Who Cares [About Big Tech and Privacy]?
tech privacy autonomyAs I talk in meatspace to more people about decoupling from Big Tech and rethinking how they use technology, I see a variety of responses:
- Isn’t it inevitable?
- How do I do this?
- Who cares?
I think the common thread is that pulling away from Big Tech is difficult to commit to. The technology era now includes people who have lived their entire lives knowing nothing else, and people who worked hard to understand what they know and establish an online presence. It’s a lot of work to make big changes. It’s easier to be resigned, frustrated, or dismissive than it is to try or to commit.
I want to answer each of these responses specifically, though.
Isn’t this inevitable?
The short answer is: No. Nothing is inevitable, certainly not when it comes to technology.
If the real question is: “why even try when people and groups with power are your opposition?” I’d say that power is a funny thing. It is fragile, and survives by passive consent and disorganization or fragmentation of dissent. History is filled with examples of people, companies, empires, and Gods who have lost their power or ceased to exist entirely. Big Tech and its financers and figureheads have no special protection from this fate.
The corrollary complaint is “what can I do as one person?” It’s true that systemic changes are needed. As an individual, you can’t be entirely responsible to solve a societal problem. But even systemic changes are made by groups of individuals. You can simply be one of those people; there are more choices available to you then doing nothing. You can donate time, money. You can vote with your dollars or your feet; reallocate your consumption, leave spaces where you’re not helping and join spaces where you are. You can make small changes that, if done by lots of people, will add up to big change. Doing nothing is a guarantee nothing will change. Doing something, even a small something, is living with intention and has an effect, either by economic signal, social example or direct consequence… however small, it is non-zero. Your personal action doesn’t need to turn the tide and it doesn’t need to be some perfect, contradiction-free expression of principle.
How Do I Do This?
Disentangling yourself from Big Tech should not be hard, but right now it is.
Mainstream algorithmic platforms can be fun and easy. In contrast, Mastodon gives you a blank feed to start, and even the notion of federation is confusing to people accustomed to centralized services. The demand for sovereign, self-hosted, distributed and privacy-forward services has not created a comparable ecosystem of tools and services with easy on-ramps.
I don’t have any easy answers to this. Accept that you might have to do a little groundwork… the same way you might have one time searched how to do something on Facebook or figured out how to tweak your GMail inbox. Leverage mainstream tech resources (search engines or chatbots) for help. Or seek out that dork you know who is always proseletyzing about the Fediverse and Linux and ask them. Most of them will be thrilled to help you.
Finding and signing up to alternative services is one thing. Self-hosting is another, more difficult thing. There are Linux/Homelab meetups in most major metro areas. There are lots of tools (especially coming out of the EU tech scene) that aim to make this easier for people. See yunohost, nextcloud, casaos, umbrel, and others. But you may need help making these things as reliable and convenient as “free” cloud services. Seek community help. Trusting in people over faceless corporations and algorithmically-driven online “communities” is an essential part of the process of rebuilding real community after decades of social media company intermediation.
Who Cares?
Obviously I think everyone should care. But some people have the sense that the backlash against big tech is overblown, and that the tradeoff of personal data for services is worth it, given that it’s (supposedly) aggregated and protected by policy and terms of service. Have you ever read a TOS? They are not, generally, favorable to user freedom or privacy. Still, some people prioritize their immediate convenience over long-term consequences.
Maybe this is you. Consider that there are a bunch of bad things that have happened and will continue to happen if we continue to accept the status quo:
- corporate cooperation with rights-violating government policing (1)
- mass manipulation via ads, algorithmic gaming and behavioral data trading (2)
- exposure of identifying user data, including credentials, location and health data through breaches and sales (3)
- deprioritization of software quality in favor of business-to-business commerce (4)
- large-scale data appropriation and theft laundered through ML obfuscation, digital moats, and paywalls (5)
I’m barely scratching the surface of bad outcomes here. You might be able to justify the trade-off for yourself, but you can’t pretend there aren’t external harms done to enable your tidy arrangement with the tech companies giving you “free” stuff. Someone is paying, and we are all helping in some small part to create these vulnerable, centralized, exploitative systems. It would not be worth it for any of the above bad actions to occur en masse if we did not donate our data en masse.
The real question, I think, is: how can you not care?