Individualism Won't Solve Our Problems

Let's fight Big Tech, together

February 01, 2026

Last week, I published a blog post titled The Internet Doesn't Suck: Blame Big Tech, Not The Internet. In it, I argued that the annoyances or issues we find with the internet are not inherent to the technology we use. Rather, Big Tech is designing these platforms in their own interests, which contradict our own — leading to the problems we're all quite familiar with. I wrote this to contradict a popular sentiment among Social Media critics, digital minimalists, and modern-day Transcendentalists that somehow "social media is the problem." I fear this is just not the case. I would much rather people place the blame where it truly belongs: on the corporations who are intentionally turning the knobs to slowly make digital platforms more and more unbearable.

https://riverseeber.net/blog/post/the-internet-doesnt-suck/

Of course, though it is important, the management of social media platforms is by no means the only issue related to tech that plagues our society. I chose to use it as an entry point because it proves useful for dissecting the underlying mechanism that has allowed all of tech to get worse suddenly. It's also easy because people have a very visceral connection with social media. Everyone knows that social media is getting crappy, so you don't really have to sell them very hard on the premise.

Enshittification

Before heading any further, I want to go over Cory Doctorow's description of the process of "enshittification", which is his model of how and why platforms and services decay. Here's how he spoke of it during his talk at DEFCON 31:

"First, [a platform] is good to its users, then, it abuses its users to make things better for its business customers; finally, it abuses those business customers to claw back all the value for itself. Then, it dies."

https://pluralistic.net/2023/08/27/an-audacious-plan-to-halt-the-internets-enshittification-and-throw-it-into-reverse/

I'm going to try not to get to caught up in the weeds in talking about this, but if you'd like to learn a bit more, totally feel free to read or watch his full speech, linked above (or read his new book, Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Went Wrong and What To Do About It. I haven't read it yet, but it's definitely on my list).

https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374619329/enshittification/

So, as stated, things start out good at first. When Facebook started, it really wasn't a bad platform. It showed you exactly what you wanted from people you followed, and didn't show you crap you didn't ask for from content creators you don't know. This was the era where "social media" wasn't a misnomer. You actually interacted mostly with your friends on these platforms.

When Instagram started, it was being propped up as an alternative to the (now enshittified) Facebook. It was better to its users because it had to be in order to ignite an exodus from the incumbent platform.

Of course, we know how the story goes. Instagram, just like Facebook, slowly started to enshittify. Whereas they used to only show posts from people you actually follow in your feeds, in a reverse chronological order — now most of the posts in your feed come from random "featured" accounts that you didn't follow or ask to see^[1]. Ads have seemingly increased at an exponential rate. They've added all kinds of features directly designed to distract you into using the app longer than you had intended to.

Moderation is also important, as it's the thing that keeps the interactions between users from degrading into a bar fight, though that's a highly detailed discussion that I won't be able to do justice here. Perhaps I'll make a post on it in the future. Suffice it to say that a company which feels the need to treat its users well will also invest into developing good moderation policies in order to prevent the more nasty elements of user interaction online.

The Montgomery Bus Boycotts

So what's it going to take to fix this system?

Well, I'll tell you what's not going to work. Trying to "boycott" Instagram isn't going to solve it. Especially if you do it on your own. The issues with Big Tech are giant and messy and deeply entrenched, and simply avoiding the platform isn't going to solve those systemic issues on its own.

https://pluralistic.net/2025/07/31/unsatisfying-answers/

When black organizers in Montgomery, Alabama were fed up with the racism of the public transit system and decided to engage in a bus boycott, they didn't do it by all just waking up one day and deciding "dammit, these buses are pissing me off. I'm just gonna walk to work instead."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Montgomery_bus_boycott

The Montgomery Bus boycott was an organized, collective movement. It saw it's members acting as a group, not as individuals. The boycott was organized, and happened all at once, and thus could also be called off all at once (once their goals were achieved). It involved grassroots organizing, cooperation with labor unions and organizations like the NAACP, as well as the creation of an ad hoc organization, the Mongomery Improvement Association (MIA) to coordinate the boycotts. This was not an individualistic boycott. Had the community simply just casually decided to not individually support the buses, their efforts would not have succeeded the way that they did.

https://encyclopediaofalabama.org/article/montgomery-bus-boycott/

An individualistic boycott has absolutely no hope of succeeding, because it tries to levy our own (admittedly weak) individual force against a giant systemic problem, rather than organizing together into a group which can multiply our forces together into something much stronger than the sum of its parts.

"Yet what force on Earth is weaker than the feeble strength of one? But the union makes us strong!"

  — Solidarity Forever, traditional folk song

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rgo9L_2l7QU

So let's fight back

We need to take a stab at Big Tech from a collective position, acting as a group, not as individuals. There's a few ways we can do that.

Anti-trust

First and foremost, we can work together to push for good policy and enforcement. Get the FTC to actually enforce anti-trust law again. The FTC is an agency that was created for the sole purpose of policing the misconduct of corporations — such as when they try to monopolize, or when they harm the consumer in other ways. Since the Reagan-era, under presidents both Red and Blue, the FTC has been neutered. For the past 40 years, the agency has largely operated under the theory that unless a monopoly has direct, (easily) visible harms to the consumer, we shouldn't stop them. This has the end result of allowing corporations to consolidate into gigantic centers of unstoppable power.

For a very brief 4 years under the Biden administration (problematic as he might've been otherwise), we saw the revival of true anti-trust action. He appointed Lina Khan to chair the FTC, and under her leadership, we saw incredible strides for consumer rights, and punishment for monopolies. We saw a gigantic case against Google for operating an illegal monopoly — and the court even found them guilty!^[2]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lina_Khan#Actions_and_policies

Of course, that all came to an end under the Trump administration, who has predictably returned the FTC to its role of playing lapdog for mega-corporations (as long as they fill his pockets with enough shitcoins to make him happy).

https://www.citationneeded.news/trump-memecoin-dinner-guests/

Access Control laws

Beyond just anti-trust, there's several other things we could do to topple the Big Tech empire. It seems fairly clear to me (though I admit some readers might not agree) that the root cause of these issues is the mass consolidation of power and wealth by corporate tech giants, and so that's where I'm aiming my attacks. If we can get tech companies into a position where they actually have to compete more ardently with one another in order to stay in business, I think we'll begin to see a lot more good things start happening in our world.

The United States has instituted something known as an "anti-circumvention law" in the form of DMCA 1201. What this law does is make it a crime to bypass an "access control" (a piece of software designed to prevent you from modifying your device). For instance, if Apple doesn't want you installing 3rd party apps on your phone, all they do is create an access control on the iOS operating system. Even though it's actually quite trivial for hackers and individuals to invent workarounds for these access controls, DMCA 1201 makes it a federal crime to bypass them. It's also a federal crime to even describe how you might bypass them. So what we've basically created is a special kind of "legal saran wrap" where access controls are quite easy to bypass, except for that doing so is arbitrarily illegal.

The power that this gives to tech companies is immense. It means they can prevent you using your own computer how you want to. Anytime there's a way to use some piece of software in a way that benefits the user to the detriment of the corporation, they can simply send out an update where they prevent that usage. And they further prevent undoing that update by wrapping it in legal saran wrap that makes it a crime to undo.

This is why Apple is able to charge a 30% fee on all transactions that happen in apps that come from their App Store. If it were legal to install apps through a different app store, everyone would use that app store instead. But because it's impossible to do so, that means that Apple can screw you over without losing your business. As a result, you pay an extra 30% on all transactions through your phone.

This kind of anti-consumer bogus has embedded itself into everything from smartphones to tractors to medical equipment to smart fridges. A repeal of DMCA 1201 (or it's international equivalents in other countries) would mean that tech companies actually have to compete for your business, instead of making it a crime to use competitors on the devices they sold to you.

Privacy

By now I hope you're starting to realize that tech-related social issues are important for more reasons than just "Instagram is annoying to use". This next point is going to start dipping into some of the heavier implications of Big Tech being so powerful.

One of the many reasons why these corporations have so much power is because of the vast amount of data they can collect on us. The fact that they're even allowed to collect and use all of this is really beyond ludicrous. One of the most egregious applications of all this data is in the practice of surveillance pricing. Surveillance pricing is the act in which a corporation will spy on you, spy on how desperate you are, how long you've gone without a paycheck, how bad your credit score is, how many mouths depend on you, and how stressed out you are in general with the weight of being broke, and they will selective jack up the price of goods or services for you based on all that data that they spied on you. Alternatively, some surveillance pricing systems work on the employment side of the economy instead, algorithmically reducing your pay when they know you can't afford to turn the work down. The end result in either case is that they get more of your money.

For example, a 2023 report "On Algorithmic Wage Discrimination" by Veena Dubal, a professor at UC Law San Francisco describes the way that Uber algorithmically discriminates against you in your wage based on your behavior patterns:

https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4331080

The same job, in the same time frame, and the same quality, will yield two different payouts based on who's doing the work. Uber's algorithm for payment calculation is incredibly opaque, so it's difficult to understand what all goes into it, but it's clear to see that at the very least, they're using the data they collect on you when you use the app itself to determine your rate.

https://www.latimes.com/business/technology/story/2023-04-11/algorithmic-wage-discrimination

There's also nothing really to stop apps like this from approaching the data brokerage market, buying your data for pennies, and using that info to more accurately gauge your desperation. On the flip side, there's also nothing to stop Uber from selling their data about you back into the industry for other corporations to have.

Gig work isn't the only place seeing this type of thing, either. It's also happening in shopping, where your dollars are being priced at a different value because you're more or less desperate. Take Instacart, which was recently found to be charging different prices for different shoppers of the same goods. The study was conducted by Groundwork Collaborative, Consumer Reports, and More Perfect Union, and they found differences in pricing that could add up to as much as $1,200 a year between various families purchasing the same exact products.

https://groundworkcollaborative.org/work/instacart/

Again, we don't entirely know what is behind the variation in pricing, but internal data collection is a likely candidate, as is data bought for cheap from 3rd parties.

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/12/09/business/instacart-algorithmic-pricing.html

The only reason this kind of algorithmic discrimination is even possible at all is because US citizens do not have federal privacy rights. The US hasn't passed a new federal privacy law since the 1988 Video Privacy Protection Act, which was a law to protect the privacy of your Blockbuster checkouts! Clearly, the mass adoption of the internet has changed a few things, and we need to pass new laws to protect us against new threats. The shady dealings of the data brokerage industry need to be heavily stomped out.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Video_Privacy_Protection_Act

Additionally, internal data retention of this scale should also be regulated, in order to make it more difficult for this kind of twiddling to take place. If Uber isn't allowed to store every micro-decision you've ever made on their app, they won't be able to create an algorithm in order to determine the worst conditions under which you'll continue to work for them. If Instacart can't run experiments on what the highest price you'll pay for a carton of eggs is, they can't screw you out of being able to put food on the table for your family.

Solidarity Forever

So that's what to fight for. I'm not going to lie, it's a big to-do list. I don't know exactly how we're going to get all of this done, or what techniques for inspiring change we should use in favor others. I do know one thing thing though, and it's that we're not going to be able do it on our own.

If you want things to change, you must dismiss from your head the idea that your solo actions will affect any kind of real change. We simply cannot afford to think that we're all going to just individually act in ways that eventually add up to a systemic overhaul. That's not how any of this works. The only way we can change society is by participating in it as a society. By being larger than ourselves. By acting in organizations, coordinating and timing our efforts with one another in order to make the largest impact. When we work together, our strength multiplies, and becomes greater than the sum of what we can all do on our own.

It's become this kind of assumption in society that individual action is at the heart of social change. This is a piece of literal poison that comes from Neo-Liberalism — a school of thought pioneered by none other than Ronald Reagan and Margret Thatcher. They want you to focus more energy on not buying supplies from Amazon than you do on using those supplies to protest systemic problems. They want you to spend more time finding apps other than Twitter to organize your movement under than you do actually organizing your movement. As Cory Doctorow has eloquently put it:

"Squabbling over whether using a social media network makes you a Nazi generates far more heat than light – so much heat that it incinerates the solidarity you need to actually fight Nazis."

https://pluralistic.net/2026/01/22/optimized-for-unoptimizability/

Do not buy into the lies of "voting with your wallet". That is right-wing intellectual poison that the left has bit down on, and we need to spit it out post haste! If the effective way to make change is to "vote" with your wallet, then that means people with thicker wallets get more votes than you. It also means that the people who have no reason to want social change are almost always going to have more votes than the people suffering who need change in order to survive.

So what do we do instead? I'll be honest, I've got very little experience in this field. I'm a young college student living in a tiny town that sees very little political activity. Still, here's some of the advice that I personally am going to be trying out myself based on stuff I've read several places online.

The big picture is that we need to get organized and working with other people. Tech-related activism groups, your local DSA, a workers union if that's something you can safely do, whatever. We need to be working with each other. We can't expect to solve things on our own. Don't feel obligated to do everything though, our strength comes from our numbers. Just do something, anything, and do it with other people.

One resource that is incredibly useful if you're going to be pushing on tech-related issues is the Electronic Frontier Foundation. They're a digital rights non-profit that has resources for grassroots organizing, as well as putting out news on items that demand our attention, like when Congress is voting on a critical tech bill. They make it easy to contact your local reps when that happens, and all you need to do is subscribe to their email updates.

https://efa.eff.org/toolkits

https://act.eff.org/

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks

If you don't have the time or energy to join a proper organizing group, then just reach out and connect with community for the sake of getting to know people. Just knowing people at all means that you have something to draw from when you do want to get involved later.

Also, of course, not every fight needs to be about tech. If you want to help out at a local community fridge or soup kitchen, that's fine! It means more people have their basic needs covered. It means you're reaching out into the community, and strengthening a local network by being involved. That's good both because getting people fed is good, and also because it means you're connected to a group of people who might be willing to organize together in other ways in the future. It gets you plugged into the community.

https://infosec.exchange/@tinker/113589807117870451

We don't need to all be superman. We just need to all be one of the millions of people who are pushing on an issue. Just being involved counts for something.

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1. Technically, Instagram has a way to (kind of?) disable this feature. They've designed it in the most cruel way possible for the kinds of people who might find distracting features difficult to counter: The setting only disables the feature for 30 days. After that, featured posts are enabled again, secretly, without a notification. If you want to keep this feature disabled, you have to change your settings every 30 days, because it KEEPS. TURNING. ITSELF. BACK. ON... ↩︎

2. Unfortunately, the remedy was incredibly lackluster. This was a great start, but it wasn't enough. I hope to see more energy out of them in future administrations. See Cory Doctorow's post about this for more info (pluralistic.net) ↩︎

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