Please read through my comment again. The “don’t use their services” line is another individualistic framing that exists solely to deflect blame from these large corporations.
Shell launched a PR campaign in the 90’s to popularize the term ‘carbon footprint’. This shifted the climate change conversation from large, multinational corporations needing to solve it to individuals, who have little-to-no power, needing to solve it. 71% of global CO2 emissions are emitted by just 100 companies. Even if every individual on Earth lowered their output by as much as possible, we’d all still be fucked because of the emissions by these corporations.
We must talk about corporate power in terms of policy, government, and collective responsibility. Individuals have no power in comparison to these large corporations. This is something we’ve observed in nearly every market these corporations compete in: if I had a dime for every company that tried to compete with Google Search and died over the years, I’d be really fucking rich. While their might be technical alternatives to these services, that doesn’t solve the problem of these corporations having unrestricted power to do whatever they want. That’s what we need to solve.
This is not the solution to the problems we’re facing. While it’s nice to push people to run their own hardware and software, it does nothing to solve the problem of large corporations having large amounts of control and power with little regulation oversight.
We like to do this thing in tech where we try to solve all of our problems with engineering and software. What we’re encountering now is not something that can be solved with software: it’s a political and economic problem.
We have large corporations who have the power of small countries with little (if any) oversight on the stuff they build. Apple is attempting to scan users’ photos. Amazon is using software to exploit their workers and treat them like shit, and to stalk their users around the web into buying more shit. Facebook is giving teens eating disorders and trying to create a version of Instagram for children.
The problem we’re having now is fundamentally a political problem. We have to work together as a society, collectively instead of individually, to decide what the limits of these corporations should be. That happens through boring political processes and debates that nobody likes, which isn’t appealing to us programmers. But it’s the reality we face.
Individualistic ‘solutions’ like this only cause more harm because they don’t address the actual problems at hand. It’s like when Shell introduced the idea of the ‘carbon footprint’ to shift the conversation from us as a society holding corporations accountable to individuals being held accountable. The focus *must* be on political solutions to these problems, because there is no technical way this can be solved.
Shell launched a PR campaign in the 90’s to popularize the term ‘carbon footprint’. This shifted the climate change conversation from large, multinational corporations needing to solve it to individuals, who have little-to-no power, needing to solve it. 71% of global CO2 emissions are emitted by just 100 companies. Even if every individual on Earth lowered their output by as much as possible, we’d all still be fucked because of the emissions by these corporations.
We must talk about corporate power in terms of policy, government, and collective responsibility. Individuals have no power in comparison to these large corporations. This is something we’ve observed in nearly every market these corporations compete in: if I had a dime for every company that tried to compete with Google Search and died over the years, I’d be really fucking rich. While their might be technical alternatives to these services, that doesn’t solve the problem of these corporations having unrestricted power to do whatever they want. That’s what we need to solve.