Cancel Prime. Remove Ring. Take Back the Neighborhood.

An OppEd by Scott Woods, Old Agoura resident and OAHO board member.

There is a certain kind of modern convenience that starts as a service and ends as a leash.

Amazon Prime is a perfect example. At first, it feels harmless. Free shipping. Streaming shows. Household basics at the door. A button you press when you need paper towels, batteries, dog food, or a last-minute birthday gift. But over time, that button becomes a behavioral trap. You stop asking whether you need something. You stop checking local stores. You stop thinking about who you are supporting. You stop noticing that your town has fewer small shops, fewer human interactions, and more delivery trucks. You trade community resilience for two-day shipping.

That is not convenience. That is dependency with a smiley arrow on the box. Everyone should seriously consider canceling Amazon Prime. Not because every Amazon purchase is evil. Not because technology is bad. But because Amazon has become too much of everything: the store, the marketplace, the cloud provider, the advertising company, the logistics network, the entertainment platform, the smart home company, the surveillance company, and the subscription machine. A healthy society should not route daily life through one corporate empire. There is something spiritually rotten about ordering everything from a company that has made local life feel optional.

The same goes for Ring.

Ring doorbells were sold to us as safety. See who is at your door. Catch package thieves. Keep an eye on your home. It sounds reasonable. I understand the appeal. I work in technology and cybersecurity. I believe in practical security. I am not against cameras. I am against pretending that a cloud-connected camera owned by Amazon is the same thing as personal safety. It is not.

A Ring camera does not simply protect your porch. It feeds a broader surveillance ecosystem. It trains us to accept the idea that every sidewalk, driveway, child, neighbor, delivery driver, dog walker, and passing car should be recorded by default. It normalizes the idea that private companies should sit between our homes, our law enforcement agencies, and our most ordinary daily movements.

That should bother people.

A neighborhood where every doorbell is a camera is not automatically safer. It may simply be more watched. And being watched changes people. It changes how we behave, how we trust each other, and how we define safety. Real safety comes from knowing your neighbors, noticing what is normal, helping each other, lighting streets properly, designing walkable communities, and building social trust. Cameras can be useful in specific places for specific reasons, but they are not a replacement for community. They are often a substitute for it.

If you want cameras at your home, own the system yourself. Use something local-first, like UniFi Protect or another self-managed NVR-based system, where footage stays under your control instead of becoming another stream inside a corporate data empire. Better yet, be thoughtful about camera placement. Do not point cameras at your neighbors’ homes. Do not record the whole street just because you can. Do not turn your front porch into a miniature police tower.

The goal should be security, not surveillance.

And this is bigger than Amazon or Ring. We are living through the age of the technooligarch. A small number of companies now control how we shop, communicate, search, store data, entertain ourselves, secure our homes, run our businesses, and increasingly how we think. They do not need to kick down the door. We invite them in through subscriptions, smart devices, apps, and “free” services. Then we act surprised when they have power over us.

The old American instinct was self-reliance.

Fix things. Own things. Know your neighbors. Build local trust. Support local businesses. Keep power distributed. But the modern subscription economy wants the opposite. It wants us renting our tools, renting our software, renting our entertainment, renting our security, renting our memory, and eventually renting our judgment. That is the real danger.

When every household depends on the same handful of companies, we become easier to manipulate. Prices go up. Privacy goes down. Choices shrink. Local businesses disappear. Public agencies become dependent on private surveillance vendors. Neighborhood safety becomes a subscription feature. And ordinary people are told this is progress. I do not buy it.

So here are three practical steps.

First, cancel Amazon Prime. Make Amazon inconvenient again. You do not have to be perfect. Just break the reflex. Buy less. Buy local when possible. Use other retailers. Pick things up in person. Borrow from neighbors. Repair what you own. Every canceled subscription is a tiny vote against monopoly dependency.

Second, remove Ring or stop paying for the subscription. Replace it with a system you control. A local-first camera system is not magic, and it still requires responsible use, but at least the default relationship is different. Your home security footage should not live inside the business model of one of the most powerful companies on Earth.

Third, organize at the neighborhood level. Talk to your HOA, city council, sheriff’s department, and neighbors about privacy-first safety. Push back against automated license plate readers and private surveillance networks unless there are strict rules, short retention periods, public audits, warrant requirements, and clear limits on data sharing. Ask who owns the data. Ask who can access it. Ask how long it is stored. Ask whether outside agencies can search it. Ask what happens when the company changes its terms.

The answer to crime cannot be “record everyone forever and hope the vendor is benevolent.”

That is not public safety. That is pre-authoritarian infrastructure. A strong neighborhood does not need to become a surveillance grid. It needs human connection, responsible homeowners, local accountability, emergency preparedness, neighborhood watch groups that respect civil liberties, and technology that serves people instead of harvesting them.

We were promised that technology would make life easier. In some ways, it did. But it also made us isolated, dependent, watched, and subscribed to everything. The next chapter does not have to be that way. Control your data.

Make surveillance socially unacceptable again.

The technooligarchs are powerful because we keep feeding them our money, our attention, our habits, our footage, and our trust. We do not have to do that forever. A free community is not built by outsourcing convenience to monopolies. It is built by people who still know how to say no.