If the role of the individual in the vast tidal wave of technological confusion sometimes seems meaningless, I have one simple piece of advice: unsubscribe.

Vote with your wallet. 

I have been reading yet another Cory Doctorow book. Enshittification, Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It^[1] which opens (at least in my 2026 digital copy) with a preface that gave me literal nightmares. Besides suggesting that maybe I shouldn’t read activist political think pieces right before bed, it also left me pondering my role as a wee little voice in the oncoming storm.

I’ve noted here on this site numerous times that I’m no technophobe. I’m sitting here with an AI model humming away on my laptop. I spent a huge chunk of time just yesterday vibe coding. And later this afternoon I’ll be digging into a small contract to help a local business with some of their social media automation.

But a guy can be of two minds on these sorts of things, and see that the utopian vision of a technologically-empowered future that benefits all humanity has almost certainly been co-opted by crony capitalism and dark surveillance politics. 

Doctorow’s premise at least inasmuch as I’ve only read the first chapter of this book (and heard him orate online on the topic about a zillion times) is that the collapse of our technological ideals is driven almost uniformly by the black hole gravity well of profit motive.  Things get worse because we have all accepted that companies gotta make bank and shareholder value is king.

I’m not immune. Fifteen minutes before writing this I logged into my trading account to check my portfolio and frowned that I was down a couple points on the morning. I’m simultaneously rooting for those numbers to climb… and also for the techno-utopian ideals I’ve loved my whole life to thrive—but the two are almost certainly incompatible.

Yet I learned one important lesson in my twenty-five years in the tech industry: the bosses want numbers, and they want those numbers to move in the right direction. Decisions are made on metrics. Projects live or die on budgets. 

One voice doesn’t seem like very much when it’s screaming on social media, but help make the right number go in the wrong direction on a corporate balance sheet and one wee individual has a lot more sway then they could ever imagine. Subscriptions and your attention are worth more than you realize.