They tighten their grip on us every day – and we’re all helping them to do it. Is there a way out, asks Tom Hodgkinson

The global search advertising sales monopoly Alphabet has just announced its best ever quarter. This gigantic conglomeration, which, like the other ad sales giant Meta, has a Greek name, announced takings of $100 billion. Meta’s sales this quarter were $51 billion.

Meta has an amazingly high profit margin of around 40%. And Alphabet’s margin is massive too: 34%. Bear in mind that most businesses are happy to make a profit of 10% of their sales.

Meta and Alphabet make outsized profits because they employ a relatively tiny number of staff, and because the product they sell – which is information about people so that advertisers can target their ads very precisely – is given to them entirely for free by us: yeah, we are the suckers.

In the process of monopolising the world’s ad sales, Meta and Alphabet have caused the destruction of an untold number of small magazines and newspapers. The ad money that used to support thousands of publications now all goes to M or A.

Today, some magazines survive thanks to their subscribers (like us); some thanks to a deep-pocketed proprietor (for example, the Spectator and UnHerd are generously bankrolled by their ambitious hedge fund owner Paul Marshall, who periodically transfers some of his enormous wealth into the bank accounts of his various media outlets).

It’s hard to know how to escape. Cory Doctorow’s new book Enshittification is a witty analysis of the ways and means of Big Tech. Cory says that they often start off as quite good services, eg Facebook, WhatsApp, Amazon, Uber. Then, once they’ve achieved a monopoly using their investors’ money, they become shit, in other words, prices go up, quality goes down, but by now the poor user is trapped. There is no alternative.

The tentacles are absolutely everywhere. I recently looked into where my pension money is invested. Lo and behold, a lot of it goes into American tech stocks! This means that I am supporting not only these awful companies, but also the American Empire, which they fund. The tech billionaire visionary Peter Thiel, who was the first investor in Facebook, is way pro-Trump, and helped JD Vance. He also co-founded Palantir, the data company that is now invading the NHS: just two days ago, it won a £25 million contract to provide a new data platform for our health service – and this might well lead to far bigger deals on the half-billion-a-year level.

Oh my God! This means that even when you’re ill, you’re tacitly supporting the American Empire. They’ve trapped us completely.

The only person I can think of who has managed to escape is the great Mark Boyle, author of The Moneyless Man, who lives in a remote part of Ireland without Internet or phone. Well done him. But this is not an option for most of us.

My own small and imperceptible act of resistance is to not have a smartphone. Apart from that, I’m just as bad as anyone else: I use Google Drive, Google Sheets, I google things daily.

And when it comes to AI, blimey, don’t get me started. A bunch of copyright-thieving bastards, if you ask me. I never use it, preferring to use RI or Real Intelligence, which I do by consulting my 1911 edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica, and in fact have disabled that annoying “AI summary” thing on my browser (oh, I do use an AI-assisted transcribing programme – it’s excellent!).

Help me! Will we ever be free?

Live well,
Tom

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SELECTED COMMENTS

These comments were mailed to us after an earlier version of this piece was sent out as a newsletter. We like to publish a selection and reserve the right to edit them for clarity. Please add your thoughts in the box below.

Sir: You live an envious tech-free life. Last month, I was offered a washing machine controllable by my phone. I bought one with buttons. My Alexa device is my only tech indulgence, bar my computer, and it only channels LBC UK. In two weeks’ time I may be able to put my washing out on the line. I coped in Swaziland 40 years ago, heck, I can cope now. I have time to read, greet cats, enjoy meeting neighbours and, above all, time to myself. I’m ridiculously selfish. I harm no-one apart those who wish to rob me of my time. And, over and above all, I’m not an arsehole.
Jeremy Evans

Sir: Yes, we are all trapped, to some extent. But there are ways to minimise the contribution you make to Big Tech. Make informed, ethical choices about the software, hardware and digital services you use. Take a look at ethical.net, ethical consumer and CyberInsider for starters. It’s all very well moaning about it, but unless you put your principles into action, then Big Tech’s influence is just going to get even bigger and bigger. Move The Idler’s business onto other platforms that are not owned by Alphabet or Meta. And don’t use AI. You’re not wrong, it’s copyright theft, plain and simple – not to mention yet another attack on human creativity. And the energy and water it takes up is mind-boggling. So just stop using it. Go back to using your own brain.
Hoops

Sir: I have a couple of ideas for you: Take control of your pension. Watch the Idler course on Investment. It’s very good. Then stop investing in America, and possibly stop investing. Use a good search engine instead of Google. I pay 5 USD a month for Kagi. No ads. Excellent search results. You can configure which sites are prioritised or hidden in your results. They also provide a News app which just gives you up to 12 stories per day on categories of your choice, in a nice simple format. Ideal Idler news. I could go on…
Dan Boschi

Sir: I was reading today’s newsletter and you mentioned, begrudgingly, using Google services on a daily basis. In my humble opinion, the best way to unlock oneself from the large US  data hoarding services is to use alternative search engines, document collaboration services mail providers etc al. Not having a smartphone, respectfully, only goes a small way. Switching out the services, that’s the key! These days I’m a very satisfied customer of privacy protecting, secure and respectful companies that make their money from subscriptions. It was a fairly smooth journey, some hiccups, but well worth it. As a former writer and editor I humbly offer my services should The Idler want to include a piece on how it can be done, and how incredibly satisfying the journey is.
Jaan Orvet

Sir: You might be a little bit freer if you stop blaming “American empire” for your problems and start being the difference you seek. Truly, it’s amazing reading when an Englishman whines about “empire” on the regular. You’re losing me with this ongoing pity party of yours. It’s also very unidle. It’s not American empire, by the way, but global tech feudalism and your government is looking like one of the worst actors in it, and likely would use surveillance tech regardless of the company’s origins. Hint: it’s in the Internet’s architecture and will be exploited by centralizers, be they conservative or liberal, communist or fascist. I like Cory, but he sometimes (loosely) represents just another faction that aims to control everyone. Yeah, Google sucks. But you can get away from it. It’s not easy to completely do this, but not impossible. Start by using a Linux distro and FOSS. If you can’t get away from it fully, then blocking some of it does make a difference. Would you throw away a good umbrella, just because there are a few raindrops on your shoes?
Paul Ottaviano

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