Disconnecting Big Tech

In January 2026, I made the resolution to ditch Big Tech as much as possible. We are living through a time of accelerating geopolitical tension and the consolidation of digital infrastructure into a small number of empire-scale corporations who have captured the internet. They surveil and manipulate our online behaviour, extract our content, and sell it back to us like bottled water — or, should I say, slop.

Most people don't care where their data lives. We just want what's cheap, familiar, and what works. The real costs of that convenience are never disclosed the moment we sign up. We have quietly normalized storing our digital fingerprints under legal systems we never agreed to, in jurisdictions where we have no standing. That normalization is worth resisting.

Infrastructure isn't neutral, especially as "smart" technologies become more autonomous and fine-tuned to particular corporate and political values and ideologies. The same data pipelines and AI systems powering our productivity tools are procured for unlawful surveillance, policing, and mechanized warfare. The small print doesn't mention that. Small tech —not anti-technology— is the framing here. Alternatives that can actually be held accountable; not platforms that answer to no one.

For inspiration, I looked to Paris Marx's Getting Off US Tech, Scott Galloway's Resist and Unsubscribe, and QuitGPT, but with a few different needs as a software developer focused on open source tooling and a more "responsible" use of AI, which, for better or worse, is now considered a professional baseline.

"Every program in your computer that is adverse to your interest can be neutralized with a program that is beneficial to your interests. And that means, that when you create a program that is deliberately bad, you invite new market entrance to make one that's good." — Cory Doctorow

This is not just about a consumer boycott. Choosing one Big Tech brand over another because it's today's so-called ethical choice will hardly make a difference in the Silicon Valley echo chamber. But advocating for public policy and investing our time and energy in exploring and sharing real working alternatives will.

"But I have nothing to hide!"

This argument hasn't aged well. It assumes the rules won't change, that platforms won't be sold, and the data won't be misused, especially against those less fortunate than us. Data Privacy isn't about secrecy; it's about who holds power over your information and what they can do with it. Digital Sovereignty extends that question to jurisdiction: not just who holds the power, but under what law, with what accountability, and at what cost to community and the environment.

For Canadians, there is a persistent gap between the privacy protections we assume we have and what is actually enforceable when a service runs on US infrastructure, regardless of where the physical servers actually sit. This isn't about national borders. It's about legibility and accountability.

Every time we sign up or sign in we should be asking ourselves: who unfairly profits from our convenience, and at whose expense?

"There is no situation that is morally more evil than the situation in which evil has been so fully integrated into the situation that the individual itself is spared from being evil […] The machines that populate our world have spared us from incurring guilt, just as they have relieved us from baking bread or from calculating statistics." — Günther Anders.