Leaving sucks. But there’s no other way. As long as you keep throwing money at the corporations who treat you badly, why would they change?
Apple got the message from me: I’m done with it, its products, and its services. I’m just one little drop in their trillions-valued bucket, but I’m content with that.
I love a provocative title —so clickable!— and what better a topic to get our teeth into but technology, and Big Tech at that. To be fair, Big Tech companies all seem to have very large targets painted on their backs, mostly by themselves, so it’s hard to miss.
I understand the argument that if you don’t like what Big Tech is doing, you should vote with your wallet. It’s a simple equation after all.
Stop buying Apple products, de-Google your life, and delete your Meta accounts. And if you can —trickier for us knowledge workers— move away from Microsoft. Alternatives abound and, if enough people do it, the companies will get the message.
Except I’m not entirely convinced it works like that.
Can’t switch won’t switch
The first problem I can see is that we increasingly don’t have that many meaningful choices, at least not ones that require more and more compromise from us. Big Tech isn’t just selling us products anymore, it provides infrastructure and networks that many of us can’t easily escape.
My employer uses Microsoft, my family is mostly on Apple, my friends use WhatsApp, and that’s before I even consider the myriad of software applications I use and whether they even have viable alternatives elsewhere. Suggesting that people simply walk away assumes that these ecosystems are interchangeable when, increasingly, they aren’t.
There’s also the question of what your singular “vote” actually says. If I was to get rid of my iPhone, Apple doesn’t necessarily know that I may object to its approach to AI, its slightly draconian views of privacy, its lack of repairability or its increasingly closed ecosystem. In fact, as far as Apple is concerned, I might have bought a Samsung instead, I might have lost my job or I may have simply decided to save some money. My individual boycott doesn’t necessarily communicate the message I think it does.
I’m not even sure, at the scale Big Tech works at, what number it would take for them to notice? At what number would our “vote” start to move the needle?
And where exactly are you supposed to go? I acknowledge that Apple has problems, but so does Google. Microsoft has problems, Amazon has problems, Meta has problems.
I think moving from one giant technology company to another isn’t necessarily voting against Big Tech it’s more having to make a choice about which enormous corporation’s particular set of values you find least objectionable.
That’s why I’m slightly wary of the idea that we can change Big Tech simply by “voting with our wallets”, in truth I don’t think it is anything more than a slightly grand invocation of a personal preference. I am guilty of this too, professing my desire to de-Google as much as possible, whilst holding firm on my usage of Apple products and services.
Of course, consumer choice matters. Boycotts can make a difference. Companies do respond when enough customers leave but the numbers required to make that happen for these enormous behemoths are akin to entire, large, countries, disappearing from their books.
At that point we start to look at things like regulation, competition law, interoperability, privacy legislation, public pressure, journalism and political action to try and change the rules for everyone. The hope is that it would open up things to make it possible for everyone to opt out, not just those people with the most disposable income or the fewest technological dependencies.
Your wallet is a useful lever but I don’t think it’s the ballot box many people think it is.
There’s another part of the argument I want to challenge.
Technology does not suck
I have a WhatsApp group that we use for sharing photos of Jack. We’ve had it since he was a baby, and we post a few photos to it every week. We know how much joy it brings to our friends and family.
I could give many more personal reasons, as could you.
But technology companies can, and do, suck.
Too often we seem to conflate those two ideas. Technology itself is extraordinary, even more so when you are of an age that remembers when touchscreens were an amazing invention that you saw on Tomorrow’s World1, and now we have phones that hold maps of the entire planet, a device that can store thousands of books and albums, that can translate languages and that puts almost the sum of human knowledge in your pocket! For some people this was all in the realm of science fiction not all that long ago. And that’s not even mentioning the technology quietly transforming medicine, accessibility, science, transport and energy.
I think we have become so accustomed, so blinded to the advancements that have been made, so numbed to the wonders of technology that we use every day that we mistake the extraordinary for the mundane.
No, the problem isn’t technology. It’s what happens when enormously powerful companies discover they can turn useful technology into an ecosystem designed to extract as much money, attention and data from us as possible. We shouldn’t confuse the thing with the business model wrapped around it.
And with that there is an uncomfortable truth about Big Tech, for many people —the billions of people who use the hardware, software, and infrastructure these companies provide— where do we go? I could ditch Apple and move to Google but how is that better? Where else can I go, given that there is likely some part of the technology you use that flows through the gates of Big Tech. How many online services run on AWS? On Azure?
Ditching Big Tech can absolutely be a moral stance, and that’s an important and valid distinction. You may decide that a company’s behaviour crosses a line for you and choose not to give it your money, I am at that line frequently with META.
I just don’t think we should confuse that personal choice with a particularly effective mechanism for changing the company itself. Billions of people don’t have the wherewithal to leave Big Tech, and certainly not en masse. That may be situational, financial or simply a lack of knowledge about the alternatives, but whatever the reason, it keeps the needles firmly where they are, deep in the systems built by Big Tech.
Technology doesn’t suck. I think the problem is that we’ve allowed a handful of enormous companies become the gatekeepers to the extraordinary technology that many of us can’t imagine living without.
Voting with your wallet is a perfectly legitimate personal choice. I just don’t think we should think it’s a particularly effective way of changing Big Tech.
It’s probably worth linking to this piece here too. Given Big Tech gets a lot of focus it’s probably good to remember that Big Tech isn’t really a thing, but Broligarchs sure are.
What are your thoughts?