Anselm just published a response* to NYT's "The Big Five tech companies increasingly dominate our lives. Could you ditch them?" quiz.

His personal results seem to be quite similar to what I'd find out. Ditching Apple for example would be way harder for me as, say, ditching Facebook - which I already try to avoid as much as possible, but as Anselm wrote, with friends using Instagram and Whatsapp constantly, there's no way around touching FB from time to time.

A thought I had while reading this — if data indeed is the new oil, shouldn't we all be very very alert and have a really good look at how companies/capitalism/industries have treated the environment in which they used to source their profits? Sea oil and oil spills, mining and rivers full of acid, mono cultures and the loss of rain forests, for example?

If data is the new oil, then we, the people, the users, are the environment in which the oil is sourced, and why on earth should "corporate" suddenly treat this environment in a respectful and sustainable way? When it proved over a century that ultimately the maximum exploitation of the providing environment is key?

Thus he spoked and another gallon of data is squirted into the pipes of the interwebs.

[*] which in turn was inspired by Jeena's post