Rejecting Big Tech
diy tech smalltech howtoToday’s Internet is in many ways worse than the one we had 30 years ago. It used to be easier and more fun to use computers and to be online in, say, the 1980s or 90s. This is not just nostalgia. While the hardware and software was certainly less capable, but it mostly got out of your way and didn’t take more from you than you were getting from it because for a brief time, personal computers were connected peer to peer or only intermittently on a young internet that commerce had not found or figured out how to coopt and monetize. This is no longer the case. And it couldn’t have happened at a worse time because computing has since pervaded all aspects of society. Ads and other behavioral nudges are in your pocket, buzzing your hip every few minutes.
Most affordable devices, apps, online services are stuffed with corporate bloatware and knotted up with centralized corporate services. This is done expressly to help already rich people make more money using what’s ostensibly your time, attention, compute hardware and network bandwidth. Psychological tricks, dark patterns, and the exploitation and sale of your private habits and preferences use up most of the resources, and in exchange you get a typically degraded user experience.
This limits our freedom, not just of speech but to create, to reach people, to move, to have access to power and remuneration. It restricts our right to be be unpredictable by and safe from third parties. It prevents us from taking a 10-minute breather while our wages stagnate. It prevents us from being able to decide for ourselves how or whether to extract value from our own work and creativity, rather than it being stolen, put behind ads or laundered into an AI model and monetized by someone else.
To clarify the counterintuitive idea about the right to unpredictability, consider this summary excerpt of Tim Synder’s book On Freedom:
We humans have different values, and we combine them in various ways, making us unpredictable. Today, we are becoming more predictable, and with predictability comes greater ease of control, meaning we become less free. Algorithms, social media, phone tracking, and so on, make us easier to manipulate. This is worrying and has happened very quickly. The more predictable we are, the easier it is to control us[.]
To be more free, we need to flip this script. Services are supposed to serve people, not the other way around. This is not meant to be typical consumer advocacy; after decades of heel turns by prominent tech CEOs and leaders I have no illusions about appealing to their “better nature”, or of relying a captured government to finally rein them in. This is a pledge to, and call for active participation. Individual people and social movements must take back what we were tricked and pressured into ceding to Big Tech companies.
This will involve work and creation. People who have time, energy, skills and money should be putting in effort for those who don’t, precisely because they are stuck on the present Big Tech-powered hamster wheel. This is an evolving document suggesting concrete ways of reducing dependence on this hostile form of computing by rejecting Big Tech as much as possible, in the hope that the decision will slowly but surely improve quality of life and reawaken participants to the possibility of a better, more fun, more rewarding, and more equitable way of leveraging technology and the Internet.
More dedicated and aware people have been working on this for years. Now that I have the time and means I’m refocusing on it as it’s more important than ever. I’ll make additional posts detailing how to deal with specific aspects of my own progress in the hope that it will useful to others.