Please do join if you’re interested in developing alternatives to Big Tech & are in/around London.
best,
Carl
You’ll know that as we move into 2026, Palestinians are still losing their homes, lives and families in a genocide backed by our government and our most household-name companies. Some of us will be spending this time thinking about what we want to do and help change in the new year.
So I wanted to invite you to a gathering I’m organising for 15-25 people on 1 February, in Brixton.
It’s a lunch and afternoon of discussions/activities for people who know that Google, Microsoft, Amazon and other tech companies are a part of Israel’s ‘economy of genocide’, and who want to reduce their dependency on them, but perhaps feel they’d prefer to do this in connection with and with the support of others.
The event is called Eat Good Food, Meet Great People and Dump Big Tech for Palestine.
My goal is to get this on your radar and to invite you all!
If you can help to share this e.g. amongst your team, to your friends and family, or even to any newsletters or social media, that would be great - but no pressure. (We’re not on social media, so there’d be no one to tag - but people are welcome to get in touch with me through the event webpage.)
With lots of warmth,
Taz Rasul
she/her
Google is awful - let’s help each other let go of it
Webarchitects Co-operative also provides managed Nextcloud, ONLYOFFICE and Mailcow instances, which are all free open source software, running on co-operatively owned hardware in a co-operatively managed data centre — these things can be used as an alternative to corporate services such as Office 365 / Google Wordspace etc.
However we are based in Sheffield and can’t make it to the meeting, I hope it goes well!
To me that event looks like it’s focused on dumping big tech for personal use, and I strongly suspect most people aren’t going to host a load of open source tools for themselves - yesterday I wrote about the efforts I’ve gone to liberate myself from big tech, and it’s not viable for most people –> Liberation from Big Tech? – Nick's Blog.
To support more people to break away, I think we need more collective projects that can run small-ish scale tools for small-ish groups of people that want to co-operate on this. It’s a lot more work than just getting things running - meeting up, showing each other how to configure your phone/laptop/etc., feeling a kinship that other people are doing it, hang out, have fun, etc…. building it more into a movement.
So something like: co-operating hosting providers and tooling <–> local tech collective <–> individuals
If the tooling becomes super easy, then maybe you don’t need that local bit, and a national/regional collective would work
thank you all - and some really useful resources here!
please do come along if you can and join us on 1st Feb yes, we’re still at the stage of working out how to fix our own personal relationship to some of this tech (I guess some of that, not all, could be described as Internet Safety) but politically I think there is a lean towards a kind of Tech Community Wealth Building approach which would put middle stacks/co-ops/open source very much in a political context.
Governments and armies all over the world do business with Google and AWS. As do multinationals and co-ops, charities and peace groups, political parties of all leanings and all kinds of people doing things you like and don’t like, of all colours nationalities and creeds.
Singling out Israel as being somehow especially connected to Big Tech, and using this to motivate people against Big Tech, strikes me as a modern incarnation of the “Jews are behind all the evil in the world” trope. I find it disturbing. The phrase “economy of genocide” nails this for me. It’s a very powerful phrase, connecting financial control of the world (classic anti-Jewish trope) with an accusation of evil.
Dumping big tech may be a worthy cause in its own right, and I understand that hooking into current trends of political sentiment is an effective way to mobilise people. But is it really “for Palestine”? Convince me that switching to Nextcloud could help someone in Gaza get their home or family or health back, and I’ll change my mind!
“Singling out Israel as being somehow especially connected to Big Tech…”
just a single search on pretty much any search engine. just one. No mention here of Jewishness, or any anti-Jewish tropes - in fact we were lucky to have a number of Jewish people at the event. I could write more, but won‘t.
A single search on a search engine for pretty much any country, govt etc in relation to big tech would also bring up results. That’s what I mean by singling out.
Indeed, as far as I’m aware only one other co-op in CoTech isn’t dependant on either Amazon, Google or Microsoft for critical internal systems, this is something I mentioned at Congress last year.
Both Webarchitects and Autonomic are involved with this campaign against big tech:
Indeed but conflating anti-Israel sentiment with anti-Jewish sentiment is a dangerous game, and many Jewish voices believe that to be a fundamentally anti-Jewish position in itself. I don’t think it’s okay to leverage the genuine and horrific persecution of Jewish people to silence people speaking up about the genuine and horrific persecution of the Palestinian people.
I don’t think it’s okay to leverage the genuine and horrific persecution of Jewish people to silence people speaking up about the genuine and horrific persecution of the Palestinian people.
Absolutely, I couldn’t agree with you more. It’s a real bugbear of mine and I’ve almost fallen out with family members about this. Do you think I was doing this in my post? Can you elaborate? For my part, I didn’t see the OP as speaking up about the persecution particularly. They mentioned it in the intro, and that wasn’t what I objected to. Their main gist was encouraging people to dump big tech, which like I said, though perhaps a good idea in itself, will have zero effect on the suffering in Palestine.
conflating anti-Israel sentiment with anti-Jewish sentiment is a dangerous game
Less convinced about this. I mean obviously they are different things. But neither of them is any good. I think what’s more of a dangerous game is allowing how one feels about the actions of the government or ruling powers of a country to become an excuse for “sentiment” against the country itself, which is a community of some millions of humans, many of whom don’t support the regime.
Let’s turn it around. Lots of people were horrified by the actions of Hamas on Oct 7 but does that mean it’s ok for them to harbour “anti-Palestine” sentiment? I don’t think so. But many of my aforesaid relatives do, and I think it’s people like that on both sides who are perpetuating the conflict.
Despite this, it wasn’t actually the “sentiment” of the OP that I was objecting to in my post. It was the false implication that Israel and Big Tech are singularly related (If you dump Big Tech for Palestine, are you also doing it for Russia? They supply plenty of services to the Ukrainian govt and army - as well as many others). Given how Big Tech are seen as a force for evil. surveilling and controlling the world, manipulating world events etc, this bears an uncanny resemblance to antisemitic tropes about Jews doing just that. And the idea of an “economy of genocide” which Big Tech are supposedly “part of”, makes it all out to be financially motivated - another antisemitic trope.
I can assure you, whatever batshit thing the Israeli govt thinks they are achieving with this disaster of a war, financial profit it is not it. Big Tech are profitting from it but that’s their job. They will profit from anything, unless it hurts their reputation too much, which is presumably why Microsoft actually pulled out some months ago.
and to invite you all!
Google is awful - let’s help each other let go of it
