You can’t ‘unsubscribe’ from techno-fascism

Dr Raffaele Ciriello writes that campaigns encouraging users to abandon ChatGPT confuse individual boycotts with meaningful resistance in a system dominated by entrenched Big Tech power.

FINALLY OpenAI‘s deepening complexity A convenient form of “protest” has emerged with the US military and the Trump Administration.

Campaigns like ‘Exit GPT” And “Resist and Unsubscribe“I urge people to cancel their reservations ChatGPT Subscriptions to undermine Big Tech’s contribution to authoritarian military power.

It sounds simple and seductive. If millions of users lose their money and attention, Silicon Valley will feel the pressure. Companies will change their behavior. Market signals will discipline the force. Autocrats will restrain themselves.

This idea is not entirely worthless. Individual agency is important Even in authoritarian systems. Collective action often begins with small acts of rejection. There are consumer boycotts Sometimes forced companies to change harmful practices.

But this illusion collapses with minimal scrutiny. What exactly should people use instead?

Get Anthropic claude. The company has positioned itself as the ethical alternative in the artificial intelligence race. resisting certain forms of government surveillance. But their models are already integrated into defense and intelligence ecosystems. Claude was reportedly used in recent US interventions Venezuelan And Iranian.

What about Gemini? Google’s technologies (as well as those of Amazon, Microsoft, and Palantir) have long been embedded in military and surveillance systems through the Pentagon. Maven Project Drone targeting program. Google also provides cloud services and algorithmic surveillance infrastructure to intelligence agencies around the world. Israel. Meanwhile, the issue of Gemini lawsuits Allegedly contributing to suicide.

switch Microsoft Copilot? Microsoft one of the biggest cloud infrastructure providers to military and intelligence agencies globally. The same Azure systems that power enterprise AI are deeply embedded surveillance and combat operations.

Maybe xAI Grok? by chatbot Elon Muskwho has supported many times far right politicsX’s social network to create Directing users to such policies and enabling artificial intelligence tools to enable this policy widespread generation related to sexual abuse material?

And then there is Meta. United Nations researchers say Facebook “decisive roleIn the spread of anti-Rohingya hate speech during ethnic cleansing in Myanmar, which forced hundreds of thousands of people to flee the country. internal research It found that Instagram was harming young people’s mental health, but the company resisted changes when it threatened revenues.

Investigations We also showed that Meta’s advertising ecosystem was heavily infiltrated by scams and fraud operations that generated billions of dollars in revenue. Cambridge Analytica The privacy scandal also still looms large. Why would AI disrupt this model?

And that’s even before we get into the long list Big Tech’s broken promises Addressing harms related to child safety, privacy, election integrity, extremism, and national security.

With alternatives like these, you’d better stick to the devil you know.

It’s almost time to be full amish and withdrawing from digital technology altogether, today’s reality is to navigate a tightly controlled digital ecosystem dominated by a handful of companies whose infrastructures, from communications to commerce, from politics to war, now support modern society.

The result is a world where a few digital giants shape everything. supermarket logistics with immigration enforcement. military-industrial complex has been perfected, and much of society now operates within its orbit.

Under these conditions, ethical consumerism becomes performative: ineffective at best, harmful at worst.

Canceling a chatbot subscription may offer a temporary sense of moral superiority while doing nothing to dismantle the political economy that produces these technologies.

History should make us skeptical. Famous Boycott Nestlé In the 1970s, changes were made in the marketing of baby food. It is often cited as an example of ethical consumerism. But decades later, the global agricultural system remains characterized by unequal trade relations, unstable working conditions, and concentration of corporate power. Capital adapted. The structure remained.

Digital capitalism is even more resilient to consumer pressure because network effects And platform locking. Leaving a platform often means losing access to professional networks, communication systems or essential services. Or it just means switching to another interface running on the same infrastructure.

You can’t get out of surveillance capitalism.

So telling people to “unsubscribe” risks reproducing the very ideology it claims to challenge. It shifts the blame from institutions to individuals. Systemic dysfunction comes down to lifestyle choices. We’ve seen this neoliberal victim-blaming pattern before: from blaming harmful car-centric urban planning to “jaywalking“embarrassing consumers”carbon footprint“and so-called” is a mockeryfrivolous lawsuits”.

“Responsible consumption” is not the solution when the problem is that the concentration of economic and political power only leaves us facing irresponsible choices.

Over the past forty years, neoliberal policies It has allowed a handful of companies across the West to wield unparalleled influence over digital infrastructure. The result has been an extreme concentration of power over public life in the hands of a few tech billionaires.

Addressing this fact requires something much more disruptive than deleting an app. It requires confronting the political and economic structures that created this concentration of power in the first place.

This means strong antitrust enforcement that could eliminate dominant platforms. This means robust regulatory protection surveillance capitalism and data extraction. This means taxing and restricting corporate monopolies that serve as de facto digital infrastructure.

Most importantly, it means building. public digital infrastructure: Open source artificial intelligence systems, responsible social media platforms and algorithmic institutions democratically governed rather than through venture capital and shareholder returns.

Canceling ChatGPT may seem like comfortable resistance, but the future of digital society will not be determined by subscriptions.

You can’t easily cancel your subscription techno-fascism.

You need to dismantle and replace the system that created it. The alternative is not just to use a different application, but to reclaim the digital infrastructure into the public domain.

Dr Raffaele F Ciriello holds a BSc in Information Systems from the University of Stuttgart and an MSc and PhD from the University of Zurich (2017). He is a Senior Lecturer in Business Information Systems at the University of Sydney and specializes in compassionate digital innovation.

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