Great Tools, Awful People
Going online in 2025 is a constant reminder of the rot economy: the growth-at-all-costs mindset that’s taken Silicon Valley hostage for over a decade now, among other things. The tools and apps you use every day are broken: they are buggy, bloated messes that are increasingly stuffed with AI sidebars no one asked for. There’s no fix in sight. Subscription costs keep rising. User data keeps getting mined. User trust is flushed down the drain. And these are the good apps – the products that aren’t actively harming you and the world around you, and democracy in general. For the first time in a long time, I felt seen when I read Ankur Sethi‘s anxieties on using the tools and products he relies on every day.
Every few years, I install Linux on my computer, use it for a few weeks, give up, and go crawling back to my Mac.
Also, every few years, I move all my writing, journaling, note-taking, and task management to fully analog systems powered by paper and pen. I use my analog systems for a few weeks, give up, and go crawling back to the digital apps I’ve been using for the last decade.
He starts off on a benign note. I am someone who keeps moving from one note-taking app to another. Pen-and-paper has been a staple of my system as well, at least when I’m not overly invested in a note-taking app. And then, the kicker.
My urge to use Linux and my urge to eschew computers altogether both come from the same place: I believe the companies that make our computers and the accompanying software are unethical, exploitative, and harmful to society. Using their products makes me uncomfortable, as if I’m complicit in the harms they’re causing.
This hit home because it’s something I’ve been grappling with as well. How do I continue living my life, while minimising the harm and damage I cause to the world and other humans, by using these products and services? On a long enough timescale, pretty much every company/product/service tends to dip into shitty territory, be it Evernote being overtly anti-user or WordPress being recreated in the image of its egomaniacal CEO.
The mental anguish and turmoil are further exacerbated because we subconsciously think of these apps and tools as extensions of our bodies.
The connection I have with my computer when I’m programming in my IDE or writing in my favorite writing app is the same connection a musician might have with their favorite guitar, or a tennis player with their racquet. It’s something sublime, something spiritual. When I’m using my computer to create something, when I’m in that state of flow, I forget where my mind and body end and where the computer begins. A melding of human and machine takes place. […]
This is why it hurts so much. These tools are genuinely useful. It’s just that the provenance of these tools is… icky to say the least.
[…] the tools I share such a deep connection with are made by corporations that exploit workers in developing countries, greenwash their products while generating tons of electronic waste, fight against the rights of people to repair their possessions, engage in malicious compliance when governments try to regulate them, spy on their users, hold their users’ data hostage, and commit a long list of other crimes that would take too long to recount here.
To make matters worse, these corporations openly and gleefully disrespect art and the tools used to make it while indulging in vulgar displays of power over artists and their work.
Silicon Valley’s latest obsession – AI – is a grift masquerading as a tool, shoddily built on top of a mountain of cynically stolen work. The entirety of human knowledge, hoovered up without consent to generate absolute slop.
Of course, you can never talk about what’s wrong with the world without looking at the deeper, systemic issues. “Hate the game, not the player” and all that. The insane power and control that Big Tech holds is glossed over, because the only mantra that Silicon Valley and Wall Street believe in is line up, good. As long as shareholders make money on their investments, every crime can be whitewashed, every environmental damage greenwashed, and Panopticon-style surveillance overlooked. I guess what I’m saying is all of this is propped up and enabled by – you guessed it – capitalism.
We’ve structured our society so that the best products and services are made by the worst people in the world. Of course you can deliver packages earlier than everyone else if you overwork your employees. Of course you can sell the fastest computers at the cheapest prices if you keep moving your manufacturing operations to countries with the worst labor and environmental laws. Of course you can build the smartest AI models if you slurp up everybody else’s intellectual property without asking for consent first.
A handful of people opting out of this hellscape of surveillance, growth-at-all-costs enshittification, and AI slop will never hurt the bottom line. A real change to how corporations act would require changing
- the rules of the game
- the incentives of the game
- the game
Things will only change when being an asshole stops being a competitive advantage.
Ankur ends his piece with this clever-but-true point. Big Tech got this way because of the incentives that were present before them. Unless these incentives change, expecting a corporation to be ethical — remember Google’s Don’t be evil motto? — will always be a naïve pipe dream.
Of course, this ethical dilemma of using products and services made by awful people is not limited to tech alone. I am constantly at odds with myself about the products, services, and content I consume. The businesses I engage with could be extremely shitty and evil. The artists whose work I enjoy could turn out to be monsters. That restaurant I eat at could be in cahoots with a terrorist state. Existing in 2025 means that I, as an individual, have to carry the feeling (guilt?) of being inadvertently complicit. It means that I have to be mindful of the non-zero possibility of everything I have today disappearing tomorrow because the people who make it are evil.
But that’s a conversation for a different time.