On Ideological Purity

I've written a few words lately about trying to shift away from U.S. tech dominance. I want to buy European/Canadian, support independent software over big tech, and move toward a digital life that aligns with my ethics. I want to question as much as I can and test my values.

It's been a long-term project, and it started with deleting Twitter back when Musk took over. I switched from Substack to Ghost and ate the fees. I deleted my book, Permissionless because it no longer fits my beliefs. I'm choosing discomfort over hypocrisy. I want to be able to look at my choices and say: Yes, this is who I am.

But here's where it gets tricky.

I still have an iPhone.

I still watch Netflix.

I still use Threads.

And that dissonance leaves me with a thought scratching at the back of my mind.

Does it make me a bad person?

Does it make me a hypocrite if I'm not all in right now?

And if I let those things slide, what else can I let slide?

If my domain name is still hosted by GoDaddy, is that a violation of my morals? If I read a Substack newsletter, am I complicit? If I search on Google, am I part of the problem? Can I still use DuckDuckGo, or is any American tool a step too far? What about my archive in Apple Notes? If I use Gmail, if I let AI touch my workflow, if I still engage with any of the infrastructure I'm trying to get away from...

And so on.

How far do I have to go before I can claim to be "ethical"?

Where is the line? Where is my line? When is enough?

Do my choices have to be black and white?

You can spend all your time scrutinizing every decision, slicing your options thinner and thinner until there's nothing left. You can reject every imperfect tool and flawed platform and compromise until you die a slow death of inconvenience, isolation, and frustration.

And when that happens, the easiest thing to do is give up entirely.

Because if nothing is good enough, then everything is equally bad. And if everything is equally bad, why not just go with what's easiest?

That's the trap.

But the point isn't perfection. The point is intention.

You don’t have to be all or nothing. You don’t have to make every decision a moral battlefield. You don’t have to sever every tie to every compromised system - and you sure as hell don’t have to do it overnight.

You have to engage. You have to stay aware. You have to keep questioning the default.

If enough people tried—just tried, even imperfectly—things would shift. If more people opted for alternatives when they could, if more people supported independent platforms even three times out of five, if more people put even a fraction of their energy into challenging the defaults, it would matter.

A lot of folks don't, or won't, because they think - they've been scolded into believing - that if they can't do it completely, it's not worth doing at all.

It is.

Every step you take in the direction of your values matters. Every time you make a choice that reflects what you care about—even if it's small, even if it's incomplete, even if it feels incremental, marginal, unimportant—it reinforces something. Not just in the world, in yourself.

And that's what counts.

Not ideological purity. Not proving a point and not waiting for a perfect option that will never come.

It's the awareness, the effort, and the willingness to think critically instead of accepting whatever is handed to you.

So no, you don't have to be perfect. You don't have to cut off everything that doesn't align 100%. You don't have to turn your life into a series of impossible moral tests. You don't have to throw away your iPhone.

Act with intention. And pay attention. And do your best.