This leads us to a scenario that leaves little room for resistance, because opting out, even collectively with a group of friends or a small organization, seems pointless. You are missing the network effects and you are losing traction. Every act of resistance seems to be too small because of the sheer scales of these firms. What do we do?
It’s incredibly difficult, and a lot of the resistance options are heavily individualized. We can personally lock down our social media profiles, we can turn toward privacy-saving alternatives, we can deploy algorithms that fool other algorithms, we can fool facial-recognition surveillance with specialized makeup and outfit, and so on. But these all tend to rely on individuals making a choice, rather than any approach to trying to systematically undermine the big platforms. It is incredibly difficult to think about what can be done, in part because the size and scale of these companies is very difficult to challenge from the ground up. There are some attempts though — for example, the platform cooperative idea of “we’ll produce an alternative, and we’ll get users to migrate to a nice, humane version of Uber,” for instance…