To put our toxic relationship with Big Tech into perspective, critics have compared social media to a lot of bad things. Tobacco. Crystal meth. Pollution. Cars before seat belts. Chemicals before Superfund sites. But the most enduring metaphor is junk food: convenient but empty; engineered to be addictive; makes humans unhealthy and corporations rich.

At first, consumers were told to change their diet and #DeleteFacebook to avoid the side effects. But now, two years into the tech backlash, we know that cutting the tech giants out of our lives is impossible. So among some early adopters, the posture is shifting from revolt to retreat.

In September, for instance, Nicole Wong, a veteran of Google and Twitter, said it might be time for a “slow food movement for the internet,” reminiscing about the early 2000s, when algorithms focused on showing users useful information rather than whatever keeps people on the platform. Behavioral advertising is to blame for “this crazy environment that we’re in now,” she told Recode. In December, Jake Shapiro, CEO of Radio Public, a podcasting company, said podcasts are “the media’s slow food movement” because they’re hard to share on social media and therefore less dependent on ad tech. “It’s pleasantly ironic that some of the internet’s oldest open protocols are shining through,” he told Nieman Lab.

This vision of decentralization is more back-to-the-land than blockchain. If portals to the digital world are so exploitative, it asks, why not curate our own?

For consumers, this means forgoing convenience to control your ingredients: Read newsletters instead of News Feeds. Fall back to private group chats. Put the person back in personalization. Revert to reverse chron. Avoid virality. Buy your own server. Start a blog. Embrace anonymity. Own your own domain. Spend time on federated social networks rather than centralized ones. And when a big story breaks, consider saving your appetite for the slow-cooked, room-temp take.

At first glance, the advice sounds a little like Lean In: a call for individual action to address a systemic problem. After all, I learned about these newsletters on Twitter, discovered podcasts through Apple, and read about anonymity while logged into a Chrome browser on an iPhone, no doubt drowning in cookies. But when every aspect of our behavior online is surveilled and monetized, the prospect of clean living sounds sweet.

“I don’t know what the Michael Pollan version would be: Eat independent sites, mostly not Facebook?” says Glitch CEO Anil Dash, who helped create some early social web tools 15 years ago at Six Apart and has long argued that tech needs to reintroduce community and user control. Back then, the web could be unwieldy and unwelcoming. But imagining what a modern version of those experiences might look like is essential, Dash says, and could prompt consumers and regulators to ask: How come I can’t have that?

Former Facebook product designer Joseph Albanese decided to curate his way to a better relationship with social media after leaving the company last year. Now he uses little software hacks, like a tool to block the “feed” parts of social media apps. Albanese doesn't blame Facebook for making it impossible to put down your phone, but he also doesn’t trust new features that are supposed to reduce screen time. “They’re going to do the bare minimum,” he says.