Let’s Build Our Own Tech Coop!

What’s wrong with Big Tech?

1. Monopolistic Power
A few companies (e.g., Google, Apple, Meta, Amazon, Microsoft, often called GAFAM) dominate markets like search, social media, cloud computing, mobile operating systems, and e-commerce.
→ This reduces competition, limits innovation, and gives these companies disproportionate control over digital infrastructure and user behavior.

2. Surveillance Capitalism
Big Tech platforms harvest massive amounts of personal data to predict and manipulate user behaviour for profit.
→ As Shoshana Zuboff described it: users aren’t customers, they are the product. Their attention and data are sold to advertisers or used to feed ever-more intrusive algorithms.

3. Algorithmic Manipulation & Disinformation
Algorithms optimized for engagement often amplify outrage, polarisation, and false information.
→ Platforms like YouTube, Facebook, and TikTok can push users into filter bubbles or radicalisation pipelines simply because it keeps them online longer.

4. Labor Exploitation and Gig Work
From Amazon warehouses to Uber drivers, Big Tech’s business models often rely on precarious labor.
→ Algorithmic management & surveillance in the workplace can lead to dehumanising conditions and erosion of workers’ rights.

5. Political Influence & Lobbying
Big Tech companies spend billions on lobbying to influence laws, avoid regulation, and shape digital governance in their favor.
→ Their infrastructure (e.g. AWS, Azure) is also deeply embedded in public services and military contracts, further entrenching their power.

6. Erosion of Democratic Control
The platforms act as quasi-sovereign entities: they govern speech (content moderation), control access to digital marketplaces, and shape public discourse – often with little transparency or accountability.

7. Ecological Impact
Massive data centers, endless hardware production, and supply chains contribute significantly to global carbon emissions and resource depletion.
→ Big Tech rarely takes responsibility for the environmental cost of always-on, extractive digital systems.

8. Dependency and Infrastructure Lock-In
Governments, schools, and businesses increasingly rely on Big Tech infrastructure (e.g., Google Workspace, Microsoft Teams, AWS).
→ This creates lock-in effects, making it harder to switch to more ethical, open, or democratic alternatives.

9. Minimal accountability
If something goes wrong, it’s hard to keep Big Tech firms accountable.
→ Their immense resources allow them to fund top legal teams, lobby aggressively, and outlast smaller challengers (including governments) in legal or regulatory battles.

10. Flattening of Cultural Diversity
Trending and recommendation systems, filter bubbles and algorithmic bias lead to global standardisation of culture.
→ This promotes a global monoculture. Amplifying dominant voices, flattening context through algorithmic and commercial logic and shaping online behaviour around a set of norms erodes cultural diversity everywhere.

Big Tech poses significant challenges to democracy, accountability, equality and cultural diversity. How is it even possible to build up resistance and start movements that create technological alternatives for those who want to quit big tech?

In the end, it’s still a matter of choice, right? No one has forced us to buy via Amazon, no one needs to be on Instagram. There are alternatives on the rise, but they are often invisible, or underfunded or simply pushed to the margins.

What can we do?

Resisting Big Tech and building meaningful alternatives is challenging but possible through collective, technical, and cultural strategies. It starts with supporting ethical technologies like open-source tools, decentralised platforms, and platform cooperatives that prioritise user autonomy over profit. Digital literacy is essential. People need to understand how surveillance capitalism works and how to reclaim control through privacy-respecting practices. Political and cultural resistance also plays a key role: organizing campaigns, demanding regulation, and imagining public digital infrastructure. Most importantly, alternatives don’t need to match Big Tech’s scale – they can be local, they can be small. All they need to do is to sustain human dignity, community values and cultural diversity.

How can we design sustainable tech from the ground up?

If we’re serious about moving beyond Big Tech, we need more than just ethical intentions. We need coordinated action across infrastructure, governance, funding, and culture. Here’s how a truly democratic and cooperative digital ecosystem could emerge:

1. Platform Coops as a Starting Point

Platform cooperatives are digital platforms owned and governed by the people who use them: whether workers, users, or both. They operate on principles of shared ownership, democratic governance, fair value distribution, and transparent data practices. Examples like Stocksy (a photographers’ coop), Up & Go (cleaning services in NYC), and Resonate (a music streaming coop) show that platforms don’t have to be extractive. But these projects often struggle with scale, funding, and visibility – barriers that the wider ecosystem must help overcome.

2. Commons-Based Infrastructure

We need more than individual ethical platforms. We need public digital infrastructure others can build upon. That means open-source code, federated protocols like ActivityPub and co-owned cloud alternatives such as community servers or sovereign hosting. Tools like Mastodon (federated social media), OpenCollective (transparent finances for collectives), and Solid (personal data pods) show what this looks like in practice. Collective data ownership through data trusts or commons licenses is another key component.

3. Embedding Democratic Governance by Design

Big Tech governs users by opaque algorithms; post-Big-Tech systems must invert this logic. Platforms should be governed by their communities through user or worker voting rights, transparent moderation, participatory budgeting, and, where appropriate, ethical uses of smart contracts or DAOs. Tools like Loomio, Hypha, Colony, and Aragon can help embed collective decision-making directly into platforms and protocols.

4. Redesigning Incentives and Funding Models

To move away from Big Tech’s ad-based, growth-at-all-costs logic, we need alternative funding models. These might include membership fees, public funding or municipal investment in digital commons, crowdfunding, grants, and mutual credit systems tied to real contributions. Examples include Circles UBI, community currencies, and the emerging movement for digital public goods.

5. Localise and Contextualise

Effective alternatives are not one-size-fits-all. They should reflect local cultures, languages, and legal contexts. Real coordination scales not like Uber, but like networks of local knowledge. The future lies in modular, interoperable platforms—built on trust, mutual aid, and federation rather than domination.

6. Education, Onboarding, and Culture

No matter how ethical or innovative an alternative platform is, it will fail if people can’t understand it or use it. We need clear onboarding, thoughtful UX, widespread digital literacy, and accessible explanations of how value is created and shared. People don’t want platforms in the first place, but they want outcomes. Make alternatives truly usable and beneficial to real people.

Prototyping the Future: Design Your Own Tech Coop

Imagine you’re part of a group of friends or colleagues starting your own tech cooperative. You’ll have around 10 minutes to sketch out a simple concept.

Step 1: Group Work (5–6 minutes in pairs or trios)

Work together to quickly answer the following questions:

1. What kind of platform are you building?
   (e.g. food delivery, ride-sharing, art-sharing, messaging, etc.)

2. Who owns and operates it?
   (Workers, users, both?)

3. How are decisions made?
   (Voting, consensus, DAO, Loomio, or another method?)

4. How is it funded and sustained?
   (Membership fees, grants, crowdfunding, community tokens?)

5. What makes it better than the Big Tech alternative?

You can use post-its or a shared online whiteboard if you’re working remotely.

Step 2: Share Back (5–6 minutes total)

Each group gives a brief 1-minute summary of their tech coop idea.

Let’s hear what your future looks like—who’s ready to go first?

Thanks for the workshop, thanks for contributing to this resource that we are glad to share with all of you!