Post by @paul
Bad Tech!
Well, here I go. This is going to be a long thread. I invite people to contribute.
Hoping to avoid people complaining about me putting the tech they love on this list. Please go start your own.
I can only do 500 characters at a time, FYI, which is why some, er, entries might be pithier than they should be.
I'll put in links as I find them.
I'm using https://pivot-to-ai.com/ by @davidgerard and this list as references https://drewdevault.com/weird-guys/
Please share others
The OG/corps you already know about.
Microsoft
Google
Apple
Meta
Amazon
You can also think of them as much of what is ginning up the American stock market. And if you're not alarmed by that, what have you been doing with your life since 2008?
Other stuff you mostly already know and that you can live without
OpenAI
Twitter/X/whatever you want to call them
BlueSky
Anthropic
Substack*
*This is a good time to mention that anything that is fascist or Nazi-adjacent qualifies for this list. And if you court Nazis, you definitely qualify.
And now we start to have a little fun, because as you scratch a little closer, you find that the things you thought were "ethical" alternatives really aren't, and you have to admit to yourself that you don't have options.
Proton
LibreOffice
Tuta
Kagi
Mozilla
Brave
Linux...this was when it started to get really fun
Internet Archive....this was when you might have stopped breathing
Wikipedia...which we could have suspected because Wales brags about being a libertarian, so not liking unions tracks
Omarchy...but that's a Linux distribution, and eh, you already had a problem
Mullvad...someone want to list a good VPN that isn't fascist adjacent or corrupted with AI? Please?
Stripe
PayPal...This one is *special*, and maybe should have been on the first list
Discord! They are moving to "age verification", and that is going to go really badly, I promise you. But why believe me when you can just look at tumblr?
VIM
Shopify
@dnkboston@apobangpo.space just re: VPNs, you might want to take a look at xeovo.com
Seem to be fairly anti-fasc, can't speak for Ai stance right now but they don't seem to mention anything about AI anywhere (which could be a good or bad thing)
Note: they don't have an app, instead they give you configs for the base wireguard or openvpn clients. This is a good thing.
@paul Bookmarked and thank you. Unfortunately, even if they brag about not using it, that doesn't meant they don't.
@dnkboston@apobangpo.space absolutely agree.
And there's the risk that increased popularity could fasc-ify them too.
We've been burned too many times at this point