Why quit GAFAM

“Industrial capitalism depended upon the exploitation and control of nature, with catastrophic consequences that we only now recognise. Surveillance capitalism depends instead upon the exploitation and control of human nature.”

Prof. Shoshana Zuboff – The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power

Our relationship with information & communication technologies

“The global lock down that we have experienced in 2019 has made even more apparent the central role that information and communication technologies (ICTs) play in every aspect of our lives, namely in the development of work, educational, social, consumer and political activities. We live in the era of social media, internet 2.0, applications and smartphones, which from the moment we wake up until the moment we go to sleep, accompany us everywhere, monitoring and archiving all our experiences, our geopositioning and our relational history.”
From Directa

What is GAFAM?

Globally, the vast majority of people entrust (or perhaps it would be better to say “give away”) all of their data, the fruits of all of their actions in the digital world, to a handful of U.S. (i.e. GAFAM) and Chinese (Alibaba Group i Tencent) companies. All of these rank among the 10 most capitalized companies in the world.

GAFAM stands for: Google, Apple, Facebook, Amazon, Microsoft, also known as “The Big Five“, the big technology companies. These companies offer seemingly free software and services to users on a global scale. But how do they generate so much profit? The quick answer, which will be argued below, is: through the economic exploitation of the data that their mostly unsuspecting users voluntarily provide them. When we talk about “quit GAFAM” in this website we do not mean to quit only these five companies that are part of the acronym, but also all the others that are inspired by the same principles and that use the same mechanisms to generate profit.

Why to quit GAFAM?

There are countless reasons to stop using all the software and services offered by GAFAM, delete our accounts from their platforms and look for alternatives. For the writer, by far the most important reason to do so is that these companies take possession of and profit from all the data they collect through the activity of the users who access their platforms: personal data, photographs, videos, contact details, personal tastes, preferences, emotions, interests, conversations, political, religious, artistic and philosophical activities and affinities. Everything. Having at their disposal our whole life projected in the digital dimension, these companies can condense information, analyse it, profile it and exploit it through machine learning and artificial intelligence techniques to generate profit. Through this data and these techniques it is possible to leverage the intimate psychological mechanisms of each person to manipulate their thoughts, opinions, speech and actions.

From mass media manipulation…

Obviously the manipulation of human thought by the power and the interests of oligarchy is not new. It can also be exercised by media. In fact, the manipulation, which could already be exercised with propaganda through the press, already made a leap forward with the advent of radio and television. In fact, these at the time “new” technologies allowed the user to reach new audio-visual dimensions that offered him a “new experience” capable of reaching deeper spheres of human consciousness and more directly.

…to technological totalitarianism

Today, with the arrival of machine learning, artificial intelligence, data science and platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, Instagram or Whatsapp, the possibilities of manipulation of consciousness make a further leap forward, reaching a level never experienced before by humanity. With these technologies, in fact, it is possible to create personalized “advertisements”, messages and fake news. Ad personam.
Unlike the press, radio and television, which can exercise generalized massive propaganda, with these new technologies you can create a kind of propaganda machine, customized for each user. In this way you can exercise personalized propaganda, extremely more effective than the generalized one. In fact, due to the fact that the personalised message, arrives to the user-target in a specific way and, leveraging his weaknesses, his anxieties and his fears, it can trigger actions, reactions and decision-making difficult to obtain with traditional means and with greater effectiveness. It is a kind of new science that ties together different disciplines such as psychology, mathematics, data science and information science. All this represents a new phenomenon, that of artificial intelligence linked to psychology whose developments and consequences are not deeply understood even by experts working in these fields, outlining a future that is at least disturbing. We have entered the era of surveillance capitalism that can catalyse a technological totalitarianism.

The problem: our data

The writer of this text is in no way against technology. Indeed, I think it can be essential to solve many of humanity’s problems, but the use that large corporations and power groups make of it puts us in front of a threat. It is essential to understand that if any company or for-profit organization offers any service for free, it means that the price of that service is you and your data. Data is the new oil and people, the new oilfields. Instead of extracting raw materials from nature as in the industrial era, technology companies in the age of surveillance capitalism extract information from their users to re-engineer human behaviour and generate maximum profit.

The solution: quit GAFAM and obtain digital sovereignty

This problem can be solved with a simple concept: digital sovereignty (which includes personal data sovereignty). In this site with the word “sovereignty” we refer to the full political, autonomous, and independent power of any person or entity that is not subject to any other power.
It is essential for each one of us to regain control of our data, the data we generate with any action taken in the digital world. Until the ownership of personal data becomes a basic human right, we will have to fight to defend it from the interests of private corporations and power groups.
Fortunately, abandoning these platforms and their services is possible. They can be replaced with free software alternatives, developed by thousands of volunteers and activists around the world. In this website I’ll talk, progressively, about my process of transitioning from an average GAFAM user to alternatives that don’t expose my personal data to big companies that make profit from them. Since I am not a technology expert, I think my testimony of transitioning and quitting GAFAM as an average user may serve other people who are in the same situation as me, that is the vast majority of GAFAM users.

In order to better understand what is on this page, I would like to recommend that you take a look at our resources page which contains links to documentaries, articles and books that are worth watching, reading and keeping in mind.