Mood Quixotic
Why I'm leaving FB, Insta, Spotify, and Amazon
It’s New Year’s Eve 2025. Black eyed peas with ham hocks are simmering. By midnight tonight, they’ll be tender and tasty, and I will have left four of my go-to resources: Facebook, Instagram, Spotify, and (gulp) Amazon.
First: I’m doing what feels right for me, not shaming or goading anyone else to do anything. You do you.
Second: I’m not a purist, so please don’t task me with a bunch of whataboutism. All those arguments crowding your hard palate have already kept me up at night. These changes are beyond inconvenient for me and utterly inconsequential to the windmills at which I’m tilting. Other companies are blah blah blah. I know, I know.
No, I can’t dismantle the machinery of despotism. But I can remove myself from it. So I’m doing that.
= Facebook and Instagram
What got me thinking: In 2024, I gave up social media for Lent, and within days, my eyesight, mental clarity, and anxiety level were noticeably improved. I read more and wrote better. I stayed off for several months, then got sucked back in.
When I was a kid, my dad was the general manager of a radio station. When I asked him how they made money when the music was free for listeners, he told me, “The music isn’t the product being sold. The listeners are. Someone wants their attention, and we get it for them.”
The product being sold by Meta is me. My eyeballs. My attention span. My family. My information. They’ve been pulping the most precious, inexorably limited natural resource I have: my time. And they bartered it out from under me so skillfully, so incrementally, I almost didn’t notice. Almost.
A bridge too far: Seeing Mark Zuckerberg, Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk, and other oligarchs lined up behind the podium at the president’s inauguration in January 2025 sent a clear and chilling message: “This chump belongs to us. We rule the world now. Get used to it.” The swift evisceration of our democracy, government agencies, and societal norms created a sort of vertigo that was paralyzing for a lot of folks, including me. We’ve been struggling all this year to find our sea legs, and now we’re in “better late than never” mode.
FB and Insta aren’t the only purveyors of mis/disinformation, but they’re the ones who’ve been making money off my participation. (I’ve never been on X. All the “NYT bestselling author Joni Rodgers” accounts with my photo are bogus.) Cory Doctorow’s explanation of enshitification on the Daily Show brought clarity to my growing sense of ick. I started downloading as many photos as I could. At midnight tonight, ready or not, I’m done.
What I’m doing instead: This Substack, for starters. I’m not trying to make money off it. I just need a space to sound off once in a while. FWIW. Since I announced my departure, I’ve had a lot of inquiries from writers who said they valued my takes on the craft and business. Maybe this is a venue where I can offer something that feels purposeful without encouraging scrolling that chews up a writer’s reading and writing time. Let me know if there’s a topic you’d like me to gas on about. There’s a lot going on in the publishing industry, and God knows I got thoughts.
The main thing that kept me on FB/Insta was the connection to far flung friends and extended family. I’ll have to make a conscious effort to connect with my nieces and nephews now. Texting. Postcards. Zoom invitations. You know—actual human interactions. I think I remember how to do that.
= Spotify
What got me thinking: The first words out of my mouth every morning when I walk into the kitchen: “Alexa, play Spotify.” I’ve curated a number of playlists: Breakfast Jam (good morning vibes), Auntie Uku (songs I want to learn), We the People (apt protest music we play through a busking amp at marches and sit-ins). Every book I write has a Spotify playlist of “anchor music” that takes me instantly to the core vibe of the book. After a list plays through, Spotify continues feeding me music that has a similar vibe.
Liz Pelly’s “The Ghosts in the Machine” article in Harper’s is a stomach-churning look at how the Spotify sausage is made. Sweat shop generic instrumentals and AI slop had become the dominant tracks rolling in the background of my life. The AI tracks are surprisingly good—having skillfully ripped off history’s finest jazz musicians—but I want to support human artists.
Because I could not imagine life without Spotify, I resolved to be more vigilant about the music I play, but I couldn’t unsee the fact that my passive-listening as facilitated by Spotify was encouraging spam and AI slop while screwing over artists.
A bridge too far: I cut ties with Spotify after they doubled down on their decision to run ICE recruitment ads. Along with unfettered spam and slop, they’re tonguing this fascist propaganda into the earbuds of young people who are desperate for jobs, healthcare, and student loan relief. It’s horrifying enough that my tax dollars are paying for it. I’m not giving Spotify another dime.
What I’m doing instead: Suggestions welcome! Deezer, maybe? Or a return to CDs?Right now I’m living on my vinyl collection, which has been great, but I feel the novelty wearing off every time I have to get up from my desk or the dinner table to flip an album over. Let’s pretend it’s because I’m focused on writing, not that I’m too butt lazy to walk 14 feet.
Seriously, if you know of a good Spotify substitute, let me know.
= Amazon
What got me thinking: Like a lot of authors, I’ve had a love/hate relationship with Amazon for decades. I love how they democratized publishing with KDP; I hate how they turned around and screwed over the striving authors who provided grist for the Kindle mill. I love that I can order books (and other things) that aren’t immediately available to me in the rural area where I live (a remote PNW peninsula); I hate how they’ve ground local businesses and indie bookstores to a pulp. I love that I was able to republish my backlist books under a new imprint; I hate that they mistakenly stripped hundreds of reviews and ratings from those books and then refused to fix it.
I could go on, but the bottom line has always been Amazon’s domination of the book market, which instilled this idea that authors and publishers survived (or not) at the pleasure of Jeff Bezos.
A bridge too far: Again, it was that inauguration moment. I witnessed this guy’s pillaging of the publishing industry from the very beginning, and the values system was clear: profit über alles, fuck art, fuck literature, fuck small businesses, fuck his own employees. And now he’s puppeteering our democracy? Ugh.
As an author, there’s nothing I can do about the sale of used copies of my books on Amazon or about the sale of my ghostwritten titles, but as of midnight tonight, paperbacks and ebooks published by my own imprint will be removed. As a consumer, I’ll be closing my account and cancelling Prime. I just don’t want any part of Amazon as long as the socially irresponsible corporate ethos and support of fascism persist.
What I’m doing instead: My paperback books will remain available via Barnes & Noble and indie booksellers and on loan from local libraries. Ebooks will remain available via B&N, Smashwords, and iBooks. I’m also looking at ways to do direct sales via my own website. We’ll see how it shakes out.
As with the other titans mentioned above, I know this hurts me more than it hurts Amazon. I know my departure won’t cause a ripple on the ocean of available books, but living 300 steps from the Pacific Ocean has done a lot for my sense of perspective. It’s taught me a few scary lessons about rogue waves and undertows and reminds me daily that being comparatively inconsequential is a lovely thing. I don’t have to be responsible for the whole world, only my small corner of it.
I can’t let my inability to do everything obscure my responsibility to do something.
Channeling Patti Smith:
the people have the power
to redeem the work of fools
upon the meek the graces shower
it's decreed: the people rule
Thoughts?
