This being the first post on this blog, it should probably start with something historic like “Hello World!” Or perhaps with a grand, quotable statement about a step forward for humanity. But since this is called Juan’s Rants, I’ll start in style. Let me explain what led me to start a blog.

The short version: politics and boredom. Now, the longer version. I’ve always followed politics closely. As will likely become clear over time, I’m the perfect example of a left-leaning centrist dad. I was horrified when Trump was elected in 2016. And even more so in 2024. But what happened once he was in power was far worse than anything I had expected. First, there was the lack of decency, the crassness with which he ignored limits on his power, the rule of law, and the separation of powers. Then, there was the arbitrariness with which he handled everything and everyone. The way he and his minions spoke about Canada, Greenland, or Europe—while being super chummy with Putin and the like—left a lasting impression: that he, and by extension (though in more diffuse ways) the US as a whole, could not be trusted.

Then there was the fact that Musk could simply cut Starlink service to Ukraine, his role in government, and the tech billionaires behaving like courtiers. All of this led me to decide to quit big tech—or at least reduce my reliance on it and how much of my money it gets.

I started by basically stopping my purchases on Amazon. Most of what I bought there were books, and this was surprisingly easy to change: I began ordering books through a local bookstore, Librerie Greenwich. It’s simple—the books arrive in a couple of days, the price is the same, and you go there to pick them up and end up staying for a while, chatting with the owners. The only downside is that you always leave with more books than you intended, but that’s how I discovered Sigrid Nunez, and I am really I did: The friend is truly fantastic! Now, back to Amazon: I still occasionally buy things there, but I try to find alternatives, and it’s definitely no longer my first choice.

Besides reducing my use of Amazon, I decided to degoogle. This hasn’t been easy—Gmail was my main email, I logged in everywhere using Google Pass, I used Drive, and had a Google Sites page, and so on. You don’t realize how intertwined Google is with everything you do online until you try to get rid of it. By now, I’m basically degoogled. I’ve moved my email, password manager, and Drive to Proton (I decided to pay for services). I host my webpage on Gitlab, and make it accessible via the same domain, perlora.eu, of which this blog is a subdomain. I love owning perlora.eu: the real-world Perlora is what I always describe as “the village of my grandmother.” Anyway, I still haven’t deleted my Google account because I still receive some mail there and want my old Sites page to redirect to the new one, but I plan to delete it at some point next year.

The last big company I’ve been very dependent on is Meta. While there are plenty of free substitutes for zoom, there’s no good substitute for WhatsApp that I can see—maybe Signal. I’ll need to check. But beyond WhatsApp, I’ve been a heavy user of Facebook. I announced in March that I was leaving, but I failed miserably. I tried Bluesky instead, but it wasn’t for me because what I like to do is rant. And share pictures of my cats. And post silly comments. The plan is to see if I like Mastodon more than Bluesky as a place to post cat pictures, and to use this blog to rant. I’m not sure what will happen with Facebook, but I hope to become more of a voyeur (of the very little there is to see there) and eventually quit it altogether.

A final note: after deciding to write a blog, I started thinking about where to host it. Blogger, being part of Google, was out of the question due to my degoogling obsession. The obvious choice would have been WordPress, but seeing it described as “the world’s most widely used content-management system” was a turnoff, given my move away from big tech. This is probably irrational, but there it is. So, I decided to see if I could build a site myself. Amazingly, here it is. As you can see, I didn’t put much effort into making it pretty, but it looks decent to me, and it only took about a week to get the domain perlora.eu and build my webpage and the blog as subdomains. It would have been impossible without the invaluable help of Mistral’s Le Chat. And this leads me to a final thought: if a total waste of space like me can build this in a week using AI, then man am I happy that my livelihood does not depend on writing HTML sites.