The Why

Part 1: But Why Care?

Every day, our lives become more and more online. With big tech companies showing no interest in wanting to make any effort into improving the world, it has become increasingly important to take control of your online activity, not be at the will of corporations, and stay private and secure online. With the amount of money, power, and influence corporations have within society and the government, it's nearly impossible for them to be "good". Here are some of the most egregious and disturbing instances of corporations doing what they do best: making the world a worse place. This is not an all encompassing list, it is simply some examples/a cautionary tale as to what happens when greedy groups have too much power. Just because a specific group isn't mentioned here doesn't mean they're innocent.

Pollution

- Bill Gates, founder and former CEO of Microsoft - whose company's revenue grew almost 200% while their emissions grew almost 25% from 2020 to 2025 - who thinks climate change does not pose an existential threat to humanity, and who is named in the Epstein Files and thinks Epstein's life was "intriguing" (Gates)

Climate change threatens to make our world hotter, raise the sea levels, destroy entire countries, make our weather more extreme, threaten food supplies, destroy habitats, and lead society to it's end (Union of Concerned Scientists, Nuccitelli). We as a species continue to soar past climate deadlines (UN Environment Programme). Temperatures and sea levels are rising at a pace that's apparently too fast for the governments and companies of the world to attempt to do anything about (Climate Action Tracker). 95% of all countries failed to submit UN climate pledges (Dunne). Contries including Kiribati, Maldives, Vanuatu, Tuvalu, Solomon Islands, Samoa, Nauru, Fiji, and the Marshall Islands - including all their culture, history, landscape, nature, resources, and human, animal, and plant inhabitants - are at risk of being completely wiped off the face of the Earth due to our inaction over climate change, to the point where some have started making digital copies of their nation to preserve themselves (Active Sustainability, Yeo). As residents of the one and only Earth and direct beneficiaries and losers of climate change, we all play a part in both the continued threat and the hopeful end of climate woes for all plants, animals, and people with our passivity.

- Greta Thunberg, political and climate activist, speaking at the World Economic Forum to the global elite attendees (The Independent)

Big tech companies have a seemingly unending desire to destroy our planet and everything on it with their inaction on the climate. Big business and billionares pollute so much more than us common folk. Just 100 companies are responsible for 70% of emissions and billionares emit more carbon pollution in 90 minutes than the average person does in an entire lifetime (Riley, Thériault). Despite already lying about their impacts on the environment, companies like Google and Microsoft still continue to soar past their environmental goals (Turek, St. John, Microsoft). Even a company like Apple who markets themselves as environmentally conscious continues to release pointless revisions to their products that will inevitably become e-waste year after year and constantly show themselves to be against the right to repair, something that reduces waste and improves usability significantly (Dayaram). This has only gotten exponentially worse with the advent of AI (St. John). Data centers that pollute both the local and global environments continue to pop up at a rapidly increasing pace all across the world, making the air and water unbreathable and unusable while bringing our world and every species on it closer to a climate catastrophe (Abraham).

Genocide

- Mustafa Suleyman, CEO of Microsoft's AI division - which still actively arms the Israeli government in their genocide - responding to a pro-Palestinian employee (Singh)

Google and Amazon have a deal with the Israeli government called Project Nimbus in which they provide cloud computing services, including artificial intelligence and machine learning, to assist the Zionist regime in its genocide (Roscoe). Google's YouTube helped air ads promoting misinformation on the blockade induced famine in Gaza (Poulson and Fang). Microsoft provides their cloud computing platform Azure to the IDF and has cancelled the email address of International Criminal Court prosecutor Karim Ahmad Khan for his official investigative work on Israel's war crimes (Mednick et al., Quell). Google and Microsoft fire employees for their opposition and activism towards ending their company's support of the Palestinian genocide (Kerr, O'Brien). Facebook helped to propagate the Rohingya genocide in/by Myanmar and helps to propagate the Gaza genocide by allowing ads and crowdfunding for IDF drones and illegal Israeli settlements (Amnesty International, Bhuiyan, Magee).

War

- Alex Karp, founder of US and Israeli government contracted surveillance database company Palantir that works with other big tech companies like Amazon, Microsoft, and NVIDIA (Dowd)

Google has repeatedly partnered with the US government, including the military and ICE, in order to "get their work done" (Google, Cox, Gault). That "work" consists of using the people's tax dollars to kill a countless number of civilians from all across the world while we reap the benefits of repossessing their oil (Wikipedia, Wikipedia). They partner with multiple military tech companies, including Palantir and Lockheed Martin (Google, No Tech For Apartheid). Microsoft also works with the US Military and ICE, including the same software they lease to Israel (Wong, Microsoft). Even streaming services like Spotify participate in the military-industrial complex by showing ICE recruitment ads to their users (Mier).

Lobbying

- Katie Harbath, Former director of public policy for global elections at Meta, social media legislation advisor, Founder and CEO of social media legislation consulting firm Anchor Change; despite the fact that people are growing less comfortable with AI in society (Bosa and Wu)

Tech companies are some of the biggest lobbyists out there. Google ($16,540,000 in 2025), Amazon ($18,865,000 in 2025), Microsoft ($10,105,000 in 2025), Apple ($10,000,000 in 2025), and more are all among the companies who have given the most amount of money to US politicians through PACs and other means to have their interests represented in the government over the politician's own constituents (OpenSecrets). This results in more corrupt system where money holds the power rather than the people (Nazur). This is a problem across US party lines; neither party serves anyone other than greed (Integrity Index).

Labor

- Jeff Bezos, founder and former CEO of Amazon and the worlds 4th richest person - who's company has an entire Wikipedia page dedicated to their bad treatment of worker's unions (Döpfner)

Companies like Google, Amazon, Apple, and Samsung benefit from the forced labor and persecution of the Uyghur minority in/by China (ASPI, Leibold). Google, Apple, Tesla, Microsoft, Dell, Samsung, Sony, and more have all been accused of utilizing child labor (Mosebo, Amnesty). Companies including Amazon, Meta, Apple, and much more are known for their poor treatment of their workers and the subsequent unions (Wikipedia, Wikipedia, Wikipedia).

Artifical Intelligence

- Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT (ControlAI)

Big tech has shown that they will knowingly advance AI regardless of any possible ecological or societal issues it triggers (Stanton). It may seem convenient and harmless, but studies show reliance on AI can actually decrease your brain activity and make you dumber (Kosmyna et al.). AI has been linked to cases of chatbot-induced psychosis (Caridad). It is a major, to say the least, threat to all creative and artistic people (Saliba and Cho). AI is being used "on an industrial scale" for fraud and scams (Down, Coffeezilla). Google has removed any promise that they won't use AI to inflict harm (Tucker). When AI is used in legal environments, it can lead to errors resulting in the prolonged jailing of innocent people (Henson). Twitter/X's AI chatbot Grok has repeatedly referred to itself as "MechaHitler", said Adolf Hitler is the "best suited to deal with [the] problem" of Jewish people, and has generated child porn right on the open web for all to see at it's user's requests (Hagen et al., Vallance).

Privacy

- Larry Ellison, founder and former CEO of the company Oracle - partial owner of TikTok in the US, maintainer of the Java programming language, and owner of a large amount of all corporate infrastructure - who is the 6th richest person, owner of an entire island of Hawai'i, father of the founder and CEO of Paramount Skydance - which will soon also own Warner Bros. Discovery - and friend of the Israeli Military, who offered a board seat in his company to Benjamin Netanyahu (Ma)

Nothing you do using products by big business is private. All of your information is tracked and used to serve ads (Graham and Elias). Google, Microsoft, Meta, and Apple routinely coordinate with the National Security Agency (NSA) (Gleenwald and MacAskill). Recently, the United States federal government has been buying this data to spy into the lives of it's citizens (ACLU). Meta waitied to launch facial recognitition in their camera glasses until the political envoirnment was in a place where the "civil society groups that [they] would expect to attack [them] would have their resources focused on other concerns" (Hill et al.). There's too many privacy issues to even begin to list for each of these companies, to the point where Google and Meta each have a Wikipedia page dedicated to their privacy issues. (Wikipedia, Wikipedia, Wikipedia, Wikipedia).

Garrett Langley, CEO of Flock Safety, who's cameras can be hacked and who does share data, in an email to a police chief released by the city (Staunton, Virginia)

The extent of mass surveillance has been growing exponentially in recent years. Flock Safety cameras are everywhere. They're supposed to be used for law enforcement and ICE, but they are extremely insecure and publicly viewable with the right tools (Jordan). To see a map of known Flock cameras, check DeFlock. There are some near your home, and likely more on the way. Before the controversial 2026 Super Bowl commercial, Amazon's Ring doorbells also worked with Flock, culminating in an increasingly worrying and popular surveillance state (AP, Koebler).

- Peter Thiel, founder of PayPal as well as US and Israeli government contracted surveillance database company Palantir - that works with other big tech companies like Amazon, Microsoft, and NVIDIA - who funded the political campaign for many prominent political figures - including JD Vance and numerous companies you likely engage with often - when asked if the human race should continue to survive (Interesting Times)

Palantir is a company that's been on the rise and in the news a lot lately, yet no one seems to know why. Maybe it's their insane stock prices (Yahoo Finance, Trefis Team), maybe it's their confusing business model founded on the surveillance of civilians (Haskins), maybe it's that they work with other big tech companies like Amazon, Microsoft, NVIDIA, and more (Rosenberg, Haselton, NVIDIA), maybe it's that one of their CEOs Peter Thiel doesn't think the human race should continue on (Interesting Times), maybe it's the other CEO Alex Karp that is known for always seeming to be high, or maybe it's just them embracing the surveillance state with their very existence just to appease shareholders in general. Hard to say. Regardless, know that you are almost never alone. Someone could always be watching, whether it be a corporation, a government, or a person and whether it be online or in real life.

ID Verification Laws

- Discord announcing all users will need to verify their age in order to continue using the service as before (Discord)

Recently, multiple states, countries, and companies have either introduced or have started working towards ID verification rules that would require you to provide your ID before being able to participate in the web. Mandatory ID verification laws are a massive threat as they give governments and companies the tools to enable censorship, to control what you can and can't see or do, and to track you across the web more than they already do. They basically remove online privacy as a possibility, since everything you do online will be tied to your government identity. They increase your risk of identity theft as companies constantly suffer data breaches, leaks, and hacks (Roach). In the specific case of them restricting minors, this means minors can no longer communicate on a mass scale, express their thoughts and opinions about issues, have their voices heard, or participate in today's culture. This is even even more worrying when you add the fact that companies already know more about you than you do about yourself. Now they'll be able to link your digital identity, with all the data they have about you, to your actual identity. In summary, they mean the days of being private and secure on the internet will be over, as your internet activity and all the data people collect about us will be directly tied to your government ID.

Australia has already implemented a ban on social media for those under 16, banning everything from Instagram to even streaming like YouTube and Twitch. Other countries are following suit (McGuirk). The US federal government is one of those countries eagerly attempting to pass age verification laws, with the proposed legislation undergoing many transformations and name changes along the way. Most recently, the KIDS Act has been introduced. On top of the standard criteria for an age verification bill, Section 234 says that people under the age of 13 will be unable to use messaging features (Congress). This could mean that if you choose to not verify your age on online platforms, your access to things like DMs could be revoked. It passed the committee on May 5, 2026, meaning it is waiting for its day in the House (Roth). Individual states like Texas are also eagerly trying to implement their own versions of the laws. Texas Senate Bill 2420, which blocks downloading apps without first verifying your identity, would have already passed if it wasn't federally blocked by a judge after Attorney General Ken Paxton was sued by Students Engaged in Advancing Texas (Texas, Nguyen and Simpson, Vasquez).

Discord recently had a leak of 70,000 ID photos (Chia). Just four months later, they decided to begin to roll out "Teen-by-Default" settings to all users unless you can prove your age with an ID, facial scan, or if their "age inference model" deems you to be an adult (Discord). One of the companies involved in Discord's age verification is linked to the surveillance company Palantir (Open Rights Group). Apple has already rolled out verification tools worldwide (Perez). This is all even scarier when combined with the fact that Google will soon ban installing apps from outside of Google Play on Android and will require app developers to verify their ID with Google in order to be able to develop apps on the platform (Google). This initially would've gone into effect at the start of 2026, but after consumer backlash they pretended to walk back the change (Google). Despite claims that Android is going to be free going in to the future fueled by Google's misleading blog post, the change will go in to affect starting in September of 2026 (Keep Android Open). Not only is this a massive concern for user freedom and privacy, this would also mean it would be impossible to not support Google as a company - which is incredibly worrying considering their previously explored ethical failures.

Right to Repair

- Devin Hartline, senior fellow at a conservative think tank's Forum for Intellectual Property and anti-right to repair advocate, speaking to Congress (Congress)

The right to repair is the legal right and the movement for consumers to be able to repair and modify products that they purchased. This is leads to a reduction in e-waste, as instead of throwing away devices you can simply upgrade or repair them - thus helping the environment. It also has the benefit of both giving you control over your device - as you can choose what repairs or modifications you do or don't do and how you do them - and it prevents things like companies forcing you to pay for expensive first-party repairs or bricking your device. Companies shouldn't have the right to tell you what you can and can't do with your own product that you paid for, yet they consistantly show themselves to be against the movement. It shouldn't be possible for tech companies to leave a device you paid for unusable like with Spotify's Car Thing or to make it difficult to repair/modify your own devices for no reason (other than to make a profit when you pay them to repair it) (Rogers, Thompson, Kim). Corporations go as far as advocating and lobbying against the right in court (Roth, Green).

Art

- Game developer Nintendo, who has taken legal/financial action against everyone from a small Costa Rican supermarket to YouTubers to emulators, emulators, and more emulators in addition to much more, on people's ability to preserve and enjoy video games via emulators for games that the company isn't even selling anymore (Lao)

Tech companies have a history of suppressing, discrediting, and replacing art and the artists who make it. Artists are frequently suppressed and censored for their views or methods on social media platforms (Don't Delete Art). Recently, corporations have started outsourcing human creativity with AI generated images (Zhao). Often, companies that own vast media empires don't do their due diligence to preserve and protect the media that only they can legally produce and sell. Examples of this include the deletion of Discovery TV content you already paid for off your Sony PlayStation console, Nintendo's repeated relaxed attitude towards preserving their own games but violent attitude towards others doing it for them, the general shying away from physical media and towards subscription models, Digital Rights Management (DRM) controls, and more (Medina, Bandit, Wikipedia, Alvi, Davies, GOG). Not only do companies not care enough to preserve the art they own, but they go out of their way to target people who take matters into their own hands (Sued by Nintendo, Bailey). Corporate consolidation and licensing agreements threaten existing and future media (González, Roosevelt Institute, Gupta).

Companies allow the governments of the world to invade the content and art we see and enjoy online on their platforms. Memetic warfare is the utilization of memes as propoganda in order to influence the masses, categorized as a form of psychological warfare, which is said to be a large part of the current political landscape. The United States is currently involved in "exploit[ing] the psychological vulnerabilities of hostile forces to create fear, confusion, and paralysis, thus undermining their morale and fighting spirit" (McBride). Know that nothing is sacred when it comes to your attention, even a thing that seems as innocent as memes.

Control

- Jen-Hsun Huang, founder and CEO of NVIDIA, on people who are against using AI

If you decide to switch from corporation-owned services, you will realize that, lots of the time, the non-billionaire-backed alternatives are a lot better. Often, the most successful products are claimed to be the best, simply because they have the most users or rake in the most cash. This is often not true, especially when one service becomes so required in modern society that the owners can make it as unusable and as profitable as possible by limiting user's control and ignoring their wants (a monopoly). When you switch to products that actually care about their users and their experience, it's hard to go back.

Ethics

- Mark Zuckerberg, founder of Facebook (which enabled a genocide in Myanmar), Meta (which currently sells invasive constantly watching glasses with cameras), who's biggest regret is competing on the fencing team in high school rather than wrestling (Levy)

If it wasn't obvious already, corporations have no guiding ethics. They'll often claim they follow fancy sounding goals like "building for everyone" while arming a genocide, "protect[ing] fundamental rights" while using child labor, or generic support of diversity while actively cutting back on support for LGBTQ+ individuals and profiting off their inclusion via pride (Google, Microsoft, Murray, Peralta). They are not beholden to the morals they avoid, the governments they pay off, or the people they trample - they are purely at the will of them and the people and groups around them's greed. The companies we are forced to involve ourselves with constantly couldn't care less about anything you care about. As long as they're making a buck, they (and by extension, the governments of the world) don't care. How can we trust organizations founded on principals of wealth and power with the control of the products and services we use everyday?

Part 2: Be Angrier about the World

It doesn't need to be this way.

Before reading this page, it had been a while since you've heard much on Greta Thunberg, hadn't it? Remember, the Swedish activist known for her young age and opposition towards climate change? Famous for her "How dare you!" sound bite at the 2019 UN Climate Action Summit? Surely you haven't forgotten about her or the impending doom this planet faces between all the doomscrolling, right? Well she certainly hasn't. Something has changed with Thunberg, though, specifically with how the media covers her. It wasn't her goals or her career or her love live that changed the media, and therefore the public's, perception of her, but instead it was the very thing that brought her to the spotlight: her activism. She uncovered that the same thing caused the climate crisis, the Gaza genocide, the military industrial complex, the rise of AI, the fall of privacy, any of the other issues I cover on this site, and much of the other problems facing the world en masse today: the systems in place (Flakin).

- Greta Thunberg, referring to capitalism, from her book "The Climate Book" (Thunberg)

Thunberg hasn't gone anywhere. Instead, she's shifted her focus to the oppression at the hands of the powerful in general. She used to be a favorite of the media, now shes barely brought up. If she is brought up, it's either talking about her in a negative light and/or talking about one of her most recent endeavours supplying aid directly to the people of Palestine, and being promptly kidnapped by Israel in response (Flakin). I had a hard time finding quotes for this section due to the amount of hatred towards her that seems to permeate through all news sources; I eventually just had to check out her book for myself at the library. It's time we shift to the real problems of society, too.

- Unknown

The systems in place have failed us. We have all the scientific innovation we could ask for, yet when it tells us very clearly what's going to happen and what's at stake, we ignore it. The people at the top only get richer and richer while the people at the bottom and young people face the end of it all. If we want to stand a chance at saving our one and only planet while the rich seek to escape it by fucking off to Mars, it will take all of us to realize that us the rich and powerful people and systems - along with the politicians from all sides they pay off - are the common enemy to our salvation. There isn't one bad party, one bad politican, one bad CEO, or one bad company - there is one system. The question is, what will you do about it?

For more information, see dj8ngo's Political Action Toolkit and this resource collection. I also reccommend the book Technofeudalism by Yanis Varoufakis - or this and this video on the subject by Epoch Philosophy and Varoufakis's own video summary of his book.

- Greta Thunberg from her book "The Climate Book" (Thunberg)

Part 3: Now What?

- Eric Schmidt, Former Chief Executive of Google, speaking on behalf of the company - which actively arms the genocide of the Palestinian people, participates in the destruction of out planet via climate change, and helps the US military and ICE "get their work done" (Auchard)

Yeah, we can tell, Schmidt. In summary, if you add up the word counts of Meta's six (general, censorship, privacy, unions, content management, real-name policy), Apple's five (general, environment, censorship, unions, taxes), Amazon's three (general, unions, taxes), Google's three (general, privacy, censorship), Microsoft's, Netflix's, and Spotify's criticism pages on Wikipedia, you get a (very rough) grand total of over 125,000 words (and there are likely more pages I didn't find). That would be about 500 pages in a standard book, or 14 hours of an audiobook.

Whether they are helping kill our planet, destroying local communities, arming a genocide, suppressing activists, fueling the military-industrial complex, bringing about the AI apocalypse, eroding everyone's privacy, making greed the primary motivator of the world, or depriving us of the world that could've been, corporations - and the systems that allow them to exist - do not care about you. It's time you stop caring about them by ceasing to give them any more of your time, money, effort, attention, clicks, or data.

It may seem like there's nothing you can do, but we, the workers and consumers, have the power and the responsibility to change the world for the better. Other than revolting, showing you don't support the way things are going by not supporting the products, services, and companies rooting for our downfall is just about the best we can do. By ceasing to use their platforms, we can create change (Ethical Consumer). By acknowledging the pain and suffering corporations and systems can, will, and do cause, we can be a more ethical, empathetic, and thoughtful society and people.

- Sundar Pichai, CEO of Google - whose company's carbon emissions grew 48% in the last five years - discussing the environment (Clifford)