Liberty as Resistance

I recently wrote about the decline in my opinion of Apple. This presents me with an ethical problem, because we’re heavily invested in the company. We don’t own any of its stock, but we’re very much entangled in its products and services ecosystem.

I’m writing this on an M4 MacBook Pro, my wife has an M2 Air, we both have iPhones, and each member of the family has an iPad (though only my son actually uses one). There’s also an Apple TV device, my wife’s AirPods, two Apple Watches, and various third-party smart home devices which integrate with the aforementioned Apple TV as a home hub.

Then there are the services and subscriptions. We use the iCloud family features, and so we pay for additional iCloud storage. Our photos are in iCloud, automatically shared between my wife and I, and we have a couple of AppleCare warranty plans. We currently subscribe to the Apple TV streaming service, and I use a few subscription-based third-party apps which are of course billed through the App Store. Even without money being a factor, we have shared folders of household documents in iCloud, shared notes for shopping lists and such, shared passwords for relevant sites and services, shared calendars and reminders, and we all use Messages and FaceTime extensively. I look at it all with despair.

Let me give a little bit of context. I’ve used Apple machines as my primary computers since I was about 11 years old. I started off with Macintosh SEs and Colour Classics (favourite Mac of all time, by the way) at school, and I had the pizza-box Macs, and the PowerMacs, PowerBooks, iBooks, G3 and G4 desktop machines, a load of MacBook Pros and iMacs, and all the rest of it. I had the Pismo and the Lombard and the TiBook. I had so many Apple Developer Connection CD-ROMs I could have built a throne from them. I could have covered my office with Apple-logo stickers. I have two Newtons and an eMate, as well as several old MacBooks and PowerBooks, in the cupboard here in my office. I’ve never in my life owned a Windows PC, though I’ve used many. My first iPhone was the 3G, and my only daily-driver phones have been iPhones ever since. I’ve never owned a tablet computer that wasn’t an iPad, notwithstanding my e-ink devices. While others wrote puff about whether you could work on an iPad, I used one as my computer for eight years.

I’m not just a user, either. The header of this site rightly identifies me as a novelist, but my degree is in computing science. I worked for Adobe back in the day, on their GoLive product, which was previously the Mac-only GoLive CyberStudio. I’ve done plenty of contract work for Apple itself, on assorted interesting things. I’ve stood on stage in a number of countries and given talks on software usability, often using Apple as the gold standard. I wrote columns and tutorials in every issue of an iPad-focused magazine, giving advice to developers. I’ve been blogging on this site, largely about technology, for over 21 years.

And I’ve written a lot of open source code, the bulk of it for iOS and macOS. My code has been in more apps than I could ever count. If you’ve been on those platforms for more than the last few years, you’ve used apps with my code included. When aliens arrive on Earth in thousands of years and open up github’s weird Arctic code vault thing, when they get to my name, they’ll say: huh, this guy was a developer for Apple’s platforms.

I am not a dilettante, or an opportunistic journo, or a career pundit. This is all very painful for me.

Apple makes the best hardware in the world, I think; credit where it’s amply due. And it’s still probably the least terrible option overall, when you consider Microsoft on the desktop and Android for mobile. In terms of security, privacy, and especially convenience, as well as familiarity and integration of course, the gilded cage is very real. In our household, we have neither the means to replace our entire tech setup, nor the time or stamina to shift everything over. The fact remains, though, that Apple just isn’t trustworthy.

Now brace yourself, my many American friends, for this next part — you surely knew it was coming.

Because of the present US administration and its politics and actions, no American company is trustworthy. Regardless of intent or principle, you cannot trust any manufacturer, or software maker, or service provider in the United States at this time, because they’re all at the mercy of an unstable, vindictive, petulant, puerile, narcissistic authoritarian, and it seems that the new normal is to act first and consider the law later (if ever).

As it has always done throughout history, this immediately creates an army of appeasers and collaborators, and US big tech is rife with them. Your data and your privacy cannot possibly be in good hands with any US company, for the foreseeable future. Arguably they never were, but it’s explicit now, and worldwide exposure to US tech is catastrophically ubiquitous. Every service based in the US, or falling under US jurisdiction in even the most incidental way, is now a trojan horse; a bomb waiting to go off. The big tech companies will comply, because they have no means not to, and/or they’re US exceptionalists, true believers, stock-market slaves, or some combination of the above. To be in Apple’s, or Microsoft’s, or Google’s, or Amazon’s, or Oracle’s ecosystems is to be exposed, because the US is not a safe place, or a trustworthy partner, much less an ally.

Even if you can somehow put issues of trust aside, there’s still the matter of sending money into the economy of a country whose government is aggressive, adversarial, and unpredictable. A country that seeks to annex the territories of allies by force. A country that usurps other governments, and routinely engages in political and military coercion and economic warfare. A country gripped by civil unrest and the rising far-right, with government-sanctioned militias snatching and even murdering people in broad daylight.

I can only imagine what it’s like for the sane and reasonable majority of Americans to live through all this. To see the increasing suspicion and distaste around the world, the destruction of reputation and of generational relationships, the animosity towards flag and towards accent, the initial bemused pity giving way quickly to anger and disgust. You are not safe for us. You are now another Big Problem country. Even in the most optimistic of outcome scenarios, regarding international opinion the US must walk in the wilderness for quite a while to come, as at most a necessary evil of diplomacy and trade.

It seems pressing to say the least, then, to detach from US tech companies wherever possible. To avoid giving them money directly, to avoid giving money from which they extract a commission, and even to avoid giving money to entirely separate third-parties whose products create an additional dependency on big-tech platforms or ecosystems.

But let’s be realistic. If I, and every person I’ve ever personally interacted with in any capacity, were to ditch all US-originated tech products tomorrow, it wouldn’t ever cause the slightest blip in those companies’ finances. It wouldn’t be noticed. I can’t possibly hurt them, or make them change any aspect of their behaviour. I’m aware of that, I accept it, and honestly it’s quite freeing to say so. I cannot make a difference to them. I can only make a difference to me.

The question isn’t whether Apple and Google and so on will continue to do what they do; they certainly will. The relevant question is whether I can do anything at all to make myself feel less trapped by my reliance on them. I’m fairly sure that I can.

Every year, the tech press asks (with increasing mirth) if it’s the year of Linux on the desktop. Every year, it is not; but that’s a simplification. It has of course been the year of Linux on the desktop for decades now, if you’re the kind of person who’s willing to make that transition and adjust some of the perceptions you’ve formed from using Windows or macOS. It can most certainly be done, and it’s also a more streamlined and approachable process than it’s ever been, in terms of comparative user-friendliness, hardware support, the availability of help, and so on. If it’s feasible for you, absolutely give it a go. Try Ubuntu, or elementaryOS, or whatever takes your fancy.

I can’t presently do that, as I’ve outlined above. There are far too many moving parts in my current personal ecosystem of technology, especially in regards to my family. Don’t get me wrong: I’d love to switch to Linux. I’ve got a virtualised Ubuntu 25.10 VM running in UTM on the MacBook Pro M4, and the performance is fantastic. Running full-screen, you’d hardly even know it was a virtual machine, and I am using it whenever I can. I’m writing this article in emacs on Ubuntu, and I’ll upload it to my site in Ubuntu, and I’ll regenerate the site to publish it in Ubuntu. It’ll just still have macOS lurking behind it, for the moment, because Apple doesn’t allow booting any operating system other than their own on M-series chips (correction: they don’t prevent it; they just don’t provide the needed documentation, so reverse-engineering is required), and the Asahi project is still working on it for the M4.

It is, of course patently absurd and unjust that I can own a computing device but not be free to choose what software to run on it. Apple is long-practiced in deploying a sinister, elastic definition of security and privacy-protection in order to justify self-serving limitations. The circumvention of an existing liberty, in order to offset a notional or otherwise asymmetric threat, is a dark pattern of authoritarianism — and of course capitalism. They care about the security of their revenue-flow a lot more.

It’s also important to remember that not all laws are just. Laws which protect or facilitate the enrichment of corporations are particularly suspect. Anti-circumvention laws are bordering upon dystopian. If you can break free, you have a moral responsibility to do so.

But how?

There are some prosaic measures, of course, and they’re nonetheless important. Don’t buy expensive new hardware or accessories from big tech companies. Don’t subscribe to their first-party services and software. Don’t support their platforms financially. Move to non-US services and products wherever possible, such as those based in the EU. These all entail pain, of course, and only for you — but principles invariably work that way.

The picture is perhaps a little rosier in terms of daily usage, though. The sensible approach to digital liberation is to change userland first; i.e. to move your desktop habits and apps to more independent versions before thinking about abandoning a platform itself. That’s what I’m starting to do at the moment.

The only true freedom, of course, comes from free/libre software (not meaning free as in zero cost, but rather the freedoms of free software), but cross-platform software (which isn’t also made by a platform provider) is a reasonable halfway-measure, especially if you can make a change for your primary work.

I will love and revere and recommend BBEdit as a text editor, code editor, and general text toolkit until my dying day, and I’m a huge fan of Ulysses for long-form writing and publishing, but I’ve moved all of those tasks over to emacs now, as I wrote about extensively. I can use emacs on any platform at any time, and lose none of my muscle memory or needed functionality. I exported my entire Ulysses library to the filesystem and I work from there, beholden to nothing.

(Although, spoilers: if there’s a single US software company I’ll keep giving money to for upgrades, it’ll be Barebones, even if I’m not using BBEdit at the time. But I digress.)

I don’t use a lot of other third-party and Apple-only software, with Logic being a notable exception which nonetheless has many competitors I could look into. DaVinci Resolve is cross-platform, and I don’t play games on the Mac generally, so my main issue is with the many Apple-provided services and integrations. Those will take time to extricate myself from, and it’ll be a piecemeal process. But I’m determined to try. I’d love to hear your suggestions on that.

In closing, here’s a thought to consider. It’s something I’ve learned during my adult life. There are those who want to take from you, and to control you, and their greatest weapon is not intimidation and fear; it is ease, and comfort. Ease of living, ease of use, ease of grasping a point or identifying a threat. Convenience and simplicity have been weaponised. In the face of that, for most people the idea of there being nobility in hardship is absurd. That doesn’t mean it isn’t functionally true; the idea will just never spread beyond the minority who are able to endure hardship by choice, in service of principle. And you’d better believe they’re a minority.

Instead, it must also be ease which is its own counter weapon. People won’t switch away from convenience until the alternative — and the process — is also convenient. The era of weaponised price is waning, ushering in the age of weaponised inertia and comfort. I think that most people, at least in the West, are now bordering upon being incapable of choosing to do a hard thing except in extremis. But there are still those who will choose to do a hard thing in order to make that thing easy in future, for themselves and for others. And they’re called software developers.

If you’re one of those, maybe you can help a bit more than most people can. Do something to free others from closed platforms and apps. Support more than one operating system, or contribute to the open source software community. If you’re a writer like me and willing to roll up your sleeves a little, I’ve created a solution for publishing fiction and non-fiction in multi-trim-sized paperbacks/hardbacks and standards-compliant ePub formats, with lots of customisation, all from Markdown files in the filesystem, and it’s built entirely on top of open source software: pandoc publish. Likewise, if you need plaintext-based back-of-book indexing without resorting to Microsoft and without the learning curve of LaTeX, I have a project for that too: TextIndex. I created these things to liberate myself, but you can use them too.

You can use one platform while supporting others, even if you can’t yet quit the platform itself. You can also practice for departure, or quiet quit, by slowly cutting ties. That’s my intention. Not because Apple or anyone else will care, but because I do.

It’s tempting to think of liberty as a binary thing, and perhaps ultimately it is, but pragmatically that’s a pessimistic position. There are some problems which don’t have an immediate solution — but progress can still be made. The individual can simultaneously embrace radical acceptance but also push against their own status quo.

In whatever small ways we can find, externally noticed or not, we can always resist.