Introduction

It has been a pretty much white male nerdy thing to warn everyone around about everyone’s collected data on the Internet via your devices, that it is something everyone should be aware of, against the “I have nothing to hide” people, who think that they have no illegal activity to hide, and therefore have no reason to fear from surveillance. Following Edward Snowden and the whistle-blowing era, the reveals of surveillance worked as an act of disruption from the order, called the “evil exception” by Baudrillard, which in turn enables the continuity of the status quo after all. Now, we have arrived at a state where mass data extraction has become part of everyday life, and everyone is aware of it to the very detail.

Digitalisierung [digitalization] has been a buzzword in Germany for a long time, from the beginning of the 2000s, always implying an optimistic view towards the future, now can only be seen as a desperate hopefulness in the good old linear logic of progress, which no one sincerely believes in anymore. Efficiency was once promised as something that automatically was supposed to make sense for anyone, which is now not much different than “the market will regulate itself” meme. It has to be repeated over and over and over again for it to survive the day.

Digitalisierung remains meaningful only for those who get a slice of the data extraction pie and are hungry to gain access to more and more data. And the states are barely trying to cover it or not even trying. In recent years, Big Tech companies increasingly signify, not only behind the scenes but also very consciously yelling into everyone’s faces, that they are fully in line with the fascist governments and will not hesitate to be enablers of their fascist goals and their AI-assisted genocide—and if that does not fit with the Zeitgeist, then the donated money to NGOs will not be made public, no problem.¹⁾

For a long time, digital privacy was a concern of the white, male, educated, privileged population in the world, mainly limited to the Global North. They were opting for individual measures for anyone in a palette of smartphone applications to the surveillance cameras installed in private homes, in the style of “who took my Amazon package” kind.

Anyone would agree that privacy discourse and individual measures can not be the solution to Big Tech-owned surveillance systems and data extraction anymore. Similar to the carbon footprint discourse, as not taking planes can be a lifestyle at most, not using Instagram can definitely make your own life better if you can afford it. But, things can change very fast when you are, in fact, in need of alternatives to Big Tech or depend on them, and when it is not just a consumer choice you made out of good conscience.

Individual measures can, of course, matter, but where these individual measures fall short is especially the point where they departed from in the first place: mostly a white bourgeoisie individual property protecting kind of cautiousness that is not seeking for a change but rather populist. It speaks to the created fears that they should feel threatened by, in a similar manner, how a rumor of “there have been many thefts lately in the neighborhood” can work.

However, groups and collectives that have been collectively implementing these measures by listening to people’s needs, not just out of “privacy and theft” concerns, do exist. These need to multiply and diversify.

First of all, what we definitely need is a new kind of way of seeing, where the connections of data extraction, fascism, and AI supremacy are laid bare and self-evident. We cannot settle for ”ethics” and “good conscience” or “empathy,” which do not respond to people’s needs.

When you are directly confronted with Big Tech as an extended arm of the state apparatus both in the Global South and the Global North, whose only aim is to ensure the capital’s needs are being met and not the other way around, you know that you should look for alternatives. Only an attitude that departs from people’s needs, who are directly affected by data extraction and censorship mechanisms that are embedded in Big Tech social media and communication tools—including all Meta and Google products like WhatsApp, Instagram, and Google Sheets—can bring the change. Only an attitude that comes from an anti-capitalist, anti-imperial, anti-war, anti-genocide, anti-patriarchal, anti-ableist and anti-colonialist place that is aware of the racial, class, and gender dynamics can prevail.

This attitude can directly bring us to federated media, which is not under the control of any group and belongs to no private person but to people. The practice of co-running server infrastructure with your allies and friends is the future that we will rely on, allowing us to create on- and offline spaces of mutual aid in distributed and decentralized networks.

— Ipek Burçak 2025/06/10 18:30