25 ways to be a little more punk in 2025
Cut fast fashion - buy used, learn to mend and/or make your own clothes, buy fewer clothes less often so you can save up for ethically made quality
Cancel subscriptions - relearn how to pirate media, spend $10/month buying a digital album from a small artist instead of on Spotify, stream on free services since the paid ones make you watch ads anyway
Green your community - there's lots of ways to do this, like seedbombing or joining a community garden or organizing neighborhood trash pickups
Be kind - stop to give directions, check on stopped cars, smile at kids, let people cut you in line, offer to get stuff off the high shelf, hold the door, ask people if they're okay
Intervene - learn bystander intervention techniques and be prepared to use them, even if it feels awkward
Get closer to your food - grow it yourself, can and preserve it, buy from a farmstand, learn where it's from, go fishing, make it from scratch, learn a new ingredient
Use opensource software - try LibreOffice, try Reaper, learn Linux, use a free Photoshop clone. The next time an app tries to force you to pay, look to see if there's an opensource alternative
Make less trash - start a compost, be mindful of packaging, find another use for that plastic, make it a challenge for yourself!
Get involved in local politics - show up at meetings for city council, the zoning commission, the park district, school boards; fight the NIMBYs that always show up and force them to focus on the things impacting the most vulnerable folks in your community
DIY > fashion - shake off the obsession with pristine presentation that you've been taught! Cut your own hair, use homemade cosmetics, exchange mani/pedis with friends, make your own jewelry, duct tape those broken headphones!
Ditch Google - Chromium browsers (which is almost all of them) are now bloated spyware, and Google search sucks now, so why not finally make the jump to Firefox and another search like DuckDuckGo? Or put the Wikipedia app on your phone and look things up there?
Forage - learn about local edible plants and how to safely and sustainably harvest them or go find fruit trees and such accessible to the public.
Volunteer - every week tutoring at the library or once a month at the humane society or twice a year serving food at the soup kitchen, you can find something that matches your availability
Help your neighbors - which means you have to meet them first and find out how you can help (including your unhoused neighbors), like elderly or disabled folks that might need help with yardwork or who that escape artist dog belongs to or whether the police have been hassling people sleeping rough
Fix stuff - the next time something breaks (a small appliance, an electronic, a piece of furniture, etc.), see if you can figure out what's wrong with it, if there are tutorials on fixing it, or if you can order a replacement part from the manufacturer instead of trashing the whole thing
Mix up your transit - find out what's walkable, try biking instead of driving, try public transit and complain to the city if it sucks, take a train instead of a plane, start a carpool at work
Engage in the arts - go see a local play, check out an art gallery or a small museum, buy art from the farmer's market
Go to the library - to check out a book or a movie or a CD, to use the computers or the printer, to find out if they have other weird rentals like a seed library or luggage, to use meeting space, to file your taxes, to take a class, to ask question
Listen local - see what's happening at local music venues or other events where local musicians will be performing, stop for buskers, find a favorite artist, and support them
Buy local - it's less convenient than online shopping or going to a big box store that sells everything, but try buying what you can from small local shops in your area
Become unmarketable - there are a lot of ways you can disrupt your online marketing surveillance, including buying less, using decoy emails, deleting or removing permissions from apps that spy on you, checking your privacy settings, not clicking advertising links, and...
Use cash - go to the bank and take out cash instead of using your credit card or e-payment for everything! It's better on small businesses and it's untraceable
Give what you can - as capitalism churns on, normal shmucks have less and less, so think about what you can give (time, money, skills, space, stuff) and how it will make the most impact
Talk about wages - with your coworkers, with your friends, while unionizing! Stop thinking about wages as a measure of your worth and talk about whether or not the bosses are paying fairly for the labor they receive
Think about wealthflow - there are a thousand little mechanisms that corporations and billionaires use to capture wealth from the lower class: fees for transactions, interest, vendor platforms, subscriptions, and more. Start thinking about where your money goes, how and where it's getting captured and removed from our class, and where you have the ability to cut off the flow and pass cash directly to your fellow working class people
I'd love to add to this some random resources to pirate. Please feel free to add more as I'm just someone navigating through all this myself.
- Popcorn time. Multi platform, easy to navigate, has tons of shows and movies.
- Library Genesis (libgen). For books, and scientific books and articles.
- Biblioteca Cervantes. For license free books in Spanish. Technically not pirating but still good to have.
- The Pirate Bay. Here is where to find other stuff you couldn't find on, say, Popcorn time. But you can still use Popcorn time to download things from here to your machine.
These are my basic day to day tools. A piece of advice would also be: use online forums to learn more about these. I'm not a big fan of Reddit for some reasons but it is a nice place to start to look for instance "beginner guide Libgen reddit" on your search engine (preferably not Google-based).
Let's all help each other in this to regain this digital literacy that's not being taught anymore and is sort of a lost knowledge.
