Off the Grid and Online: Meet the Americans Buying Tech That Can't Snitch on Them
Marcus lives in Asheville, North Carolina. He works in HVAC, coaches youth soccer on weekends, and carries a phone that has never sent a single data packet to Google. His daily driver is a Pixel 7a running GrapheneOS — a hardened, privacy-focused Android fork with no Google Play Services, no location telemetry, no behavioral tracking baked into the OS. He installed it himself, following a guide on the GrapheneOS documentation site.
Photo: Asheville, North Carolina, via bf1af2.akinoncloudcdn.com
'I'm not a hacker,' he told No Grip over Signal. 'I just got tired of feeling like I was the product. Once I understood what was actually happening under the hood, I couldn't un-know it.'
Marcus isn't alone. Across the country — in cities, suburbs, and rural communities — a loose, largely self-organized movement of regular Americans is making deliberate hardware and software choices to exit the data-harvesting ecosystem that underpins the modern tech industry. They're not all privacy researchers or security professionals. Many are parents, tradespeople, educators, and small business owners who arrived at the same conclusion through different paths: the deal they were offered wasn't actually a good deal.
What 'Going Dark' Actually Means
The term sounds dramatic, and the media tends to cover it that way — framing privacy-conscious tech choices as the domain of criminals, extremists, or paranoid preppers. The reality is considerably more mundane and, frankly, more interesting.
For most people in this subculture, 'going dark' doesn't mean disappearing from the internet entirely. It means choosing hardware and software that doesn't continuously report back to a corporate surveillance infrastructure. The practical toolkit in 2025 looks something like this:
Degoogled Android phones. The most common entry point. Devices like the Pixel line (chosen for hardware quality and strong GrapheneOS support) or Fairphone (chosen for repairability) are flashed with open-source Android variants that strip out Google's proprietary services layer. GrapheneOS and CalyxOS are the two most prominent options in the US. Both support a sandboxed version of Google Play if users need specific apps — but the default state is a phone that doesn't report your location, contacts, or usage patterns to Mountain View.
Refurbished ThinkPads with Coreboot or Libreboot. A significant contingent of the community has moved to older Lenovo ThinkPad models — particularly the X230 and T440 series — because these machines can have their proprietary UEFI firmware replaced with Coreboot, an open-source alternative. The appeal is eliminating firmware-level surveillance and reducing the attack surface for hardware exploits. These laptops cost between $80 and $200 refurbished, which is a non-trivial part of the pitch.
Offline-first and local-network gadgets. Home automation devices that operate entirely on a local network, never touching a cloud server. E-readers with the wireless radio disabled. Cameras that write to local storage only. The philosophy is to reduce the number of devices in a household that maintain persistent outbound connections.
The People Making These Choices
Dana is a middle school teacher in suburban Ohio. She switched to a CalyxOS phone two years ago after reading about how her district's student management software was sharing behavioral data with third-party analytics companies. 'If I'm going to tell my students to think critically about their digital footprint, I figured I should actually do something about mine,' she said.
Her setup isn't extreme by community standards. She uses F-Droid (an open-source app repository) for most applications, runs Proton Mail for email, and uses Signal for messaging. She still has a Gmail account for communications with parents who won't use anything else. 'I'm not a purist,' she said. 'I just wanted to reduce the surface area. You can't get to zero, but you can get a lot closer than most people are.'
Then there's Ray, a software contractor in the Pacific Northwest who built what he describes as a 'sovereign home network' — a setup involving a self-hosted Nextcloud instance for file storage and calendaring, a Pi-hole DNS sinkhole that blocks ad and tracking domains at the network level, and a Wireguard VPN server he runs on a VPS in Iceland. His household of four, including two teenagers, runs entirely through this infrastructure.
Photo: Pacific Northwest, via parametric-architecture.com
'My kids think it's annoying sometimes because certain things don't work the way they do at their friends' houses,' Ray admitted. 'But they also understand why. And honestly, explaining it to them has been one of the better conversations I've had as a parent.'
The Technical Tradeoffs Are Real
This is the part of the story that enthusiast coverage often glosses over, and No Grip isn't going to do that. Going this route involves genuine inconvenience, and in some cases, genuine capability loss.
Without Google Play Services, certain apps simply don't function. Banking apps are the most commonly cited friction point — many major US banks use Google's SafetyNet or its successor Play Integrity API to verify the device environment, and they'll refuse to run on a degoogled phone. Some users work around this using a sandboxed Google Play environment within GrapheneOS. Others use their bank's mobile website instead of the app. A few have switched banks to ones with better web interfaces.
Navigation is another sticking point. Google Maps is the gold standard for a reason, and its offline capabilities are limited. The community has largely converged on Organic Maps (based on OpenStreetMap data) as the best alternative, but in rural areas or for real-time traffic data, the gap is noticeable.
The firmware replacement process for laptops carries genuine risk — a botched flash can brick a machine. The documentation is good and the community support is strong, but it requires a level of technical comfort that not everyone has.
Is This a Power-User Fantasy or a Real Option?
The honest answer in 2025 is: both, depending on your definition.
For someone who is technically comfortable and willing to spend a weekend getting set up, a privacy-respecting daily driver is entirely achievable. GrapheneOS in particular has invested heavily in usability — the installation process is now web-based and significantly less intimidating than it was three years ago. The community documentation is thorough. The hardware is affordable.
For someone who needs every app they currently use to work identically to how it works on a stock iPhone or Android, the tradeoffs will feel prohibitive. The ecosystem of privacy-respecting alternatives has improved dramatically, but it hasn't fully closed the gap on convenience.
What's changed is the distribution of who's making these choices. The community forums and subreddits dedicated to GrapheneOS, privacy-focused hardware, and self-hosting have grown substantially since 2022. The conversation has shifted from 'how do I do this' to 'how do I explain this to my family and get them on board.' That's a meaningful shift. It suggests the movement has moved past the early-adopter phase.
The Bigger Picture
What connects Marcus in Asheville, Dana in Ohio, and Ray in the Pacific Northwest isn't technical sophistication. It's a shared conclusion: the default configuration of modern consumer technology was designed by people whose interests are not aligned with yours, and accepting that configuration uncritically is a choice, not an inevitability.
That framing — tech as a set of choices rather than a given environment — is the core of what No Grip has always been about. You don't have to go full sovereign-network to act on it. But knowing the option exists, and that regular people are living with it successfully, changes the conversation.
The grip is looser than they want you to think.
