2025 Wooden Snake: What We Shed and Why It Had to Go

/The snake doesn't mourn its old skin.

It just keeps moving — even when the new skin feels raw and exposed. Even when it itches. The Wooden Snake year had one lesson, written over and over across twelve months: observe before you judge. And observation, done honestly enough, becomes its own kind of action.

By the time the Fire Horse arrived, I had left TikTok, Reddit, and Meta entirely. I had closed my official business. I had mapped where my data goes and started building systems to route around the worst of it. I had spent a month studying my own ISP and discovered it sells my browsing history as a matter of routine policy.

None of this happened in a single dramatic decision. It happened the way the snake sheds — slowly, in sections, and not without discomfort.

It Started With the Folders

In the spring, the work was practical: the 3-Folder Rule and what it actually means to know where your things are.

What I found wasn't just that digital chaos slows you down. It's that how you organize your data shapes how effectively you can use it — including how effective your AI tools are. Disorganized inputs produce disorganized outputs. Knowing where your files live is knowing what you own. That realization — that organization is a form of sovereignty — set the tone for everything that followed.

By September, the work deepened into data flow. Understanding the creative process like breathing: something that happens constantly whether or not you're paying attention to it. The question that September forced: where does everything I make, search, and click actually go?

I followed the data.

The answer was not reassuring.

What the Privacy Pleasure Series Actually Revealed

October was the Privacy Pleasure series — four weeks on building digital independence in a world where billionaires monetize every click. I want to be honest about what that month was.

Week 1 established the foundation most people don't want to look at: your ISP — your internet service provider — is logging your browsing history, your searches, your app usage. Not occasionally. Constantly. And they sell it. To data brokers, to advertisers, to anyone who completes a compliance form and writes a check. This isn't a theory or a worst-case scenario. It's the business model.

Week 2 was about VPNs as harm reduction. Not a magic solution. A layer. A way of saying not today to the most casual forms of surveillance. ProtonVPN has a free tier. Surfshark runs a few dollars a month. Small friction, meaningful effect — the same logic that applies to every other harm reduction practice.

Week 3: Secure communication and file sharing. Google owns your email, your documents, your drive — because it was free and familiar and we handed it decades of our most intimate professional and personal correspondence without being asked what that meant. ProtonMail. Signal. Tresorit. These tools exist because someone understood that the default was not built for your protection.

Week 4: The complete system. Integration. The frame that stayed: quiet transformation. Not a public performance of leaving. Not virtue-signaling about your new stack. Just the slow, consistent work of building something that actually serves you.

That phrase — building digital independence, slowly — turned out to be the honest description of the whole year.

The Exits

The platform exits weren't sudden. They were conclusions.

Meta entirely — Instagram, Facebook, Threads — was the first to go. The exit I'd been circling for years. I framed it as a security decision at the time, which it was. But it was also simpler: Meta's AI models are trained on your content. Your photos, your writing, your patterns of engagement are training data in a system you don't own and that wasn't designed to serve you. Every post you write or read extends their model.

Closing the official business happened the same week. Not a community loss — a consolidation. The honest reason: I wasn't in any capacity to digest what was happening in the world and lead others through it at the same time. Stepping back from the public-facing work wasn't retreat. It was the decision to stop performing competence during a volatile period that required presence. I needed to deepen my own rituals, offline, out of sight. The Wooden Snake year asked for that kind of honesty about capacity.

Twitter/X followed. Musk's acquisition in 2022 wasn't a plot twist — it was foreshadowing for us. The platform that hosted the most visible political speech in the world now belongs to the man running a shadow federal agency, gutting oversight infrastructure, and using the platform itself to amplify administration messaging. Staying on Twitter after that isn't a neutral act. He subsidized the microphone.

TikTok came next — and specifically because of the sale, not the ban. The ban was noise; the sale was the signal. When a platform gets acquired or transferred under political pressure, your behavioral data — every scroll, every pause, every loop across years of use — transfers with it. You don't get a vote on who holds your profile next. The sale made that concrete in a way years of privacy warnings hadn't. I wrote about it at the time: the issue was never which government owned the servers. It was that a government — any government — could.

Reddit completed the exits. It became a matter of public legal record — not speculation, not a privacy researcher's warning, a documented government request — that DHS had successfully obtained data from Reddit, Facebook, and Google targeting anti-ICE posts. The people who wrote those posts believed they were participating in political speech. They were feeding a searchable, government-accessible database. The infrastructure was always going to be used this way. We just finally had paperwork.

Google is next. The 2026 work. The roots go deep — Gmail, Drive, Search, Maps, the infrastructure of a decade of digital life. But the Privacy Pleasure series built the alternative path piece by piece, and the alternatives exist. The goal isn't a perfect solution. The goal is less: less surface area, less data accumulation, less dependence on systems that optimize for their revenue at your expense. (More to come.)

Pinterest is on watch. The platform is in active conversations about selling to OpenAI. We've seen this before — the acquisition announcement, the terms of service update, the data that travels with the deal. Pinterest built its value on years of your visual preferences, your saved ideas, your taste. If it sells to an AI platform, that data becomes training material. The shed is already starting before the sale closes.

The Itchy Phase

The itch is real. So is the tightness. The new skin fits differently than the old one did — it pulls in places, looks unfamiliar when you catch a glimpse of yourself. For a while it doesn't quite look right, doesn't quite feel right. That's not a sign something went wrong. That's just what new skin does before it settles. The snake moves through it anyway.

You miss the scroll. Not the content — the scroll itself. The muscle memory. You catch yourself opening an app by reflex. You feel the ghost of the notification. You second-guess the decision in the specific way you second-guess things that are actually the right call.

Peace arrived in increments. Deleting the apps. Revoking permissions. Going through years of stored data and deciding, field by field, what you'll allow to remain. Requesting account deletions and waiting for them to process. Every deletion is small. The accumulation of them is the practice.

The digital wellness work from earlier in the year — sustainable habits over sweeping overhauls, neurodivergent-friendly rhythms, tech as a tool you wield rather than a system you're embedded in — made the itchy phase survivable. You don't have to leave everything at once. You have to keep moving, consistently, toward less exposure.

What the Snake Left Behind

The shed skin is on the ground.

The metadata, the behavioral profiles, the years of posts and clicks and searches — the platforms still hold all of that. Deleting accounts doesn't erase what they already kept. It stops the accumulation.

But there's something real about stopping. About the moment you decide: this is the last year they add to my file. The record they have is the record they'll have, and I'm done contributing to it.

Big Tech's trajectory toward what it is now didn't begin with Trump or Musk or the current administration. It began earlier — with the PayPal Mafia, with Peter Thiel, with the quiet understanding among a very specific cohort of people that data infrastructure was power infrastructure, and that both could be built simultaneously under the cover of "free services." Anyone paying attention in tech circles heard the warning for years: watch Thiel. Everything traces back to Thiel. Here we are.

The Wooden Snake's final gift is clarity. Observe long enough, honestly enough, and the judgment arrives without forcing it. You don't have to manufacture the conclusion. You just have to be willing to act when it comes.

The Fire Horse is already moving. The shed skin is already dry.

Everything that follows is on the other side of the burn.

Next: 2026 Fire Horse — When the Shed Skin Burns →