T- Tap out of Surveillance and Into Community
DECENT SEAS · Seventh action
TTap Out of Surveillance and Into Community
Every time you open Facebook, you’re clocking in. There are better places to be.
Your attention is yours. So is your inbox, your search history, and your community. The tools you use every day were mostly built to monetize those things — but that doesn’t mean you’re stuck with them. This guide is about using technology on your own terms: moving your public presence somewhere better, protecting your private communications, and finding your people wherever they actually are — including places you might not expect.
What you are actually worth to them
The business model, in plain numbers
The platforms you use free of charge are not free. The price is your data, your attention, and your political psychology. Understanding the scale of what you’re giving away is the first step toward deciding whether the exchange is worth it.
The surveillance economy by the numbers
97% of Meta’s revenue comes from advertising — $164.9 billion in 2024 alone. Your engagement, your clicks, your emotional reactions are the product being sold.
3.07 billion people use Facebook monthly. That reach is what makes your data valuable to advertisers and to anyone else willing to pay for influence at scale.
Google processes 8.5 billion searches per day and tracks every one of them — along with your location, your YouTube history, your Gmail content, your app usage, and more — to build a profile used for targeted advertising.
Former Google CEO Eric Schmidt (2010): “We know where you are. We know where you’ve been. We can more or less know what you’re thinking about.” With AI, that statement is more accurate now than when he made it.
X / Twitter lost major advertisers after Musk’s acquisition — ad revenue fell by double digits — but still runs the same engagement-maximizing algorithmic model, now with less moderation and more amplification of extremist content.
“The platforms are free because you are the product. Knowing that changes how you use them.”
This is the same argument as D — Dollars applied to your attention and data. When you scroll Facebook, you are generating revenue for a company that has spent decades optimizing for your emotional engagement over your political wellbeing. When you search Google, you are building a profile that gets sold to advertisers and available to law enforcement through a court order. Choosing differently is an act of the same kind as moving your bank account.
Social platforms
Where to spend your attention, and where to protect it
X / Twitter
The algorithm actively amplifies outrage and partisan animosity. Since Musk’s acquisition in 2022 he fired 80% of staff including most of the trust and safety team, restored thousands of previously banned accounts including white nationalists and conspiracy theorists, and has used the platform to personally promote political candidates. A 2025 study published in Science found that increasing exposure to antidemocratic content on X measurably shifted users’ political polarization within ten days. You are not leaving a neutral platform. You are leaving one that is actively working against democratic norms.
This one is complicated, and we’re not going to pretend it isn’t. Meta’s business model — 97% advertising revenue — means your data and attention are its product. Facebook ended independent fact-checking in January 2025. It has been the primary vector for political misinformation in the U.S. since 2016. All of that is true. And also true: some of the most valuable civic communities in the country live on Facebook right now — local organizing groups, values-aligned business directories, mutual aid networks, neighborhood coalitions. If your people are there, that’s a real reason to stay. The goal isn’t purity. It’s intention. Get in, connect with your community, get out. Doom scrolling the feed is the enemy, not the platform entirely. Instagram runs the same data collection under a different aesthetic — use it deliberately or not at all.
Bluesky
Built on the open-source AT Protocol, meaning no single company owns or controls the network. No ads. Chronological feed by default — you see what people you follow actually post, in order. Custom feeds are transparent and user-defined, not black-box systems optimized for outrage. Over 43 million users as of 2025, including a major wave of journalists, academics, progressive organizers, and political figures following the 2024 election. Publishers on Bluesky report 2–10x the engagement of comparable accounts on other platforms. The Starter Pack feature gets you connected to a curated community in minutes. bsky.app ↗
Ad-supported and corporate-owned, so not a clean alternative — but the community structure is meaningfully different from algorithmic feeds. Most cities and towns have active subreddits. Most civic issues, policy areas, and local concerns have dedicated communities. Used with intention — targeted visits to specific subreddits rather than passive feed browsing — Reddit can be a genuinely useful organizing and information-gathering tool. Find your local subreddit, your state politics subreddit, and the issue communities that matter to you.
Substack
Where a significant portion of serious independent journalism, policy analysis, and progressive political writing now lives. Paying for a Substack newsletter you trust is exactly the kind of D — Dollars move that invests in the information infrastructure you actually want. Substack has its own funding and ownership questions, and its open platform has also given space to some harmful voices — which means you choose what you pay for and read. It is not a passive algorithmic experience. It is a deliberate subscription. That distinction matters.
The share of left-leaning news influencers on Bluesky roughly doubled in the four months after Election Day 2024. There are now over 700 Indivisible chapters active on the platform. Blueskystarterpack.com has catalogued over 170 progressive politics Starter Packs covering everything from local organizing to issue advocacy to journalism.
How to find your community in the first ten minutes: Go to bsky.app and create an account. Search “progressive starter pack” or go to blueskystarterpack.com/progressive-politics to browse curated lists. Click any Starter Pack to follow a group of people and feeds in one click. Then explore Custom Feeds — feeds built around topics by other users, from breaking news to local politics to specific issue areas. Your feed will feel alive from day one.
One honest gap: Bluesky doesn’t have groups yet. Facebook Groups, for all the platform’s problems, built community infrastructure that simply doesn’t exist on Bluesky in 2025. Local organizing groups, county-level community networks, values-aligned business directories — a lot of that still lives on Facebook because that’s where it was built. That’s a real limitation and worth naming plainly. As Bluesky develops, this will change. For now, use both where each earns it.
bsky.app ↗ Progressive Starter Packs ↗Local community groups — find your people where they are
In many areas, especially suburban and rural communities, the most active values-aligned organizing happens in local Facebook groups. County-level progressive communities, mutual aid networks, and neighbors who have already mapped the local values-aligned businesses in your area. These groups are doing real work — including things like community business directories that tell you which coffee shop, contractor, or restaurant is run by someone whose values align with yours. If that infrastructure exists in your area, it’s worth knowing about. Search Facebook for your county or city name alongside terms like “progressive,” “neighbors,” or “community.” It may already be there.
Search engines
What Google knows, and what you can do about it
Google processes 8.5 billion searches per day and keeps a record of every one of yours. The profile it builds from your searches — combined with your location data from Maps, your email content from Gmail, your viewing history from YouTube, and your purchases from Google Pay — is extraordinarily detailed. Google uses this profile to target you with advertising and makes it available to law enforcement through court orders. Clearing your search history in Chrome does not delete it from Google’s servers. Incognito mode does not prevent Google from seeing your searches if you’re signed in.
DuckDuckGo — search without being tracked
DuckDuckGo doesn’t track your searches, doesn’t build a profile, and doesn’t sell your search history to advertisers. The results are genuinely good — it aggregates from multiple sources and has improved significantly in recent years. Set it as your default browser search engine: go to your browser settings, find “Search Engine,” and select DuckDuckGo. Takes 30 seconds. DuckDuckGo also offers a browser app with built-in tracker blocking. duckduckgo.com ↗
See what Google actually has on you
Go to myactivity.google.com while signed into your Google account. You will see a searchable timeline of every search you have made, every video you have watched on YouTube, every location Google has recorded, and more. Most people find this unsettling. That reaction is appropriate. You can delete data from here, though deletion from your dashboard does not guarantee immediate removal from Google’s servers.
Startpage — Google results without Google tracking
If you rely on Google’s search quality but want to reduce tracking, Startpage is a Netherlands-based search engine that returns Google results without sharing your identity with Google. A useful middle step for people who find DuckDuckGo’s results insufficient for specialized searches. startpage.com ↗
Email providers
Your inbox is not private by default
Gmail scans the content of your emails to target you with advertising and builds a comprehensive picture of your financial activity, travel plans, subscriptions, and communications from your inbox. It complies with law enforcement requests for user data. The service is free because your email content is part of what Google monetizes. This is documented in Google’s own privacy policy, which states that automated systems analyze your content to provide personalized ads and features.
Proton Mail — encrypted email from Switzerland
Based in Geneva and governed by Swiss privacy law, which is among the strongest in the world. Built on zero-access encryption, meaning even Proton cannot read your email — they don’t hold the decryption keys. End-to-end encrypted automatically between Proton users. Free tier is sufficient for most people. Proton also offers a calendar, VPN, and cloud storage under the same privacy framework. The upgrade from Gmail is significant and the interface is comparable. proton.me ↗
Switching email is the highest-friction swap on this list
Your email address is attached to dozens or hundreds of accounts. A full switch takes time. The practical approach: open a Proton account now and start using it for any new account you create. Use it for organizing, activism, and sensitive communication immediately. Migrate everything else gradually. Even partial use of Proton reduces your exposure significantly. You don’t have to do it all at once.
Tutanota — German encrypted email alternative
Another strong encrypted email option, based in Germany under EU privacy law (GDPR). Open source, zero-knowledge encryption, no ads. Slightly different feature set than Proton — worth comparing if Proton’s interface doesn’t suit you. Both are meaningfully better than Gmail from a privacy standpoint. tuta.com ↗
Signal for messaging — covered in N
The case for Signal — end-to-end encrypted messaging, zero metadata retention, the Hegseth context — is covered in detail under N — Narrate the Truth, where it fits alongside the broader argument about secure communication and information hygiene. The short version: download it, use it for organizing conversations, and know that the CIA uses it by default for day-to-day communications because it works.
Common objections
What people say, and what’s actually true
Objection
“I can’t leave Facebook. My community is there.”
Reality
You don’t have to leave immediately or completely. Build your Bluesky presence alongside your existing accounts. Many people find that within a few months, Bluesky becomes their primary feed because the quality of engagement is higher and the emotional cost is lower. The network effect is real but not permanent — it shifted when people moved from MySpace to Facebook, from Facebook to Twitter. It can shift again. Start now before it’s crowded.
Objection
“I have nothing to hide. Privacy is for people doing something wrong.”
Reality
Privacy is not about hiding wrongdoing. It is about controlling who has power over your information and therefore over you. Your location history, your search queries, your communication patterns — this data is sold, analyzed, and used to target you politically and commercially. Journalists, activists, domestic violence survivors, and ordinary people have all faced real consequences from data exposure. Choosing not to hand over your data is a reasonable decision about power, not a confession of guilt.
Objection
“Bluesky is just a progressive echo chamber.”
Reality
This criticism has merit as a caution, not as a reason to stay on X. Every platform has a dominant culture. The question is whether the platform’s architecture and ownership work for you or against you. Bluesky’s chronological feed, custom feeds, and absence of outrage-maximizing algorithms give you meaningfully more control over your information environment than X does. Building a deliberate, varied feed is a user choice. It requires intention. That intention is worth it.
Objection
“These are individual choices. The problem is structural.”
Reality
Both things are true. The structural problem is real and requires structural solutions — antitrust action, data privacy legislation, platform accountability. And individual choices at scale create the conditions for structural change: platform migration shifts advertiser economics, moves conversations, and demonstrates demand for alternatives. D — Dollars makes this argument about spending. It applies here too. Withdraw your attention from systems that profit from your political manipulation.
Quick reference
All the tools in one place
See and delete what Google has collected about you. Start here before deciding how much to change.| Tool | Type | What it’s for |
|---|---|---|
| Bluesky | App | Decentralized social platform. No ads, chronological default feed, transparent user-defined custom feeds. 43M+ users. |
| Progressive Starter Packs | Web | 170+ curated starter packs for progressive politics, organizing, and issue communities on Bluesky. |
| DuckDuckGo | Web | Search engine that doesn’t track you or build a profile. Set as your browser default in 30 seconds. |
| Startpage | Web | Google search results without Google tracking. Good middle step if DuckDuckGo results feel insufficient. |
| Proton Mail | App | Encrypted email from Switzerland. Zero-access — even Proton can’t read your email. Free tier available. |
| Tutanota | App | German encrypted email alternative. Open source, zero-knowledge, no ads. Strong GDPR protection. |
| Google My Activity | Web | |
| Signal | App | End-to-end encrypted messaging. Covered in full under N — Narrate the Truth. |
A note on scope
This guide covers social platforms, search engines, and email providers. Secure messaging via Signal and the deeper argument about algorithms shaping your information environment are covered under N — Narrate the Truth. Moving your financial accounts and consumer spending is covered under D — Dollars. Each letter has its own lane — and this one and D are sister guides.
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