tldr: "Big Tech" is a big disappointment. The answer? Little tech. Small tech. Local tech!
I grew up alongside personal computing. I've always been fascinated by tech and excited by the promise it holds - that technology can help everybody, limited only by our own imagination.
"Big Tech", though, is a big disappointment. They've swapped out imagination for greed.
Society and the planet itself are finding out just how dangerous it is to let a handful of rich creeps decide everything. But for the time being, I'm going to focus just on the tech giants. Platform monoliths Microsoft, Apple, and Alphabet/Google. Hardware giants Nvidia and Intel. Cloud and social giants Amazon, Meta/Facebook/Instagram, Oracle.
You know who "Big Tech" is. They've probably made you groan at some point today.
Multi-factor authentication. Upgrade prompts. Terms and conditions agreements. The official story is that all of this nonsense is to keep us safe. There's a sliver of truth in that, but reality is that the nonsense to which Big Tech subjects us - all of it - is there to maximize their profits, and to minimize our agency.
Yet here we are, using their devices, beholden to their services, feeding their algorithms. Meanwhile, they act more and more predatory, ignore what their customers actually want, pay no respect to truth or reciprocity, waste terawatts of energy in a frenzied AI arms race, and for what? To help everybody? No. To make more money, and to have more control.
Many of us feel stuck, trapped using Big Tech's offerings, because Big Tech has eliminated as many alternatives as possible. That's the bad news.
The good news is that beneath all the marketing and all the nonsense, many of the actual core services which Big Tech provide - the things we actually want or need - were built atop projects which academics and hobbyists and geeks created before. Open software libraries and tools and protocols, which even the giants do not have the ability to lock up. That means, anything useful which a tech giant can create or provide, so can we!
...And we can do it locally, without the noise and the nonsense.
You probably know a geek or two who runs their own home media server, instead of paying forever for way-too-many streaming services. You might know some nerds who create their own websites for fun, by hand, choosing character and charm over generic templates. You've likely met a tinkerer who has hooked up things which were never intended to operate together, either to solve an inconvenience, or just because they could.
(And, now you know at least one person who does all of those things. :^)
Big Tech claims there's an app for that, whatever "that" is. But tech is more fun, more real, and more useful, when it's yours. If you want to own your own technology rather than paying forever for it, if you want a solution that's built around you and what you do and how you do it, rather than to line pockets in Silicon Valley, then you don't need Big Tech.
You deserve your own non-big tech. Everybody does.
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