How to Fight the Broligarchy

The tech overlords want to trap us. Escaping is how we fight back.

The first step to solving a problem is admitting there is one.

Let’s face it — today, many of us suffer from an addiction, the source of which feels impossible to escape: our phones.

It’s always there, this limitless technology, ready to offer you the world. Accessible always, calling to you. A notification, a message, a new like, a news update. Endless scrolling. Everything at your fingertips at all times. How do you escape something inescapable?

Want the answer to a question? Look it up on Google (or now, ChatGPT). Want to buy something? Get it in two days on Amazon. Want to stay up to date with your friends? Follow them on Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok. 

Each time we use these platforms, we become more likely to use them again. They are designed to hook us. These tech companies have separated us from one another and addicted us to our phones. We’ve been caught in an endless cycle that further divides and addicts, over, and over again, for the purposes of profiting off us.

Humans aren’t meant to live like this. We are meant to be with one another, in communities, socializing, loving, present with people and nature. 

We’re victims to the greed of oligarchic technocrats, and humanity is worse off because of it.

But we aren’t trapped, no matter how inescapable it feels. Yes, we’ve been enclosed in this technological, capitalist hellscape, but we can leave. The issue is not that we are trapped, but that the cages are incredibly large, and, as soon as you leave one, there are high odds you bump right into another, accidentally walking through the gates and imprisoning yourself once again. Not to mention, the world outside of the gates can also feel lonely. Where is everyone? They’re still in the gates, most unaware of their imprisonment. To engage with others online, you often find yourself stuck between a rock and a hard place, deciding between different fiefs that are looking to profit off you. Walking out of the X or TikTok gated enclosures? You’re likely going to walk right into Threads and Instagram land next. “Welcome to your new gated community! Check out these new fun toys to play with!” (cough, AI) Once again, our attention is captured, and we’re confined at our own peril.

There are however some new virtual lands forming with some key differences worth discussing. As large corporations intentionally work to trap us, others may set us free.

In Big Tech lands, you are constantly monitored. Video cameras are everywhere, surveilling and studying your every move, purely so the landowners can determine how best to keep you there, how best to monetize you. “Are there areas where we can expand the gates?” I imagine the robotic Zuckerberg asking his fifteen AI friends, “What if we bought Instagram land? How about WhatsApp land too?” The Meta landmass widens, the gates lengthen, and you become further trapped. They study you, build new shiny objects to keep you looking inward, to keep you distracted, to profit off you. They leverage human psychology and neuroscience to imprison us and enrich themselves.

Not all digital lands are like this. Bluesky is better. They aren’t surveilling you because they aren’t advertising to you. That is the whole purpose of the mass surveillance and grand data mining on these Big Tech platforms after all—to sell things to you. Bluesky doesn’t do that, which implies its incentive structure is totally different too. If it isn’t surveilling you to sell you to others, then the platform isn’t designed to keep you hooked. Instead, it’s designed to be for you. A people’s platform, not a billionaire’s tool for enrichment. The landmass may widen, but that’s simply a result of more people wanting into the open yard. The commons grow out of public need, not out of strategic enclosures by extractive owners.

This is not to say Bluesky is a perfect platform. They still have investors, and these investors will eventually be looking to cash in. However, as of now, it seems like a great alternative. Other decentralized privacy-forward platforms like Mastodon (i.e., Facebook alternative) and Pixelfed (i.e., Instagram alternative) are also following suit.

But really, radical change is needed to fix the problems we are encountering. These open-air digital prisons are simply too large. They are monopolies that dominate our lives. It’s not necessarily impossible to escape because there are no exits; rather, it’s difficult to leave because everywhere you turn, you’re likely to still find yourself in the enclosure. This doesn’t just impact us as users of the platforms—it impacts the businesses that rely on them too. All these businesses also exist within these enclosures and are also surveilled by the tech overlords.

Google is necessary to find your business. Apple is necessary for your business to have a smartphone app. Amazon’s marketplace and web services are necessary to sell your products and host your services. Meta and other social media platforms are necessary for you to find and market to audiences.

A business will struggle to survive if it exists outside of these virtual tech lands, because most consumers they need to access live in those lands. And as businesses set up shops inside the enclosures, they are not only studied by the landlords—who leverage these learnings to copy and run them out of business—they also must pay rent to operate. Want to use Amazon for selling your product? That’ll cost 50% of your revenue. How about selling on Apple’s App Store? That’ll be 30% of your revenue.

Our businesses are in exploitative landlord relationships with Big Tech. Big Tech is not producing new value—they are stealing it. Through their enclosures of the internet’s commons, they have monopolized key infrastructure that people and businesses rely on. Now that they’ve expanded their lands and built up their fences, amassing an enormous amount of power and money, they are realizing that the public will soon discover their heist, and they’re getting worried. 

Because if the people wake up to who they are and what they’re doing, there will be massive backlash, and their oligarchy will be threatened. Monopolies will be dismembered, and Big Tech and AI will be intensely regulated. If this were to happen, Musk, Zuckerberg, Bezos, Altman, Thiel, and the rest of the techno-fascist billionaire lot would lose all of their power.

So, they’re taking their chances by working to establish a new world order, one where they’re in charge forever (see the neoreactionary movement, i.e., “Dark Enlightenment”). It’s a move of desperation to secure their power indefinitely. Luckily, these tech bros are the few, we are the many, and we can fight back. 

Here’s what you can do today to take action against the broligarchy:

1. Amazon

   1. Cancel your Amazon Prime subscription.

   2. Stop using Amazon entirely if possible; if not possible, severely limit purchases on Amazon. Instead, purchase directly from retailers. You can try Costco as well, which is still supporting DEI efforts.

   3. Stop buying from WholeFoods.

2. Google

   1. Switch from Google’s search engine to DuckDuckGo or Brave.

   2. Switch from Google’s Chrome browser to DuckDuckGo or Brave.

   3. Switch from Google suite (e.g., email, drive) to Proton suite.

3.  Social Media

   1. Switch from X & Threads to Bluesky.

   2. Switch from Facebook to Mastodon.

   3. Switch from Instagram to Flashes (Bluesky-based) or Pixelfed (see details on how to easily migrate).

   4. Switch from Facebook Messenger & WhatsApp to Signal.

   5. Switch from TikTok (it is a surveillance tool for China) to Skylight (Bluesky-based).

   6. If you choose to continue using Instagram, Facebook, and TikTok, only use these platforms for resistance efforts (e.g., informing people of fascism and sharing protest information). This is still a vital part of online resistance, whether you migrate or not!

4. Artificial Intelligence (AI)

   1. It is difficult to avoid AIs such as ChatGPT today. If you do use them, at least make sure you understand the risks:

      1. They are stealing your work to profit off you, and it seems they have no plans to stop as the Trump regime fired the head of the US copyright office after she released a report on how AI potentially oversteps law.

      2. Every time you use these models, it contributes to destroying the planet. Writing a 100-word email with ChatGPT is the equivalent of dumping out one water bottle.

      3. AI bots like ChatGPT often hallucinate, providing inaccurate information to users, and this phenomenon is only getting worse.

      4. Some of these tools are owned by techno-fascist billionaires who can exploit them for information control and reality distortion. Just yesterday, Elon Musk’s AI chatbot “Grok” was spreading misinformation about nonexistent South African “white genocide” to users across the platform.

5. Learn & Educate

   1. Subscribe to Carole Cadwalladr’s How to Survive the Broligarchy. Cadwalladr is widely known for helping to expose the Cambridge Analytica scandal. Recently, she spoke at TED about the digital coup we’re experiencing.

   2. Subscribe to Gil Duran’s The Nerd Reich. There is no better coverage on the neoreactionary movement than Duran’s. Here’s a great article to start with, comparing Curtis Yarvin’s ideas about a CEO-dictator to Elon Musk’s actions.

   3. Subscribe to Wired. They have comprehensive coverage on the regime’s data heist as well as useful information on data privacy.

   4. Follow Carole Cadwalladr, Gil Duran, Jenny Cohn, and Brooke Harrington on Bluesky. Cohn has fantastic coverage on “network states” (see her thread on the people behind this fascist movement), while Harrington covers the Broligarchy (check out her interview with Jon Stewart).

   5. Read about Bluesky’s vision for a decentralized, privacy-forward internet, learn about the AT Protocol backing its efforts, and discover the new promising apps that are propping up using the same technologies.

Finally, share this article widely. And when you switch platforms, why not share a post when you leave, encouraging others to join you? You can include this article, its list of actions, and your new accounts on the alternative people-centric platforms. 

The more people that boycott Big Tech, the better. Their power comes from more of us living in their enclosures so they can steal and sell our data. Without that, they’re nothing.

It’s time we move out.

This article was written by R, an anonymous member of 50501 NY. This is not an official statement of the 50501 movement.

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An extended P.S.:

I’d like to leave you with two thoughts.

First, an excerpt from Yanis Varoufakis’s Technofeudalism: What Killed Capitalism, exploring the concept of cloud enclosures further. I highly recommend reading his book, as well as watching some of his interviews. He paints a vision for a beautiful, democratized future, where the people take the power back from the tech overlords.

How different would the internet be without these New Enclosures? Imagine what you could do if you owned your digital identity and could prove who you are without relying on the combination of a bank card and a corporation like Uber or Lyft that processes that card and all your subsequent travel data. In the same way GPS pinpoints where you presently are, you would have the opportunity to broadcast over the internet: ‘My name is George, I am on the corner of Aristotle and Plato Streets, and I am heading for the airport. Anyone wishing to bid for my ride?’ Within seconds you would receive a multitude of offers from people or outfits licensed to carry passengers, including sage advice from the municipal transit authority like ‘Why not take the metro, located three minutes walk from where you are, and much faster than any car can meander its way through traffic?’ Alas, you can’t do this. 

In the world of Internet Two, shaped by the New Enclosures, you are routinely forced to hand over your identity to a part of the digital realm that has been fenced off, such as Uber or Lyft or some other private company. When you request a ride to the airport, their algorithm dispatches a driver of its choice with a view to maximize the exchange value the company owning the algorithm extracts both from you and the driver. These New Enclosures enabled the plunder of the digital commons which drove the incredible rise of cloud capital.

Second, a favorite of mine, Bo Burnham’s “Welcome to the Internet”, who reminds us that the internet was a better place before the tech overlords swooped in to dominate and profit off our lives via algorithms.

You know, it wasn't always like this

Not very long ago
Just before your time
Right before the towers fell, circa '99
This was catalogs
Travel blogs
A chat room or two
We set our sights and spent our nights
Waiting
For you, you, insatiable you
Mommy let you use her iPad
You were barely two
And it did all the things
We designed it to do

Now look at you, oh

Look at you, you, you
Unstoppable, watchable
Your time is now
Your inside's out
Honey, how you grew
And if we stick together
Who knows what we'll do
It was always the plan
To put the world in your hand

Hahaha (evil laughter)
Could I interest you in everything?
All of the time
A bit of everything
All of the time
Apathy's a tragedy
And boredom is a crime
Anything and everything
All of the time