Sign in Join

Action Guide: Moving Away from Big Tech

Action Guide: Moving Away from Big Tech
Amazon Data Center in Tallaght, South Dublin, Ireland. The row of stainless steel chimneys are permanently installed to evacuate toxic gases from the diesel and gas generators below. Photo: Colm O'Neill (CC BY-SA 4.0)

Preamble

This document aims to serve as a conversation starter for members of the Climate Justice Universities Union to consider a progressive move to more ecologically and ethically conscious digital tools. It is written in good faith and directly acknowledges the complexity of technology, IT services, the internet, and how challenging it can be to review one's digital practices.

Why Big Tech is so problematic

It is increasingly clear that large technology vendors have never had users' best interests at heart. These companies do not prioritise the public good nor are they working toward healthy, stable futures. Rather, they are intentionally dismissing concerns about the ecological destruction and human exploitation associated with their technologies.

As Emily Tucker has so compellingly explained, we now know quite a lot about the harms of Big Tech and the AI industry, such as how the industry

abuses workers, hordes resources, manipulates markets and elections, controls policymakers, steals from artists, violates civil and human rights laws, colludes with war criminals, exploits poor and vulnerable people, implements mass surveillance, or lies to customers, Congress, its own shareholders and members of the public.

Extensive reports on Big Tech companies document their contributions to warfare, negative social / well-being impacts, misleading marketing, and intellectual violations. Google and Amazon's project Nimbus delivers the infrastructure of Genocide. Meta egregiously burned $77 billion on technology no one wanted or used, while it was found liable for designing addictive products that harm children and teens and for failing to protect young people from predators. Apple continues to engage in labor rights abuses and make misleading sustainability claims. Microsoft engages in blatant lying and abuse of power, while also being complicit in genocide.

As if these grave social injustices weren't enough, Big Tech's rollout of (gen)AI and its sprawling data centers have a colossal environmental footprint through their voracious appetite for water, energy and earth metals. The International Energy Agency estimates that a typical AI-focused data centre consumes as much electricity as 100,000 households, whilst the largest ones under construction today will consume 20 times as much. AI's demand for water is especially concerning amidst an era of 'water bankruptcy'. The UK Government's Digital Sustainability Alliance (GDSA) report highlights that AI is predicted to lead to an increase in global water usage from 1.1bn to 6.6bn cubic metres by 2027. This is equivalent to more than half of the UK’s total water usage.  

One approach Big Tech uses to promote their profit-seeking priorities and legitimate their AI hype is by is strategically targeting universities. Higher education institutions are increasingly reliant on digital tools for research, teaching, learning, and communication. And Big Tech has been strategically investing in higher education to promote dependence on their digital tools and to legitimize the uncritical adoption of these tools throughout society.

For these reasons, most members of the Climate Justice Universities Union find ourselves dependent on digital tools for our communication and coordination needs. As an international collective, we rely heavily on online digital tools to connect and collaborate. But given the ecological destruction and human exploitation that is being exacerbated by big tech companies, the Union has been reviewing the tools we use and actively moving away from Big Tech.

As an international organisation guided by climate justice principles, we are particularly concerned about the ecological destruction and exploitation of Big Tech. Since these companies entered the AI race, from 2020 to 2023, Amazon's operational carbon emissions grew by 182%, Microsoft's by 155%, Meta's by 140%, and Alphabet's by 138% (see the ITU 2025 report here), leading the companies to "quietly abandon" their climate targets and pledges.

From a climate justice perspective, the need to move off Big Tech is clear, but doing so is indeed quite complicated. One further moral injury is that these giant companies are experts at locking us into their systems. Because of this, sometimes it can seem impossible to even imagine moving away from Big Tech. What follows is a collection of approaches and resources on how to disassociate ourselves from these tools. Within the Union, we have begun to do this, so we draw from our own experiences. We hope that the Union can continue to be a forum for sharing, mutual aid, and support in these matters, as we try to act in solidarity and work towards a more embodied and just tech future.

The Climate Justice Universities Union's experience so far

In the last 9 to 12 months, the Union has changed its website (twice), its primary email, its shared file storage, started a community tool, and reviewed its member registration / management system. We are still working on changing out some of the last pieces of the puzzle: our newsletters and our video-conferencing/online meeting approach. Below are some details of where we were and where we are at now. These aren't meant as a list of instructions, they are more a testimony of our experience to date, and an illustration of the iterative nature of the process. The process of disentangling from Big Tech is a stepwise one, and does not have to happen in all at once. If you are looking to do this yourself, we recommend starting with one manageable change, and build from there.

The website: This started out as a 'Squarespace' website, which initially served the Union well. Squarespace has the advantage of allowing configurable page designs, and tries to make editing content very easy. The downside to this is that controlling what kind of trackers and asset loaders are in use is impossible. Further, Squarespace is very happy to act as a domain name registrar, but allows zero control for subdomains or more advanced domain name settings.

At the core of any resistance of Big Tech is a deep care for privacy. Squarespace inserts all sorts of cookies and trackers that compromise basic privacy. These mechanisms of Digital Surveillance, are also the tools of extraction and monetisation that contradict the principles of the Union. The fight for digital privacy is ongoing and relates directly to Climate Justice principles.

The Climate Justice Universities Union now self-hosts Ghost as a website publishing and content management system. Ghost is not perfect for the Union's needs, but we chose it because it would help us to share newsletters. Also, a tool that had a comprehensive and modern editor interface was important, as Union coordinators come and go.

Email: The union started with a Gmail address, but swiftly moved to a Proton Mail address. Google is one of the worst offenders with regards to digital privacy, but it is also one of the most aggressive when it comes to locking users into their systems, as early as possible. Moving a young organisations email might be easier than moving a private email, but the steps are basically the same. There are multiple guides online on how to do this. It takes time, but it isn't all that hard. It is also worth noting that Microsoft and Google are basically running an email oligopoly under the veil of guarding from spam. While Proton currently puts privacy first in its marketing material, like any other internet company, it could turn. So it is important to be nimble with these transitions.

File storage: Our shared files used to be on (the lock-in mechanism) Google Drive. We've moved them over to Cryptpad, which actually offers a full Suite of apps, so if you want to change over to something that still has integration between your files, that might be an option. Note that Proton Drive also takes this approach, or you could consider something like Nextcloud.

Community communication tools: This is still something we are working on, as we learn about how Union members collaborate and meet, but so far, we have been trialing Mattermost (specifically, a version called Mostlymatter, which is a fork —open source software term meaning a derivation is made, as source code is accessible— of Mattermost) as a way to have more immediate connection than email. Since this is still being trialed, we won't share a link here, but if you'd like to try it out, please send an email to Climatejusticeuni@proton.me and we can invite you. We still rely heavily on university email addresses and some members, working groups and branches have also been using signal for communication.

Member registration: Initially, this was managed via a Google form, then via a Cryptpad form. As we plan our move towards a more privacy respecting newsletter tool, we had to rethink and reorganise how union membership was managed, and what that even meant. This thinking was mixed in with decisions about the website management tool, which led us to opt (despite our best instincts) to centralise some core requirements. Membership management is now done via our website tool Ghost, where Ghost provides a basic account, and will allow members to choose what information threads they want to follow, in the form of different newsletters / emails. We have recently completed the integration of the F4F membership, and have ported over our legacy membership into the one platform.

Newsletter: Along with the website and the member registration, this is likely a key element of the Climate Union's communication. The monthly newsletter has been critical to building the Union ver a year now, but continuing to delivering it via Mailchimp would go against all of the other work we have done disentangling ourselves from Big Tech. Mailchimp describes itself primarily as a marketing, reporting and analytics tool, and while it was somewhat helpful for us to know if the newsletters were being read, the compromise is too big. We got a mail delivery system, but they exploited all the interstitial data that is generated in the process - how frequently you open the newsletter, what other (Mailchimp) newsletters you are subscribed to, and what devices you open these emails on. Tools like Mailchimp are goldmines for data brokers, who love to store and sell data points about you, your email, and your interests. Being signed up to our newsletter, which is about the activities of the Climate Justice Universities Union, tells data brokers what kind of person you are, and what kind of advertising might work on you. This is a system we profoundly dislike, and which we now mean to resist.

Moving to Ghost addresses this issue in part, as it disconnects us from marketing-driven companies. Bulk email remains a serious technical challenge, however, since Big Tech giants are working very hard to undo the interoperability of email. It is certain that we will lose some of you in our transition to a more self-managed email distribution system, but we will work hard to ensure you regain access to our emails (if you want them) and see this as an essential part of reclaiming a just, equitable and interoperable internet.

Online meeting / conferencing platform: This remains a site of work. At the moment, the Union still uses proprietary and extractive tools to meet online, but changes are on the horizon. M$ Teams and Zoom are used extensively in academia and activism alike yet need to be scrutinised. This situation became particularly problematic during the Covid Pandemic, where most institutions refused to acknowledge the elephant in the room. Zoom is a business and surveillance focused tool. While we have included disclaimers and acknowledgements during our own events, we know this is not good enough. We want to do more to practice what we preach, and to embody our Climate Justice values in the tools we choose to meet online as well. Plenty of brilliant alternatives exist, such as Jitsi, BigBlueButton, MiroTalk, or Visio, but hosting these in a way that can potentially welcome hundreds of people from across the globe is technically very challenging. We are currently testing MiroTalk on our own server, and it seems to work well for small groups, but we were recently reminded that some Eduroam (a common wifi gateway/access used in many Universities) instances block the WebRTC protocol (the open technology on which many of these alternative video conferencing tools rely on), and have had to take time for a bit of air and to figure out a workable alternative. For these reasons, we will likely continue to use Zoom in the short-term as we keep searching for a suitable substitute. If members have had good experiences with alternatives, please let us know!

Moving away from Big Tech is an ongoing process

If the last few years of increasing digital dependence and platform lock-in, enshittification, and AI proliferation have taught us anything, it is that things can change rapidly, that no tech company can be relied upon, and that knowledge is power. In this disruptive era that we are living through, we all have power to make choices that align with our principles. As long as we can continue to think about the technologies we want in a principled way, we can reimagine alternative futures and try to align our actions with more positive futures. These processes of moving away from Big Tech offer us multiple tools for Resisting, Reclaiming, and Restructuring. What follows are a list of practical guides, resources, and some further principles to consider if you are embarking on this journey of moving away from Big Tech. We, in the Tech Justice working group of the Climate Justice Universities Union, are here to help and support each other. We recommend DIWO (Do It With Others), not DIY (Do It Yourself)!

1. Considering adopting principles and digital attitudes that are consistent with the rest of the Union's activities by choosing tools that are:

  • Transparent: Tools that allow us to see how they are built.
  • Open: Tools that allow for modification or changes by the users.
  • Accessible: Tools that consider different computing abilities and computing power, therefore, tools that are as simple as possible and do not require disproportionate resources to run.
  • Honest: Tools that do what they say on the tin and nothing else.
  • Politically active: Tools that combat the pervasive nature of copyright when applied to software, by choosing open and permissive licenses (eg: Creative Commons licenses, or the AGPL).
  • Ecologically conscious: Tools that try to minimise water, energy, and other resource usage, e-waste, and reduce their carbon footprint.
  1. Consider prioritizing small tech over Big Tech by choosing:
  • Systems that we can see the boundaries of.
  • Systems that are transparent; when they break, it is obvious what is broken, and why.
  • If mainstream/commercial tools are to be used (e.g., for managing payment systems), it would be preferable to choose tools that have a clear and understandable business model.
  • For example, instead of Chrome (Google) for a web-browser, use Zen Browser, Firefox, or 'Ungoogled-Chromium'

3. Consider putting Digital Privacy first:

  • By selecting tools based on the principles above.
  • By communicating openly about the resulting choices above.
  • Thoroughly complying with GDPR and using the directives as an opportunity for conversation.
  • Using SSL (https://) certificates, encryption, and two-factor authentication methods when necessary.

4. Consider choosing to self-host when it makes sense:

  • This means to use local (home & self-hosted) hosting solutions when possible and appropriate.

Burst their bubbles

We remind ourselves to find solidarity in European and American resistance projects that call for moratoriums on data centers. We also remind ourselves that we don't have to accept the ecological burden of their computation. We stay with the troubles and try to reckon with companies that have told terrible lies in the past, and continue to tell terrible lies today. We take energy from the actions and successes of organisations that came before us. We know that data centers are the tip of the iceberg, but that collectively refusing their software can have huge impact. We know that as tiring as this fight continues to be, the science is on our side. All we need to do is to see through their hype marketing, their cloud metaphors, their fake screens of seamlessness, their narratives of inevitability and burst their bubbles.

Finally, we also acknowledge that while this text speaks of moving from destructive tools to alternatives ones, we know we actually need to think beyond, and embrace what it means to degrow the digital, to find radically different ways of being and begin exnovating away from harmful products and processes to strive for more just, healthy and livable futures.

Further resources: