Tech sucks? Really? – Happily Imperfect

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Tech sucks? Really?

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?

Andreas on 82MHz

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.

Stan on Creolened

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...