to share migration tips or tricks.

As a Substack user, bailing on the platform would be simple but self-defeating. While I love to dunk on the worst aspects of the service, there are many, many, many more great writers than grotesque shitheels on the platform. I don't want to sever my writerly relationships or miss out on the platform's powerful network effect, especially in advance of the Leverage launch.

My compromise solution has been to remove my newsletter from Substack while maintaining my user profile and treating the site as a pure social media platform. Of course, if you've read this far, you know I despise social media platforms. I suspect the day will eventually come when I tube my profile and cancel all my subscriptions.

After, I'll clandestinely resubscribe to my favorite newsletters using a Proton Mail burner address and read everyone's posts in my email inbox, the way the Internet Gods intended.

Benefits and Consequences: Since migrating to Ghost I've churned 6.0% of my subscriber base (~87 subscribers), half of which were dead emails or spam accounts. The good news is, if I continue to lose subscribers at this rate I'll be able to shut down this cost center by the summer.

On a more serious note, I've been quite pleased by the latest metrics. My email open rates (e.g., the percentage of people who open each post) have soared from the low-30% range to almost 50%, while overall engagement has skyrocketed to circa 70% over the past 30 days.

Despite the challenges of running an email newsletter (e.g., high reader churn, woeful economics), these are gratifying stats. It's legit cool AF that one thousand real-life humans read and engage with my nonsense.

Now, go pre-order Leverage so I can justify all the goddamned effort I put into this goddamned newsletter.

Extraction Pain Score: 4/10 as creator; 7/10 as user.

Twitter

How I Escaped: Because I like to make bad decisions, I lumbered onto late Twitter during the Spring of 2022.

By year end, the Maker of Overpriced Cars and Rockets Which Always Explode had decided to buy the affection of tens of millions of incels for tens of billions of dollars and Twitter's imminent decline became all too obvious.

Because I like to say "I told you so," I bailed in March 2023.

Benefits and Consequences: I had fuck-all following to lose, and I felt a weight lift from my shoulders the second I stopped logging on to the pathetic platform.

Extraction Pain Score: -44,000,000,000/10.

Managing Your Data and Raging Against the Machine

I'd like to conclude this treatise with some philosophical thoughts.

Whenever you decide to ditch an online platform, it's good practice to download your existing data first. I did this with Google and my various social media platforms and I wished I'd done so with my CuckStack content before I started ripping everything up last fall. The latter certainly would've made my Ghost integration smoother.

At the same time, I don't for one goddamned femtosecond believe these shitbag tech platforms purged my valuable advertising fodder from their servers. With their newfangled "AI" models to "train," they have even less incentive to respect anyone's data or privacy.

But, by bouncing, I'm at least depriving them of my future data – or at least forcing them to blatantly steal my information from other sites. In theory, this could expose these nihilistic fucksticks to legal recriminations.

We just need the Big Five publishing houses, a deep-pocketed law firm, and Lars Ulrich to go full Napster against the tech industry.

Furthermore, while decluttering decades of digital detritus, I found myself less and less sentimental about all the "important stuff" I'd saved. Of course the items related to my family remain priceless to me, but most of the junk in my litany of Gmail folders looked like digital hoarding.

We're all gonna die one day – perhaps sooner than anyone thinks given the state of the world – and we can't take any of this shit with us.

Moreover, as the immortal Tyler Durden once said:

I've taken both of these ideas to heart over the past twenty-five years, and they served me well during my digital cleanse.

To escape the world's most evil tech companies, all you need to do is log in and let it go.

Godspeed.