Why should I hate Big Tech?

Who are 'Big Tech'?

By 'Big Tech' people are usually referring to the largest tech companies: Google, Meta, Microsoft, Amazon, Apple. You will sometimes also hear about 'the magnificent seven', which adds Nvidia and Tesla to the list. Many also include the likes of Netflix, Spotify and Uber. During the AI boom we can expand even further to include Open AI and Anthropic, and surveillance data analytics companies like Palantir. We include any company that makes a significant proportion of its revenue via Big Tech's business model: surveillance capitalism.

Why you should hate Big Tech

There are many reasons to hate big tech, and they fall into five buckets: Monopolists, Colonialists, Unaccountable, Addictive and Surveillance.

Monopolists

• they’re just too big (see our page about this)
• they're bullies, buying up or destroying other companies, e.g. Google's list of acquisitions
• they're anti-innovation - bloated incumbents whose only new idea in the last 25 years has been the transformer language model

Colonialists

• they exploit and extract, particularly in the Global South. AI is the latest example of this
• they build AI-powered death tech, e.g. colluding in the Gaza genocide, and in the Iran war
• they believe in weird ideologies like eugenics, white supremacism and a twisted form of effective altruism

Unaccountable

• they don’t even answer to governments
• they dodge tax

Addictive

• their products are deliberately addictive
• their products are bad for mental health and attention span in both children and adults

Surveillance

• they invented the toxic business model that powers ads and the surveillance state: surveillance capitalism
• they are trying to kill privacy (and safety) through the massive data leak that is the RTB system
• the micro-targeting they enable is a threat to democracy

---

It's ok to be angry about this - they never told us what they're really up to. In everyday life anger is to be avoided, but in this case anger is good: it will spur you into action - rejecting Big Tech for ethical alternatives.

OK, I'm angry. But what's powering all this?

Next➡️ Learn about Surveillance Capitalism, the business model of Big Tech