We recently came across a post that resonated deeply:
“I’m trying to shift my perspective from ‘there was a glorious computer revolution that empowered the user and disrupted authority and we have fallen from the heights of its transcendental grace’ and towards the more accurate ‘my formative years just happened to coincide with a period where a few technical innovations briefly conferred a small amount of power on individuals and labor, and capital has been efficiently reversing that small disruption ever since’ but it sure doesn’t feel like that.”
We felt that sadness too. We mourned this year, and the ones before too, as we saw it unfold.
But we have come to terms with the fact that what felt like permanent progress was in fact just a blip.
How we got here
The brief period when people could run their own servers and control their own data was a timing accident that capital is now systematically reversing.
The early internet pioneers thought they were building something new and wondrous. And they were, in a way. They created a small golden age where human creativity flourished in new mediums, and the money people hadn’t yet figured out how to monetize it. We happened to come of age just then.
But in the early 2000s, Google pioneered a clever business model: offer free services, collect user data, sell predictions about behavior to advertisers. By the mid-2000s, Facebook perfected the art. Within a decade, this became the default way the internet works.
Nowadays you legally own your content and data, but technically speaking, your photos, documents and creative work live on someone else’s servers, subject to someone else’s terms.
One day you have your data. The next day you’re locked out of your entire digital life. Paris, an Apple enthusiast and author, woke up to find his Apple ID disabled and all his devices useless—decades of purchases, photos, and work gone because an algorithm flagged a gift card he bought in good faith. No explanation. Everything bricked. When even evangelists can be locked out on a whim, you’re not an owner; you’re just another tenant. Yanis Varoufakis calls this technofeudalism, and he’s right.
Tech extraction somehow keeps getting worse. Refrigerators now serve ads. Cars make you subscribe to features you already paid for. Streaming services charge you to watch ads. Your devices you thought you own don’t serve you—your attention is sold to advertisers while you’re often the one paying for this “privilege.”
You can no longer convince us this is innovation. It’s desperation pretending to be progress.
Tech became a weapon
Beyond the absurdity, there’s plenty of real world harm.
Somewhere in Nairobi, a deeply religious family man pretends to be Jessica, a 24-year-old lesbian student from California, for $0.05 a message, because his children are hungry and the rent is overdue. Elsewhere, a retired couple in Georgia pours buckets into the toilet because Meta decided to open a data center next door, destroying their water supply along the way.
Our industry is actively fueling the fires we’re supposed to be putting out. Seven of nine planetary boundaries are already breached, and barely 15% of Sustainable Development Goal targets are on track. And we keep building things that make it worse.
The tech-to-authoritarian pipeline
In 2025, Big Tech—ten major companies—spent €49 million lobbying Brussels. That’s more than pharma, finance, and automotive combined, which tells you something about how much they have to hide. Google funds all sixteen major European think tanks shaping EU policy. Not some of them. All of them. Amazon and Meta fund most of the rest. When you’re paying everyone in the room to think, you don’t even need to bother telling them what to think anymore, they’ll figure out what you need to hear.
Here, someone always says, “But lobbying is just advocacy! You have to explain complex technical issues to policymakers!”
Sure. Then we also need to explain to our city council why we need a private militia to protect the neighborhood.
Here’s how things devolved: You build the tools. You say they’re infrastructure, that we’re connecting people, we’re making things more efficient. But when you build infrastructure, you rarely get to choose who or what gets built on top of it.
Then, one day, someone decides the tools are good for something else. You wake up one day and realize the thing you built to connect people is being used to round them up, and you can’t remember exactly in what company all-hands that became okay. You say nothing, because no one else around is.
Power […] is becoming more diffuse, more unpredictable as control over these technologies is shifting from states to corporations and sometimes to individuals. - Blaise Metreweli, head of British Secret Intelligence Service (MI6)
Innovation professor Francesca Bria maps the pipeline for how tech becomes authoritarian: venture capital → surveillance tools → cryptocurrency → disinformation networks → political capture. Each layer enables the next.
Venture capital funds the companies, who then build the surveillance infrastructure. Later it gets renamed “personalization” because who wants generic ads and content? Generic ads hurt the many sellers who now use the platform, as the story goes. Cryptocurrency makes the newly earned money hard to track as it moves around. The surveillance tools get sold to governments “for safety.” The disinformation networks run on the same engagement algorithms that sold ads, and no one will stop it because it’s good for engagement.
The beautiful part, if you’re into that sort of beauty, is that it’s self-funding now. Thiel, Musk, and others who aren’t such household names use tech fortunes to buy political power, then use that power to ensure tech stays unregulated. They’re not even hiding it anymore. Musk tweets about which government he’d like to topple. Thiel explains why democracy and freedom are incompatible in mainstream financial papers and journals.
The quiet part suddenly isn’t so quiet anymore.
What bothers us is that “our people” are building this.
People we know, we worked with, people we met at events, people who got into this business because they wanted to make things. They’re building the surveillance tools because the job pays well and the problems are interesting. They’re optimizing the engagement algorithms because that’s what the metrics and product managers say to do because it grows the bottom line, and now there’s no turning back. They’re adding the features that enable authoritarian control because it’s just another ticket in the backlog, and anyway, they’re not responsible for how people use the tools.
We know this because we’ve had these conversations. We’ve watched people we respect take or keep jobs at companies doing questionable things, and when we ask them about it, they say: “It’s complicated” or “someone else will build it anyway” or, our personal favorite, “I can change things from the inside.”
Maybe they’re right and we’re the naive ones. Maybe this pipeline was always inevitable and refusing to build it just means someone else gets paid to do it instead.
But what Francesca Bria’s research actually shows is that the pipeline only works if enough skilled people agree to build each layer. Nothing about it is inevitable. It’s a choice thousands of people make every day, and they make it because it’s easier than saying no.
Saying no costs money. We know: you lose opportunities. We’ll get to that too. But saying yes even when you know better costs everyone else.
That’s why it feels so personal. Because we’re all part of a broader industry that’s building infrastructure for authoritarianism, and, every day, through decisions big and small, we get to choose whether we’re complicit or not.
But we keep refusing to participate, because we don’t want to be the kind of people who build the Torment Nexus and then tell themselves it’s not their fault how it gets used.
The only sane thing left to do
We have often wondered if the fact that we’re bothered by all this means we need to take some chill pills, or that our compass is still working and it’s the rest of the world that’s gone insane.
In reading and talking to people this year, we’re convinced it’s not just us. The world is acting insane right now. Sadness is a reasonable response to watching something we believed in get corrupted.
The hacker ethos, the idea behind general purpose computing, the genuine belief that technology could empower people—it’s been intentionally dismantled. People who’ve never had a moral compass can now rejoice that they don’t need one anymore.
What this year taught us is to let go of attachment to how things “should” be. There was never a golden age, it was just where we came in. Either way, it’s gone now, and the only sensible thing left to do is to look at the world as it is, not as we wish it were.
What’s in the here and now are the tech millionaires, scammers and grifters trying to redefine what tech means. The mass market is being pushed to speed and scale: AI code generation, no-code platforms, offshore dev farms; all trend towards commodification.
And then there’s us.
We run a software studio. We make things. It ain’t much, but it’s honest work. The fact that some people have turned building software into building extraction machines doesn’t change what’s in our heads and hearts.
We may share a professional identity with these people, but we are not in the same business.
Software for a world on fire
The software we build today is built in opposition to what exists, with different values from the start.
We can’t single-handedly fix the industry. We can’t stop tech billionaires from buying political infrastructure or make people care that their photos and messages train AI models while their children befriend chatbots. We can’t make the world less insane or put out the fires.
But we can refuse to be mad in the same way. We refuse to adopt their practices, their ethics (or lack thereof), their worship of growth-at-any-cost.
What it looks like in practice
We’ve come off infrastructure like GitHub and host our own, code forge included. It’s not as difficult or insecure as it’s made out to be; in fact, it’s much faster, and made us realize the amount of bloat we accepted as part of doing business on GitHub.
A potential client asked for a site on WordPress. We said no. They’re confused. Why? It’s standard practice, everyone uses it, how else will we manage content? We explain that “everyone does it” is how we ended up with bloated, insecure, over-complicated websites that support an insecure manchild at the helm. If they’re too confused, they might leave. Sometimes they stay, and we build something better together.
We also recently turned down a project that was pure box-ticking. The organization didn’t care about the work; they just needed something shipped to check a box. We asked ourselves: if they don’t care, why should we? The answer was: we shouldn’t. So we didn’t.
This happens. It does cost us some money. We are OK with that. The money that does come doesn’t bring with it moral quandaries or headaches.
What we’ve learned about making it sustainable
Clients who ask “why no WordPress?” become our best work. They’re naturally curious and want to understand and learn, not just hear that everyone does it this way. They want to know the best tool for their job, and suddenly realize—wait, what else have we not heard pushback on from others until now?
We do charge more because we’re building custom software and don’t disappear once it’s implemented. As a result, we take fewer projects, but ones we’d be proud to put our names on.
The weird thing is: saying no more often didn’t make us broke. Clients who respect craft pay for craft. Word does travel. If someone leaves because we won’t sustain the status quo, we were not going to be right for each other anyway.
We have some early signals that this might work.
We’re starting to find people who are already convinced before we say anything. They come to us because they’ve heard we say no to extraction and share the same values.
That’s when we realized that the people swimming against the current aren’t isolated weirdos. There are more of us than the extraction economy or social media wants us to believe. We’re just distributed, and we’re still learning to find each other.
What comes next
We have no idea what comes after this. But a correction will come—they always do.
People learned about Big Tobacco in our lifetime. We’re still removing asbestos from our barn roof. We phased out lead paint. Each time, industries fought back. Each time, reality eventually won.
With Big Tech, we’re in the middle phase. The exploitation is visible. Educated consumers are already moving. Governments are working to regain their sovereignty. It’s clearly not happening fast enough—several ICCJ judges were locked out of their digital lives for their work, showing how easy it is to be disenfranchised when a handful of monopolies hold all the keys.
Something will break, that veryone pretended was fine until it isn’t anymore. Then everyone will act surprised.
Some people are happy to wait for market forces or regulation to fix things, but we’re not, because we have children who will inherit what we build now. When they ask us how we spent our time on this planet, we want to have a good answer.
The software we build for what comes next means building for the future we want to exist: a different kind of economy where extraction isn’t the default, where users aren’t products, where craft matters more than scale.
We intend to show that viable alternatives exist, and we intend to be loud about the difference between building software and building extraction machines, even on a small scale.
On craft and compasses
Running a software studio that builds things for clients and solves real problems in honest, transparent ways is craft work. We care about the work and want clients who do too. We say no to bad projects and prioritize maintainability over shipping fast.
It can feel like swimming against the current. We’ve wondered if we’ll be looked at with curiosity, like manuscript transcribers in an era of digital word processing.
But the real threat isn’t that craft disappears—it won’t. We need to care about the process as much about the output. We need to make things with our hands and minds just like we need to breathe. People are still manually binding books, carving individual tiles to build mosaics, drawing by hand.
The real threat to craft is if people like us stop defending it and stop clearly spelling out what’s different and why it matters.
What’s different in our work is that we don’t use analytics that track individual users or store data we don’t need. We don’t build features designed to maximize engagement or charge licenses that hurt users when they grow. We build things that work without requiring JavaScript when possible. We make things maintainable by people who aren’t us. We tell clients when their idea is technically possible but ethically questionable.
This is nothing new, at least to us. It’s building software the way we did before profit maximization became the default.
The funny thing is, most developers under 30 have never seen this. People our age know the extraction timeline. But the rest not so much. We worked with many. They trained in a world where extraction is invisible because it’s the default. Giving away your living room keys to a third party is just “how authentication works” (more on that some other time). Engagement optimization is just “good UX” because it still leads people to what they want. They don’t know there’s another way because they’ve never worked anywhere that does it differently.
If you’re reading this and thinking “wait, there’s another way?” Yes, and it’s not even harder. It’s actually easier because you’re not maintaining the complexity that comes with tracking everything and storing everyone’s data forever and doing mental gymnastics for how to reduce your cloud bill.
We’re aware that craft alone won’t reverse the course of the industry. We’re not naive. But some things are worth doing even if others think they’re doomed, because the process matters as much as the end result.
And the thing about swimming against the current: you get very good at swimming. Your arms get stronger. You learn to read the water. You find others swimming alongside you, and suddenly you’re not alone anymore.
One day, maybe we’ll be the only ones who remember how to swim. Everyone else will have forgotten there was ever any other way to move except to let the water carry you wherever it wants you to go.
The people who appreciate craft reassure us that our compass still works. And we’re learning that there are others whose compass also points in the same direction and refuse to accept that the magnetic north is wherever the powerful say it is.
The world might be insane right now, but what we’re doing is not a solo performance. And if you’re swimming this way too—you’re not as alone as you might think.