Our How To guides offer practical step-by-step instructions of how best to use your individual actions to contribute to wider movements.
For many of us, our reliance on technology and the continuing emergence of AI – especially Big Tech: Amazon, Meta, Alphabet/Google, Apple and Microsoft – crept up on us and happened largely without our consent.
This reliance might, at first glance, seem to soften the edges around the friction of daily life. But digging just a bit deeper reveals that Big Tech’s goals are the same as any large corporation under capitalism: profit. And that end goal is usually reached via nefarious practices of surveillance, exploitation and extraction, with addictive features engineered to keep us locked to our screens for hours on end.
Complete disengagement from technology might seem unrealistic for some and impossible for others, but changing our relationship with Big Tech and technology doesn’t have to be all or nothing.
Small, incremental changes that re-centre people and the planet can have real impact and support a move away from oppressive systems that uphold a society where the 12 richest billionaires, seven of whom are in tech, “own more wealth than half the world.” It’s also about reclaiming your autonomy and ensuring our tech use is more intentional and consensual.
Before we get started…
Part of Big Tech’s success is promoting “ease of life,” and under the hustle-bustle, “worker bee” mentality of capitalism, that swiftness appears as a welcome helping hand.
You want to get out of the grocery store more quickly? No problem! Place your hand on this nifty biometric scanner and Amazon will recognise your palm print for payment. Want to sign in to your account? No problem! Let your Apple laptop scan your fingerprint and your password will be autogenerated. But, that ease has real consequences.
These seemingly small acts of resistance send a signal to profit-driven corporations and the governments that enable them, that their practices are not serving the collective good.
Big Tech mines our data, selling our search history, personal information and even our location data to third party companies. This allows companies to advertise to us, forcing an algorithm that promotes overconsumption. That data can also be shared with governments, and those same third parties use AI surveillance technologies to police already over-policed communities, and extract data to target activists and organisers.
Big Tech also mines for rare earth elements including lithium and cobalt to power batteries, SIM cards and more. These materials are most often extracted from countries in the Global South – including the Democratic Republic of Congo, Myanmar and Brazil – in practices that echo the extractive blueprint of colonialism. Meanwhile, data centres are disproportionately sited in low-income and marginalised communities, generating pollution that contaminates air, water and soil.
Reducing tech use will look different for everyone, shaped by factors like where you live, what you do for work and other circumstances that may make disengaging from certain technologies easier than others. But there are steps everyone can take to meaningfully reduce their reliance on Big Tech.
These seemingly small acts of resistance send a signal to profit-driven corporations and the governments that enable them, that their practices are not serving the collective good. They also support a continuing movement that rejects billionaires, capitalism and tech colonialism.
