Language is important. The corporate propagandists are winning the language branding battle. In fact there is no battle because the pushover public just accepts their terms. We need to organize and define their garbage with our terms. E.g.

  • (smart → dependent) Homes and appliances dependent on a corporation and contract are perversely called smart. So we should refer to them as “contract-dependent” or simply “dependent”. It’s not a smart dryer or doorbell, it’s a dependent dryer or doorbell. Probably makes no progress to mess with “smartphone”, but anything that has an avoidable and needless dependency needs renaming. (smartphone is debatable… maybe a degoogled or Postmarket OS phone is a smartphone while a stock Android is a dependent phone, but let’s not get too carried away). Initially it’s not effective to just start saying “dependent washer” because readers won’t understand. Say “‘smart’ (read: dependent) washer”. Credit for this terminology goes to @[email protected] for this post, which gives a bit more detail.

  • (Meta→Facebook) Meta hi-jacks a common English word to benefit a surveillance advertiser. We can’t allow this. IMO Facebook is understood and clear enough, but note that it’s not technically accurate because Meta is a parent company which has Facebook and Threads as subsidiaries IIUC (just like Alphabet owns Google).

  • (Threads→fbThreads™/®?) Since Threads is the original name of Facebook’s forum, there is no unambiguous past name to cling to. We must invent something here. Fuck those egocentric self-centered asshole fucks for hi-jacking a generic common word to describe their service. There are already confusing conversations where it’s unclear from context if someone means FB’s Threads or a generic forum (threads). It’s not just a confusion problem… when you refer to a thread in the generic sense and it is understood, there is still a subconcious tie to that shitty company… their brand benefits from conversation that does not even involve their brand.

  • (X→Twitter) This is an easy one. Just keep with the old term.

  • (Cloudflare→CF walled garden) I’ve not encountered a replacement term for Cloudflare that’s not overly hyperbolic. But we can often incorporate “walled garden” and “centralized” to stress the issues. Instead of just saying “it’s a Cloudflare site”, say some variant of “the site is jailed in Cloudflare’s exclusive centralized access-restricted discriminatory walled garden contrary to netneutrality principles of access equality”.

It’s worth nothing that hyperbole doesn’t help. E.g. we might want:

  • Meta/Facebook→Fakebook
  • Microsoft Windows→Microsnot Winblows

The problem is these terms are only accepted by fully committed digital rights folks. That’s not the crowd that needs to be swayed. Hyperbole does not catch on with moderates - the masses where it’s most important for rebranding to take hold. Good rebranding doesn’t deviate too much from neutrality.

  • (user→pawn) Exceptionally, I refer to “users” of surveillance capitalists as “pawns”. It’s probably too edgy to catch on, but it is what it is. Users is neutral and understood so it can’t easily be rebranded anyway. I will just say pawns to stress the point: who is using who?

Anyway, this is just the start of a crowd-sourcing effort. Please contribute more rebrandings in this thread as well as improved alternatives to my effort above.