Early in 2013, Ronald Robertson, now a doctoral candidate at the Network Science Institute at Northeastern University in Boston, and I discovered that Google isn’t just spying on us; it also has the power to exert an enormous impact on our opinions, purchases and votes.

he Search Suggestion Effect (SSE), the Answer Bot Effect (ABE), the Targeted Messaging Effect (TME), and the Opinion Matching Effect (OME), among others. Effects like these might now be impacting the opinions, beliefs, attitudes, decisions, purchases and voting preferences of more than two billion people every day.

the private sector has made university-level learning accessible and free, employs over 70% of all Americans, and inches nearer every year to making death optional

But as tech companies have turned to mass layoffs in recent months, the big bets have increasingly looked like bad bets for

hat we want is to be able to leave Facebook and still talk to our friends, instead of having many Facebooks.

Twitter is the preferred platform for our elites. Journalists and media pundits

Hence, to keep things balanced, I think we should constantly oppose the anti-competitive behavior by tech giants and start using Mozilla Firefox (in whatever capacity, even as a secondary browser).

In order to truly have checks and balances, we should not have the same people setting the agendas of big tech, research, government and the non-profit sector. We need alternatives. We need governments around the world to invest in communities building technology that genuinely benefits them, rather than pursuing an agenda that is set by big tech or the military. Contrary to big tech executives’ cold-war style rhetoric about an arms race, what truly stifles innovation is the current arrangement where a few people build harmful technology and others constantly work to prevent harm, unable to find the time, space or resources to implement their own vision of the future.

consumer friendly

passage in March of a consumer data privacy law in Virginia, which Protocol reported was originally authored by Amazon

The problem with US Big Tech is bigger, deeper – iceberg-dimensioned, you might say – and not even remotely blockchain-sized or shaped. Leslie Daigle has described the consolidation of the entire Internet stack under the hierarchical and totalizing business models of US tech firms as “climate change for the Internet’. If we don’t fix it, I personally do not believe we will be able to fix much else. That’s why my life’s work is helping to fix it. And by fix, I mean destroy.

Google, Apple, Facebook, Amazon and Microsoft. These big five American vertically organized silos are re-making the world in their image.