Written by: Alienor Rougeot

Written with the help of digital rights activist Caroline Isautier, who provided me with the knowledge, but also the motivation, to think about these new challenges.

If fossil fuel executives are now losing in the court of public opinion, Big Tech executives are not doing much better in the hearts of climate justice activists. It’s time we talk about Big Tech.

When I started writing this, I thought to myself ‘Ok Boomer’. Like seriously, attacking social media and technology? What’s next, blaming millennials for climate change? Hear me out!

Social media networks, such as Twitter and Facebook, have been crucial to my activism. I’ve been able to connect with other youth striking for climate across Canada, and eventually around the world. Social media and these new communication tools have been life changers for many more, especially for voices who were previously excluded and silenced by the mainstream media and who through these platforms were able to be amplified. In no way am I denying the outstanding impact this has had on our lives. After all, would Black Lives Matter and MeToo have had the same reach without the famous hashtag?

In this article I’ll explore our duty to avoid the next crisis. I am asking that we avoid letting the attractive aspects of innovation trump our better judgement and our humanity, and learn from our dependence on fossil fuel. Fossil fuels seemed pretty awesome, I was told: affordable, abundant, allowing us to make huge improvements to our lives. Yet, we are now paying the price of blindly trusting the companies that provided this novelty. I hereby ask you not to let it happen again: in using social media and, more broadly, online platforms, let us ask for data privacy from the companies and digital literacy from our institutions, as well as a legal system that can answer to the unbridled change that comes with these platforms.

Big Tech: The Other Extractive Industry

Google and Facebook in Canada aren’t directly extracting resources from unceded indigenous land, although they certainly are operating on traditional indigenous territory in North America. They are champions of non-consensual data extraction. As we witness Climate Justice actions worldwide in 2019, it is increasingly important to address the new monopolies that threaten our communities.

The relationship between Big Tech and the climate crisis may not be the most obvious. This is not a coincidence: Google’s code of conduct stipulated “Don’t be Evil” for years, before updating to “Do The Right Thing” in 2015. Their informal, liberated corporate culture sent us signals they were a friendly breed of enterprise. Let’s face it, it also helps that their services are free to use! We have learnt to be weary about the man in the suit, but what about the man in the white T-shirt behind his computer?

Yet Big Tech’s free-minded development model is based on excess: excess screen consumption to sell more ads, algorithms that value excessive reactions in selecting which content to show, and excessive speed of change. Wasn’t “Move Fast and Break Things” Facebook’s initial motto? At a time when we must challenge the very idea of infinite growth, having large, profit-seeking companies relentlessly pushing for that model is distracting at best, dangerous at worst.