15 Ways to Divest from the Billionaires Today
- Spend time offline, with friends
- Community is vital, being online surrounded by the deluge of horrifying information is taxing. Make time to be with your people, reclaim your time, attention, and energy.
- Show up for your neighbors
- We take care of us. Mutual aid and support is where it’s at. Find a local organization doing work you care about and see if they need volunteers. Organize a little BBQ or potluck to get to know the people on your block. If you live in an apartment building, see if your neighbors are interested in joining or starting a tenant union.
- Use public transit or bike more (if you can)
- We may not be able to all get out of our cars all the time, but less cars on the road is less fuel consumed and less pollution in the air and on the ground. If you live in an area with public transit start by replacing one car trip a week with public transit or bike/scooter/walking instead. The less you drive the less you’re paying at the pump to fund the billionaires exploiting the planet and writing the energy policy.
- Use Meta/X less: Call your friends, start a Signal group chat, join the fediverse (Mastodon, Pixelfed), or try Bluesky
- Musk & Zuck make money off our attention. If we spend it elsewhere, we limit their power and the resources they have to sell to advertisers. Start by removing the apps from your phone and cut down your time on the websites. We may not be able to completely remove the Musk-Zuckiverse from our lives but reducing the time and content we spend and post there impacts their bottom line.
- Alternatives exist, Jointhefediverse.net is here to help! Bluesky is a great place to start if moving to the federated social media platforms seem daunting.
- What even is the fediverse? lifehacker has a great explainer.
- Musk & Zuck make money off our attention. If we spend it elsewhere, we limit their power and the resources they have to sell to advertisers. Start by removing the apps from your phone and cut down your time on the websites. We may not be able to completely remove the Musk-Zuckiverse from our lives but reducing the time and content we spend and post there impacts their bottom line.
- Use a search engine like Duckduckgo or Ecosia
- Use TOR or Firefox browsers
- or at the very least install an ad blocker like uBlock Origin
- Migrate off Gmail
- There are a variety of email hosts that won’t sell your data to advertisers for profit that offer comparable services to gmail. Cyberinsider has a good rundown of a few options and their pros/cons.
- Cancel that Prime subscription
- Shop local instead! Many stores offer delivery or pickup and your money goes back into your community instead of Bezos’ tax-evading pockets.
- Eat less meat and dairy
- There are a litany of reasons to divest from funding the handful of corporations that are raking in profits during a supply crisis and spending their energy trying to make food less safe to consume. This is a good jumping off point for doing your own research.
- Buy secondhand
- Craigslist, marketplace, numerous apps, flea markets, garage sales, thrift shops, second-hand book stores, little free libraries. Options abound, your community has one, you just have to look for it (or start your own)
- Don’t upgrade your phone before it’s out of support
- Planned Obsolescence is a trick by tech companies to convince you to upgrade your devices ever 2-3 years despite the hardware being perfectly functional. The easiest way to fight back against this is just to keep your devices until the hardware itself quits. (My Pixel 3a is still running despite being out of support for ages)
- Upcycle or Repurpose your old computers instead of throwing them out
- Instead of participating in the linear: buy, use, dispose cycle of your devices (or anything, for that matter), try to engage in a more circular cycle of: use, repair, reuse before disposing. Hackerspaces, Libraries, and Repair Cafes are good places to go to learn how to upcycle or repurpose your electronics. Engaging in a circular economy in any way that we can is more sustainable for the planet and ourselves.
- Try out Linux
- Distrosea runs various versions of linux desktops for you to try out in your browser so you can get a feel for how it works before you install it yourself.
- distrochooser.de is a tool that will help you find what installation is right for you based on your needs and computer’s capability.
- Boycott GOP-supporting companies
- Check out ProPublica’s handy tool
- This list of Billionaires supporting Trump by Forbes
- And this list of donors leading up to the inauguration by Newsweek
- Spend time offline, with friends
- The most important thing we can do to divest from the billionaires is invest in each other.
(if you found this helpful and you have funds you’d like to divest from the billionaires you can invest in my education instead)