The Disentanglement Podcast

34-Temporarily Disentangling from Disentanglement

In which Ms. Sara tells you why she and Mr. André are taking a temporary hiatus from the podcast but will be back in the fall of 2023, and how to occupy yourselves in the meanwhile!

33-How Many and What Kind of Backups?

In which we review our backups for digital data, which are more and less subject to privacy violation, and the difference between storage, backup, and archives. Actually, this is way more interesting and useful than that description makes it sound. Ad copy is not our forte.

32-Credit Card Churn: Yea or Nay?

In which we discuss our overabundance of credit cards, what we did about it, and how to extract actual monetary value from their extraction of your data.

31-Just Why Exactly Is Budgeting Software Free?

In which we realize with horror that for all our efforts to cover our privacy tracks, using free budgeting/accounting software essentially makes us an open book to surveillance capitalists looking to extract metadata, and we chart some ways to disentangle ourselves from all that.

30-Will the Internet Swallow Itself?

In which we veer from tech and social criticism to the philosophical question of whether the internet will be its own undoing, and whether costlessness is so much in violation of the very structure of the universe that it must by definition fail.

29-Baby Steps

In which we discuss three baby steps we've taken recently to disentangle ourselves: deleting Amazon wish lists and buying elsewhere, deleting old social media posts and letting the accounts sit dormant, and creating a separate email account and identity for e-newsletters.

28-Chopping Down the Amazon

In which we discuss why you might want to chop down the monster of online sales and then some practical ways of going about doing it.

27-Capitalism and Big Tech

In which we discuss how the rapacious depradations of Big Tech (among other things) causes Westerners to diss capitalism morally, the various meanings of the word, why communism should not be considered the logical alternative to the worst of Big Tech capitalism, and some more fruitful ways of thinking about a free market and a free government in the cyber era.

26-First Steps in Degoogling

In which one of us talks through his first efforts to disentangle himself from various Google systems and it wasn't really as hard as he expected. The other of us is cheered and encouraged by this, and you should be, too.

25-Making AI Look Better Than It Is

In which one of us goes off on the economic and human costs of sucking up to AI like it is better than it is, which requires making humans look worse than they are, and the other responds somewhat more reasonably but basically agrees. Also, we tell you that you are marvelous.