blog / rant
the current tech industry needs to die
2025-01-30
given the current news cycle of tech billionnaires getting scarily close and cozy with the new us government and far-right influencers (see this article from makena kelly at wired among others) and all big tech corporations currently pushing to not only selling our data for profit (as they‘ve been doing for ages) but also using it to train generative ai to plagiarize us while trying to silence and erase us for being trans, for supporting humanitarian aid in palestine, for calling out trump‘s obvious fascism and musk doing the hitler salute, we need to move away from the big tech corporations for good in the long run. If we want them to change, we need to take power away from them through giving them less time, less money, and most importantly less traffic and data. i know that‘s easier said than done and there‘s probably no way of getting away entirely from corporations like google, meta, microsoft or amazon unless you get off the grid completely and what i‘m writing here isn‘t gonna be news to you probably but i want to get this shit off my chest, in the following are some steps you can take to move away from the big corporations.
small-ish things to do that you will only have to make minor concessions for:
1. switch to open source software
instead of using google chrome, microsoft office and similar, start using firefox [update 2025-06-01: due to the new ai policy of firefox i no longer recommend switching to firefox, i started using librewolf since then and have run into no issues once fingerprinting is enabled again] and libreoffice and other community-driven open source projects to give big tech less data of you to sell or train ai on. i haven’t taken the plunge to switching my pc to linux yet but if you're tech-savvy it's worth at least considering if what you do on your pc is also entirely possible using linux.
2. install an adblocker
get ublock origin or something else asap, i‘m tired of acting like having no adblock helps your favorite creators on youtube, cause at the end of the day, while it does help them i suppose, the bottom line is that it helps google above all else. support your favorite creators/artists/people on the internet through more direct ways instead if you have the funds.
3. migrate your social media
there are plenty of alternatives around if you still want the social media experience, bluesky has seen mass adoption as a twitter alternative, set up other messenger apps than whatsapp and try and see if your friends have already done the same and try and see if you can get friends to adopt too, there have been alternatives for instagram and tiktok the names of which i can't remember (i'll add the names in edit when i find them), and mastodon is not even centralized to one company, those might turn bad at some point (hell, bluesky already has its issues too) but they can still be shaped by the early adopters. If you use social media as a news source specifically, set up an rss reader, lots of publications still have an rss feed and with this you can have a daily feed of news from trustworthy sources with much less exposure to the hostility of news discussion online.
4. migrate your email address
it‘s pretty self-explanatory, don‘t stick with gmail, find a new email host and move your most important accounts there, on the plus side you‘ll have much less spam to deal with for a good while too. there‘s plenty of free alternatives out there just make sure you look up the corpos and ceos attached to the companies to make sure they‘re not a right-winger (looking at you proton).
5. switch your cloud service
cancel your google drive or onedrive subscription and get a different cloud service at the same price that isn't attached to google or microsoft or amazon (i'm not in the US so i can't tell you what to get there frankly, but getting servers outside of the US might be a better idea anyways, i'm in germany and ionos is serving me well also for webhosting this very site and the servers are local in germany). if you got more of a budget you can set up a nas server in your own home network to use as your cloud storage, long term that will even be cheaper as you won't have to pay subscription fees for it if you need a lot of storage.
6. switch to the less bad
a bit of a defeatist point but if user comfort is key (and i get that it might be for a lot of you) make an effort to switch to equivalent services that cost just as much but are a little less awful. case in point: if you're still on spotify, why? other streaming services cost just as much, pay more to artists, often offer higher quality audio, have the same selection of music for the most part, and, most importantly for my point, don't shove millions of dollars into joe rogan's butt to keep him happy. my personal recommendation is tidal but i'm not gonna tell you what to do except please move away from spotify. you might not be able to find everything you get from amazon at one single store at the same price but if you play your cards well you can find other reliable online shops where you can get what you'd usually get from amazon for just as little if not less money. other search engines are just as good as google if not better at this point since a lot of them don‘t have the awful ai summary bullshit tacked onto them yet.
i know this has been a very incomplete list, there‘s more to do and i know this isn‘t exactly a guide on how to do things, but this wasn‘t my intent, i‘m not a hacktivist, i‘m not a computer expert as such, and you can look all of this up easily. for other creatives i will also add, i get that migrating platforms and leaving others behind can be hard on maintaining an audience, so i will not tell you to quit those platforms altogether, but maintain a private website with your works, set up a mailing list, put up an rss feed, get as many ways as possible to notify your audience without having to go through social media cause that way you won‘t lose everyone in the worst case.
again, i am not an expert, but i hope i can get people to at least think about some of this because social media has always been and will increasingly become hostile towards many of us and i do not believe that “the next big thing”, regardless of what’s it gonna be, is gonna save us, we need to stop depending on a select handful of online services and corporations for our entire browsing habits otherwise this will never improve for any of us.
