I found Alexa Speed the way I find a lot of good things: someone screaming in a comments section on a platform I'm trying to leave.
Alexa is the creator of Cut Off the Spigot, a Substack that goes category by category to find alternatives to badly behaving corporations. For the past year, she’s been doing the research most of us don’t have time for, and this conversation is about how to actually use it.
The frustration you’re feeling right now? Alexa says it’s decades in the making. Corporate consolidation, wages squeezed, services degraded, and your money funding the very forces you’re fighting. Like Chappell Roan, this movement didn’t come out of nowhere. It’s just reached a boiling point.
In this episode, we get into:
How Alexa built Cut Off the Spigot, starting with pet supplies and gardening, and working her way through 40+ industries including ring cameras, ISPs, and companies with active ICE contracts
The difference between a boycott and a migration, and why “toward something” matters as much as “away from”
What enshittification actually looks like at the corporate level, and the Norwegian consumer protection video you need to see
Why internet service providers are the category that “kind of broke” her, and how to think about unavoidable monopolies without surrendering entirely
How to evaluate a company’s harm by size and volume, not just association, and how the ICE/Hilton franchise situation in Minneapolis shows exactly how that pressure works
Why repairing a pair of boots feels as good as buying new ones
Watch or listen above, then tell us in the comments: what’s the one product, service, or platform you’re most stuck on right now, the one you can’t figure out how to leave?
Thank you to Alexa Speed for bringing the receipts and the roadmap! Follow and subscribe to her work at Cut Off The Spigot on all platforms.
Finally, we made you something special. We’re calling it your AI Go Bag: a step-by-step guide to migrating from ChatGPT to Claude. This is an evolving project and there’s a ton of support coming your way but this is the very first step. It’s gonna walk you through a super simple process for collecting just what you need from ChatGPT to get out the door and introduce yourself to Claude (or another LLM or none at all!). Check it out!
Excited to be on this journey with you all, TOGETHER.
Stay free,
Baratunde
Thanks to the entire Life With Machines team, and Layne Deyling Cherland and Alie Kilts for editorial and production support.
