Can we stay off Big Tech even if we wanted to?
Let's find out.
Back in 2018, the Cambridge Analytica-Facebook story broke. At the time, I was a slightly odd, privacy conscious (nerd alert) first year undergrad with an inactive Facebook page, who hadn't yet been lured into the culture-flattening world of Instagram or the outrage machine that was the heyday Twitter feed; even though Instagram still seemed a fairly innocuous place to flaunt your expensive but rubbish-tasting cappuccino, and this was a good while before Twitter got Musk-ified and went from manufactured outage to outright rubbish.
Spaces to socialise physically were in abundance so I didn’t feel the need to be online. And there was something about the idea of putting loads of information about myself online that didn’t sit right.
One evening after class, I remember discussing Cambridge Analytica with a close friend. This was our first realisation of the dangers of political ad-targeting. We were scandalised. As fairly inquisitive late teens, we understood data was the price we were paying for our free apps. But that it could be politically weaponised, on scale, was not on our radar.
I deleted my (barely used) Facebook account that night.
Little did I know that was the start of a journey that would lead me to tech journalism, let alone that I would come to work for the Citizens, a nonprofit co-founded by Carole Cadwalladr; who led the investigation about Cambridge Analytica that revealed how Facebook profiles were harvested by the firm working for the Trump and Brexit campaigns.
Unlike the average Zillennial — born in an in-between of Millennial and Gen Z realities — my path to Big Tech and social media is somewhat unconventional. I was never an early adopter, and always late to online trends (if I arrived at all!).
I only took to Instagram when the Covid pandemic hit and suddenly my social world as a 20-something collapsed. It was a compromise but still a means to connect with my closest friends, celebrating each other's small moments. Someone tried a nice recipe, someone else managed to go for a walk. This platform that had become a travelogue for the most fortunate amongst us now turned into a celebration of the ordinary.
But Instagram today is not something I signed up for. On any given day, I consider myself lucky if I see a post from a friend or a page I follow. Suggested posts and promoted ads fill my feed. And maybe it is not all so bad; it does make it easier for me to stay off it.
A recurrent theme in my youth, as it has been in so many of our lives in the past decade, is how to deal with a social media environment controlled by Big Tech billionaires. Can we stay off Big Tech even if we want to?
The word on the street is: no. But should you listen to the word the street, when the chat is coming from Tech Bros themselves? People who have everything to gain from making you believe that an alternative is impossible.
There is no denying that Big Tech is big and pervasive; it’s in the name after all. Big Tech is not just social media apps. Big Tech is email and messaging. Big Tech is navigation. Big Tech is shopping. Big Tech is the cloud that stores our data. Big Tech is the service that runs websites. Big Tech is even the music we listen to. Most of all, Big Tech sells ‘convenience’. And we have to give it to them, they are great at it.
But most importantly, Big Tech is big by design. Big Tech is big because they kill competition.
But what Big Tech is not? It is not magic. It is not an unstoppable force. It is after all just a system, and systems can be changed.
It is a system built on extraction and exploitation. It is a system that exacerbates existing inequalities in the world. It is a system that allows the unelected broligarchy to overtake our democratic systems.
But now more than ever we are seeing a more mainstream momentum for building Big Tech alternatives. It poses big questions and requires us to rethink our fundamental relationship with the internet - the operating system which now powers most of society.
Meet Sherif Elsayed-Ali. A Custodian for Free our Feeds. Someone rallying to build a new kind of social media; one that is decentralised and open. Free our Feeds are harnessing the potential of the AT protocol, which Bluesky is built on, to build an ecosystem of apps that can be free from corporate capture. Their idea is that you would never be locked in on a platform that has suddenly gone tits up, bought up by Silicon Valley. You would just be able to move between online communities and take your audience with you.
Meet Nicolás Tapia Correa, a member of Laboratorio de Popular Medios Libres. Far before it became commonplace to challenge Big Tech, he started teaching people in Latin America how to build autonomous technologies at the community level, that were free from corporate and state surveillance and information capture. He is part of Yanapak, an autonomous server promoting digital sovereignty through decentralised tools and services.
And meet Kyle Taylor. He works at the intersection of technology and politics. For some time his energies were invested in regulating Big Tech but with the Musk-ification of American politics, it has become urgent for him and his organisation Resistance Hub to develop alternative ways for civil society to organise and communicate.
These wonderful personalities, and their solutions-making brains, are coming together for an event we are organising with ooto. It’s important to report on and make sense of the issues at hand but we want to do more than report - we want to elevate the voices of those building an alternative vision.
Do come along, and consider supporting us in any way possible.
