As tech monopolies burn through our planet’s resources at an unprecedented scale, one thing is clear: It’s time to reclaim our digital independence!
The Environmental Cost of Digital Domination
A handful of corporations control our digital infrastructure while consuming massive amounts of energy and water with AI and sprawling data centers. With this energy consumption comes pollution from mining, shipping, and burning coal, oil, and gas and the climate and health outcomes associated with these industries.
Data centers require massive cooling systems. Tech companies’ water usage has jumped dramatically in recent years, largely due to AI development. In drought-stricken regions, these facilities compete directly with communities for scarce water resources.
The pollution extends beyond carbon emissions. The rare earth minerals required for servers and chips are extracted through environmentally destructive mining operations. E-waste from constantly upgraded hardware creates toxic landfills in developing nations.
The Solution: Open Source
Open-source software represents something revolutionary: technology built by people, for people. Unlike proprietary platforms designed to extract value, open-source tools serve users’ actual needs, and often do so with dramatically lower environmental impact.
Open source means:
- Transparency: See exactly what software does with your data
- Community Control: Development guided by users, not advertisers
- True Ownership: Modify, share, and control your own data
- Privacy by Design: Many alternatives prioritize your privacy over data collection
- Environmental Efficiency: Distributed computing reduces the need for massive centralized data centers, and open-source code often has more options for sustainable customization.
- Longer Hardware Lifecycles: Open-source software often runs efficiently on older hardware, reducing e-waste
Let’s Take Collective Action!
Viable alternatives exist for virtually every Big Tech service. Digital sovereignty starts with individual choices but leads to collective liberation and environmental healing.
When you choose decentralized, open-source alternatives, you’re not just protecting your privacy and autonomy. You’re reducing demand for the energy-hungry infrastructure that’s accelerating climate change. You’re supporting software that can run on your own hardware instead of requiring massive server farms.
Every person who chooses open-source over extractive tech is voting for a different digital future, one where your data belongs to you, innovation serves human needs, technology empowers communities rather than concentrating power, and our digital lives don’t come at the expense of our planet’s future.
What is one Big Tech service you could replace this week? Start there and help build the future we deserve, free from digital feudalism and sustainable for generations to come.
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Ariel Chamberlain (they/them) owns Octopus Pond Consulting, where they empower organizations that are helping people and the planet with Data Strategy, Quality, Analysis and Storytelling. Ariel is also a Community Leader at IMMA Collective and is serving as one of CAT’s first Assembly Members. They initially joined our community in 2023 when CAT launched the Climate Justice Squads.