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#bigtech

5 posts5 participants0 posts today

Tech bros are living, breathing embodiments of the false authority fallacy; claiming that their professed understanding of basic logic qualifies them to reason expertly upon every conceivable topic while conveniently ignoring a fundamental maxim of their purported core area of expertise: garbage in, garbage out.

Hi, I’m Ellie.

I’ve jumped to Mastodon after realising (again) how toxic big tech is. Trump and Musk’s obsession with controlling social media sealed it—I miss when it was about connecting, not just a tool for the rich to twist public opinion.

I’ll post a little bit about politics (Carol Cadwalladr fan!) but also pretty pictures, my pet, and travel snaps. Looking forward to actual conversations—not just whatever the algorithm wants me to see.

#FOSS is the great accomplice of #BigTech dominance, by not considering its impact on society and by generally not being produced sustainably. FOSS does not defend its market position, dumping itself on the market and leaving the rest to chance. The vultures know how to make good use of this. FOSS does not worry whether its customer segment - the #Commons - is reached, and evil players are kept out.

Big tech manages to win through ‘free’ in their delivery model, where FOSS sees itself losing.

Replied in thread

@ati1 They only stay away from the “F” and only then, if the “F” uses the AGPL if it’s for networked use. So we have to be careful to state exactly what we mean by “FOSS.”. Otherwise, they’re perfectly happy to take “liberally licensed” open source (open as in “open for business”) and enclose it. Or even use GPL licensed code on servers. Don’t forget that the Big Web – and thus surveillance capitalism – mostly runs on Linux.

We’re not going to get out of this simply by voting with our wallets, but still, we might at least try and hurt the fuckers in the only place they feel any pain…

buy-european-made.eu

(And don’t get me started on “European Values”. No, we don’t get a gold star while letting refugees drown off our coasts and being complicit in the Israeli genocide of the Palestinian people. We’re just not fully fascist yet and might just avoid it… maybe. It’s a pretty fucking low bar.)

Buy European MadeBuy European MadeA directory of EU-made alternatives. From software and electronics to everyday products - all made in Europe

The Camera Panopticon

How did we end up in technofascism? Watch this talk I gave over a decade ago warning of the dangers of Silicon Valley and Big Tech and urging us to embrace alternatives.

small-tech.org/videos/the-came

(Transcript available in English, Español, and Nederlands, thanks to the community.)

Small Technology FoundationThe Camera PanopticonAral at The Big Brother Awards in Amsterdam, Netherlands. November 2014.

Cory Doctorow's (@pluralistic) blog post for today is a speech he gave last night at the University of Toronto, the annual Ursula Franklin Lecture at Innis College.

It's worth reading:

pluralistic.net/2025/02/26/urs

It connects the dots between anti-circumvention copyright laws like the USA's Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) (and the Canadian copycat legislation) and the enshittification that ensues when Big Tech does ... well, practically anything. There's a specific example he uses that is horrifying. He also shows exactly how Big Tech has escaped what he identifies as the usual four factors for keeping the worst instincts of companies in check.

I agree with him that we should annul the anti-circumvention law on the books, and would go further in saying that we should explicitly enshrine in law the rights to alter, repair, remove etc. any functionality of products and services that we choose to use. I was one of the original 6,000 Canadians who submitted comments warning against the implementation of these restrictions to our government at the time, and my feelings in support of this are stronger than ever.

Give it a read.

Attached image: I think this is probably overdue.