What You Can Actually Do About Any of This

People ask me a version of the same question after any honest conversation about the tech industry: what can I do about big tech? It is usually asked with a slump in the shoulders, as though the answer is already known to be “nothing.” I want to push back on that slump, because the reading that produces it — the long, careful accounts of how a handful of companies came to sit astride our attention, our commerce, and our public square — is not meant to leave you defeated. If it curdles into helplessness, it has failed. The point of understanding a system is to find the places where it can be moved. So this is my attempt at an honest, unglamorous guide to those places.

I want to be clear about one thing up front, because most advice in this genre is dishonest about it: your individual choices, on their own, will barely register on a trillion-dollar balance sheet. Deleting an app is not a boycott. The leverage that actually matters is collective. But individual choices are still the doorway — they change how you see the problem, they build the habits and the appetite for the harder work, and they make you legible to other people who want the same things. So I have organised what follows in three layers: what you can do as a user, as a worker, and as a citizen. The first is the doorway. The last is where the weight is.

As a user: fewer tools, chosen on purpose

Start where you have the most control, which is your own attention and your own data. This is the layer everyone reaches for first, and it is the one most oversold, so let me set the expectation honestly: what you do here changes your life and demonstrates that another way is possible. It does not, by itself, discipline a corporation. Do it anyway, because it is the ground everything else stands on.

The first move is subtraction. Most of us do not have a technology deficit; we have an excess, poured in by default. The practice I have come to trust is a kind of digital minimalism — not a monastic purge, but a deliberate audit of which tools actually earn their place. For a couple of weeks, treat every app and service as guilty until proven useful. The ones you genuinely miss, you keep. The rest, you find, were mostly occupying you rather than serving you. The goal is not fewer tools for their own sake; it is a smaller set of tools chosen on purpose rather than absorbed by drift.

The second move is to protect your data, understanding that you will only ever do this imperfectly. Turn off the ad-personalisation settings you can find. Use a browser and search that do not treat you as the product. Prefer messaging that is end-to-end encrypted. Review the permissions your phone hands out and claw back the ones that make no sense — a flashlight does not need your contacts. None of this makes you invisible, and anyone who promises that is selling something. It simply reduces your exposure and, more importantly, teaches you to notice the extraction that the polished interface is designed to hide.

The third move is the one people resist most: pay for things that are worth paying for. “If you are not paying, you are the product” is a cliché because it is largely true. When a service is free, its incentives point away from you — toward whoever is actually paying, which is almost always advertisers. Paying does not guarantee virtue, but it realigns the relationship. A calendar, an email host, a note app, a media subscription that takes your money and therefore has to keep you satisfied rather than an advertiser — these are usually better citizens of your life. Treat the subscription as a vote for a business model, not just a purchase.

Deleting an app is not a boycott. But it is the doorway — it changes how you see the problem, and it makes you legible to other people who want the same things.

Before you move to the next layer, it is worth sharpening how you evaluate any new tool at all, because the industry will keep offering you shiny successors to the things you just quit. I find it useful to interrogate every “innovation” with a short set of five questions to unmask progress — who benefits, who pays, what it replaces, what it makes harder, and what it quietly assumes about how you should live. Progress that cannot survive those questions is usually just capture with better marketing. Learning to ask them is a skill you carry into every layer below.

As a worker: the leverage you already hold

Here is where the ground shifts from personal to collective, and where the real leverage begins. If technology is remaking how work is measured, scheduled, surveilled, and paid, then the people doing the work are not bystanders to that remaking. They are the ones with a hand on the machine. And a hand on the machine is power, if it is organised.

The oldest form of that organisation is the union, and it is enjoying a quiet return for a reason. Individually, a warehouse worker or a rideshare driver or a content moderator has almost no say over the algorithm that ranks, routes, or fires them. Collectively, they can bargain over it — over the pace, the monitoring, the appeal process when a machine gets it wrong. The gains are uneven and hard-won, and I do not want to romanticise a process that is often slow and bruising. But collective bargaining is one of the few tools that has ever forced a large employer to negotiate the terms of the technology it imposes, rather than simply announcing them.

Two demands worth naming specifically. The first is a right to disconnect — the principle that being reachable is not the same as being on the clock, and that an employer’s access to you should end when your shift does. Several countries have written versions of this into law; workplaces can adopt it without waiting for a statute. The second is a say over algorithmic management: the right to know when a system is scoring you, on what basis, and with a human you can actually reach when it is wrong. Neither is exotic. Both are the kind of thing that only ever arrives because people asked for it together.

Then there is the more ambitious path, which is to change who owns the thing in the first place. Cooperatives — businesses owned by their workers or their users — are not a fringe curiosity; they are a live, if underused, alternative to the extract-and-exit model. In the technology world this takes the shape of platform cooperatives: ride services, delivery apps, and marketplaces where the drivers or sellers own the platform and set its rules, so the value created by the work stays with the people doing it. Most are small. Some fail. But they answer the objection that “there is no alternative” by simply being one, and every functioning example makes the next easier to imagine and to build.

As a citizen: rules are the real fight

Everything above matters, and none of it substitutes for the layer where the largest amounts of power actually change hands, which is the law. A company the size of a mid-sized economy is not going to be disciplined by consumers quitting one at a time. It is disciplined — when it is disciplined at all — by rules. This is the least glamorous layer and by a wide margin the most important, which is precisely why it gets the least airtime in the “ten tips to reclaim your privacy” genre.

The first front is competition, or antitrust. The whole story of how a market tips from many players to a few, and then from a few to one, is a story about the absence or the failure of competition rules. When one firm controls the storefront, the payment rail, and the products sold inside it, the ordinary correction — a rival offering something better — stops working. Antitrust is the public’s tool for reopening that door: breaking up conglomerations of power, forbidding the self-dealing where a platform quietly ranks its own products above everyone else’s, and forcing interoperability so you are not locked in by the sheer cost of leaving. These cases are slow and technical and easy to tune out. They are also, right now, one of the most consequential things happening to these companies.

A company the size of a mid-sized economy will not be disciplined by consumers quitting one at a time. It is disciplined — when it is disciplined at all — by rules.

The second front is privacy law — real law, with teeth, not another consent banner. Much of the extraction economy runs on the assumption that data about you is a free raw material, yours to be harvested the moment you touch a service. Strong privacy law reverses that default: it makes your data yours unless you meaningfully agree otherwise, limits how long it can be held and what it can be repurposed for, and attaches penalties large enough that compliance is cheaper than violation. Where such laws exist, behaviour changes — not perfectly, but measurably. Where they are weak or unenforced, the harvest continues. Which regime you live under is a political outcome, not a natural fact.

Which brings me to the least mysterious and most neglected tool of all: ordinary democratic participation, aimed at these issues specifically. Vote for representatives who treat technology policy as something they are accountable for rather than something too complicated to touch. Ask candidates where they stand on competition enforcement and data rights, and treat vagueness as an answer. Support the organisations — advocacy groups, digital-rights outfits, investigative newsrooms — that do the unglamorous work of watching these companies when the rest of us cannot. Show up in the consultations and comment periods that shape the rules, which are astonishingly under-attended given how much they decide. Individually each of these is a small act. Together, sustained, they are how the rules that govern a trillion-dollar industry actually get written and rewritten.

The honest arithmetic

I said at the start that individual consumer choices barely move a company of this size, and I meant it — but I do not want that to read as an argument for doing nothing at the personal level. The arithmetic is subtler than “individual weak, collective strong.” The personal moves are how most people find their way to the collective ones. You quit an app and start noticing the machinery. You read the settings and start asking the five questions about everything. You get curious about why the machinery is built the way it is, and you end up understanding how technology gets captured in the first place — how tools that promised to serve us were steadily bent to serve their owners. And once you can see the capture, the collective options stop looking naive and start looking necessary.

So do the small things, not because they will topple anything, but because they are the door. Then walk through it. Join the union or start the conversation about one. Put your money and your attention behind the cooperatives and the paid services that keep you as the customer rather than the product. Pay attention to the antitrust case and the privacy bill the way you would pay attention to anything that decides the shape of your daily life, because they do. Vote and organise on these questions as though they matter, because among the things that will define the next few decades, few matter more.

Helplessness is a choice dressed up as a diagnosis. The systems that feel immovable were built by people making decisions, and they can be unbuilt or rebuilt by people making other ones. Not quickly, and not by any of us alone. But that was never the offer. The offer is that the leverage is real, it is collective, and the door to it is closer than the slump in your shoulders suggests. You start where you are, and then you find the others.