I had my attention turned to a group that produce a magazine known as Adbusters. Anti-captialist and more than a little Anti-Trump, it seems like a good fit for my worldview. There’s just one odd problem: They use the shit out of Google services.

The above the fold, autoplay video is hosted on YouTube. The fonts are loaded from Google Fonts. There is Google Analytics embedded in the page. They rely on Amazon’s CloudFront to host CDN traffic. As I scrolled through the page, my uBlock add-in blocked an estimated 22% of the requests before they get shipped off to whom? Advertisers. Or, at the least, Information Brokers.

How can I trust a group of anti-capitalist, anti-advertising, counter-culture folks that are, themselves, so embedded in the tools that enable that culture?

More Appalling

It seems like their downloads page is full things that should (probably) be simple postscript files, tiffs or other more open fomats instead of PDFs and Word Docs.

An Open Letter

Hello!

My name is Nathan, and I want to start off by saying that I respect what you do. It’s not easy trying to be anti-capitalist and anti-advertising along with being anti-whatever-Trump-is. So, keep up the good fight.

My concern, as the subject states, is with your website. It currently contains a litany of connections to some of either the largest advertisers on the planet, or those who service (and therefore surveil) enough of the Internet to make the original inventor of the Panopticon blush. This makes it hard, as someone who is tech savvy, to trust what you say without thinking that there is some sort of hidden agenda.

I get it. It’s hard being on the Internet without relying on someone else’s tech stack. Even harder if you want to reach people and actually get them to see your content. Lord knows I don’t get any viewership. However, I think there is middle-ground to be had here. We’ve long had the ability to self-host sites and tools without the explicit support of the Tech Oligarchs. It’s harder, and more expensive, sure. However it’s also a small act of defiance that says more about the people doing it, than the act itself.

Don’t get me wrong. Your publication is yours to run alone. I don’t know the back-of-the-store circumstances that keep the machine running. I know, having worked in magazines before, that often times the website is the lowest priority. It’s reasonable to hold the view that journalism and activism (as well as getting enough subscribers) are far higher on the list of things to do. I wouldn’t change that.

I would, however, like you to at least sit down and look at what you’ve put together and see if, at some point, you can make your site say what your message says you do. Get rid of the proprietary formats on the download page, lose the Google tech for visitor metrics, and opt-out of CloudFlare and CloudFront’s panopticon for delivering closest-hop CDN data. These companies are the ones not just enabling the hyper-capitalistic now, but actively innovating in the space to make it even more inescapable.

Thank you for your time and consideration.