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.
and to invite you all!
Google is awful - let’s help each other let go of it
