"And now that you do not have to be perfect, you can be good." 
- John Steinbeck

Babe, you know I'm trying to make a change

For six weeks I have been buying my bread from a woman named Tatjana who makes 15 loaves at a time from the micro-bakery operation in the kitchen of her home. She bakes twice a week, on Tuesdays and Fridays. You need to remember that you want bread for the week and order it three days before bake day. You choose from a small collection of hand-made, traditional European-style sourdough loaves and you pay a tiny amount extra to have them delivered to your home in person, by her. More often than not, they turn up warm from the oven. It is fantastic bread made by a gifted and skilled human being who makes one thing and really cares about that thing being outstanding.

The poisonous tumour installed in my brain by a decade of reading about Silicon Valley always thinks 'this is a business that can never scale' and it's like well yes that is the fucking point actually.

It is curious that in 2025 in the United Kingdom it somehow feels like some sort of act of radical localism to buy a food item with a 30,000 year history made by a business that is not currently listed on the stock exchange. Maybe this says more about me than other people, though. Personally, buying bread from an organisation listed on the stock exchange is one of the many things that does in fact make me think deeply about what the Fuck we are doing as a society a lot of the time now and why exactly we have backed ourselves into the many seemingly-inescapable corners that we have.

I love bread, but buying this bread is mostly about arriving embarrassingly late to the party of trying to act practically on the idea that the world is just what we decide that it will be, and that it is malleable, and that nothing is inevitable. In short, I am now trying really hard to spend my money in ways that I hope will affect and improve the world around me both for myself and for others. None of us can do it alone. But I think there is hope if we do it together.

It's all upside down

I think it's more common than one might realise to slowly and unintentionally build habits that you did not consciously choose, and eventually strike moments that make you gaze upon your life wondering how they came to be. Despite a quiet but growing feeling of latent dread about many of my own consumption behaviours (drifted well beyond what I would have chosen if faced with all of the same choices today), I still spent too long giving myself permission to ignore the implications of spending much of my personal income with some of the worst companies on planet earth. It did, however, always feel clear to me that I was going to eventually have to correct this. Especially given their growing and frankly, cartoon-villain levels of civic abuse committed every day, although many of them barely existed just 20 years ago. But unfortunately, moral bankruptcy happens the same way as actual bankruptcy; slowly, and then all at once. These institutions rely on the convenience of their respective market shares; hacked out and bankrolled over years by a near infinite amount of subscription cash and indefatigable venture runway. They are relying on it eventually becoming too cumbersome to move away and their market dominance leaving only limited, expensive or inconvenient replacements for the deeply unethical services you have, by then, invested years of your time and money in. Over years, these companies leech into all of the corners of your consumer life. The power that this continued endorsement grants them transforms them quietly into giant political and economic influencers that shape every detail of the reality we are doing a shockingly poor job of learning to occupy harmoniously.

In a surprise to few, it turns out designing an economy around the whims of the owners of organisations that exist as vehicles for an insatiable appetite for money has left us with the outcomes you might expect. The world's richest 1% own just more than 50% of its generated wealth. The wealthiest 10% control around 85% of it. It is an astonishing, upside-down cake of inequality of now monumental proportions.

Spotify's purpose is to transport hundreds of millions of dollars created by musicians into the bank accounts of the owners of humanity's most advanced autonomous weapons platforms

Following the wisdom that a system is what it does, Spotify in 2025 is a computer system that converts the huge mountains of money that musicians generate using their creative gifts into an astonishing net worth for it's billionaire founder, so he can deploy it with his separate investment company in leading a $700 million dollar investment round in cutting-edge autonomous weapons companies.

Spotify, prior to this, were already well established as the market-dominant streaming service that pays easily the worst per-stream artist royalty rate ($0.003 to $0.005) in the industry. As a music company, this should already be mortifying, and more than enough reason for all of their users to find another service. But perhaps unsurprisingly, the person who founded what I personally think might be one of the most artist-exploitative multimedia companies in technology history is unperturbed by the order left designed; sufficient that the revenue extracted from the global artist community that provide the platform's only meaningful product is now, with some intermediary steps, relocated to places like the bank accounts of German weapons companies. The weapons companies then give that money to some of the world's most academically accomplished people who have come to the remarkable conclusion that the best use of their talent and their single blessed lifetime on this miracle of a planet is to design modern warfare's most advanced assault drones.

Listen I'm just saying I guess I wouldn't do it myself and also that it's a dynamic that feels like a nightmare. And that it's an interesting thing because it's one type of thing to nakedly dump your money into these companies for a return. It's another entirely to run a music company that is in fact a sort of cash extraction fan sat in the unexpected chasm between musicians desperate to make money from the discovery of their own art, and ambitious venture capitalists hoping to make money from the brutal economics of war. Look I'm not saying that Spotify makes the weapons or even owns the stake, because that would not be true. I'm sadly not even saying that today, we don't need weapons companies, which is just a very horrible thing itself. I'm just saying that the business guys who got richer than your mind can ever imagine by controlling access to almost all of today's music now pay a lot of science guys to make robot weapons. People who actually go to war are often haunted by the memory of the constant overhead sound of drones by the way and if they do get to come back home a lot of them don't talk about it much after. The ones I have personally met do however love music.

Which I guess is why it's a jarring thing to think that subscribers do now pay £9.99 a month for a service that is whether they like it or not implicated in the future of products such as the CA-1 Europa Autonomous Uncrewed Combat Aerial Vehicle or the SG-1 + Lura Underwater Autonomous Mass and I personally think that subsurface surveillance patrol swarms are a thing that I should not be worried about when I just want to listen to Chicago's finest hardcore band Harm's Way. And that when the band make me feel like something deep in my spirit is roaring with knowing and understanding and satisfaction, when they drive yet another thunderous, wailing rhythm section, that their artistry should somehow cross over into the area of drone manufacture is a profoundly perverse outcome. Or similarly, when I listen to anything by South London jazz royalty Venna, and his delicate saxophone lines wrap around me like the sunlight of a never-ending dream of being in love in Barcelona. And I feel the warmth of Rocco Palladino's rich, wandering basslines just shimmer over my skin, like some sort of golden blanket. When those notes make the hair on my arms stand up I don't want to have anything to do with Helsing's HX-2 – AI Strike Drone even if it has a 100km operator range and is immune to hostile electronic warfare measures even without a consistent data connection. But what do I know I'm just some fuckin' guy blogging about bread.

So it's like I said. It's like the bread. It all does in fact make me think deeply about what the Fuck we are doing as a society a lot of the time now and why exactly we have backed ourselves into what once felt like many previously-escapable corners.

Perfect divide, gentle change

Because of all of that weird shit, I felt I had to leave Spotify behind, which felt oddly emotional and psychologically difficult because I listen to at least 30 hours of music a week and had curated something like 350 custom playlists from nothing over 9 years. Turns out it was practically, pretty easy though, which is like any of the countless tasks that I think about for 4 full months and then just do in one evening, including building this website. I left Spotify for Tidal. Tidal is unfortunately also a different sort of music theft company of its own, owned by Block, but it pays artists almost 4 times what Spotify does, the sound quality is higher and it isn't absolutely packed with new, nonsense features that I hate. I've also since bought four records on Bandcamp, which is the first time in a long time I've actually bought music directly from the artist and I'm mostly going to commit to doing more of that. I've also bought a piece of merchandise at every single concert I've been to since, even if small, which is hands-down the best way to support your artists.

I guess I'm focusing on Spotify a lot, but it's not really even about Spotify individually.

I used the forward motion to also start to try to get a grip on the other ways I've been leaning on companies that everyone knows are getting away with doing very bad stuff. I used to shop constantly at Amazon. I cancelled Prime pretty much immediately and haven't spent any money at Amazon retail in six weeks, which is very significant, relative to what I was doing for the decade prior. It turns out you can just find loads of small businesses near you selling the same thing for almost the same price. It doesn't arrive the next day, but we need to get serious about whether or not the ecological and economic decimation caused by Amazon is worth the benefit of receiving things like candles 12 hours after you order them. I moved my side projects off of, and cancelled, my Vercel account. I'd already left Twitter a long time ago, despite being active on there for 13 years, and Facebook is just a place where I log in every few months to get something second-hand off of Marketplace. I've been trying mostly to shop outside of huge national chains for perishable foods like fruits and vegetables. I've been buying second-hand Blu-rays for like £1 each, and beginning the rebuild of my physical media library. I've been buying my bread from Tatjana.

I think there's a sad and predictable response to an attempt to do better in an environment where individuals alone cannot make the difference they want to be able to due to the overwhelming power of oligopoly. A number of people have fairly gleefully (?) told me that not shopping at Amazon doesn't change anything because AWS powers 35% of the Internet, like I don't already fucking know what a dismal situation that is. A few have told me things like "they're all doing bad stuff", and the worst of all of this shit is "there's no ethical consumption under capitalism". Like, so what? Even if that is true, so what? You get to write yourself permission to default to the lowest common denominator shit possible and that that's not behaviour that shapes collective incentive? It's the same school of thought of 'well, if I don't do Bad Thing X, someone else just will anyway'. The correct response to that is 'let it be them'. It's a manoeuvre and it's a transparent line of shit and even I knew that for all the years I was ignoring it myself.

I haven't been talked down to by anybody else who is also making their own gentle change. The same way that you rarely get shit on by somebody doing better than you at anything.

This consistent misread is that no positive change is worth making unless you make it in a pristine, completely consistent, platonic final form. No. Not only is this characteristic of the main problem of progressivism today, this is also fundamentally untrue. No change is made in a vacuum, and no step forward in history comes perfectly. Believing it is true extricates you from your own responsibility and your own autonomy. It reduces your individual volition and humanity to a tool of large business. It is obedience in advance. It is an obscene mode of infantilism and not an honest position. And it reminds me of the total truism, the necessity of accepting that you won't be perfect, and that's fine: "And now that you do not have to be perfect, you can be good."

These are small moves, and something I hope to expand upon as I find ways to interact more intentionally with the technology industry over time. But I would really like to invite you to the same beginning of your own small changes in the ways that your own life and mind can afford. Because it does matter. This is not about an attempt to kill certain companies. It's less naive, and quieter, and more pragmatic than that. It's about nourishing others as if they are living like you are, as a practical movement towards using our collective power to grow a world we intentionally want to see more of. It is about a world that positively blooms around us because we are committing to the quiet and constant and careful work of tending to it.

On a parting note, I leave you with two of the greatest to do it:

"The ultimate, hidden truth of the world is that it is something that we make, and could just as easily make differently." - David Graeber

And:

"But love doesn't just sit there like a stone; it has to be made, like bread, remade all the time, made new." - Ursula Le Guin

For now, I am wishing you the best music you have ever heard in a world where the artists are paid handsomely for the joy that they break apart your misery, and mundanity, and pain with.

Until tomorrow. 🕶 🖤