Campaigns urging users to quit ChatGPT mistake individual boycotts for meaningful resistance in a system dominated by entrenched Big Tech power, writes Dr Raffaele Ciriello.
IN THE WAKE of OpenAI’s deepening entanglement with the U.S. military and the Trump Administration, a convenient form of “protest” has emerged.
Campaigns such as “QuitGPT” and “Resist and Unsubscribe” urge people to cancel their ChatGPT subscriptions to weaken Big Tech’s contribution to authoritarian military power.
It sounds simple and seductive. If millions of users withdraw their money and attention, Silicon Valley will feel the pressure. Companies will change their behaviour. Market signals will discipline power. Autocrats will restrain themselves.
The idea is not entirely without merit. Individual agency matters even in authoritarian systems. Collective action often begins with small acts of refusal. Consumer boycotts have sometimes forced corporations to change harmful practices.
But the illusion collapses under minimal scrutiny. What exactly are people supposed to use instead?
Take Anthropic’s Claude. The company has positioned itself as the ethical alternative in the AI race, even resisting certain forms of government surveillance. Yet its models are already integrated into defence and intelligence ecosystems. Claude was reportedly used in the recent U.S. interventions in Venezuela and Iran.
What about Gemini? Google’s technologies (alongside those of Amazon, Microsoft and Palantir) have long been embedded in military and surveillance systems through the Pentagon’s Project Maven programme for drone targeting. Google also provides cloud services and algorithmic surveillance infrastructure to intelligence agencies globally, including in Israel. Meanwhile, Gemini is the subject of lawsuits over its alleged contribution to suicide.
Switch to Microsoft Copilot? Microsoft is one of the largest providers of cloud infrastructure to military and intelligence agencies globally. The same Azure systems powering enterprise AI are deeply embedded in surveillance and war operations.
Perhaps xAI’s Grok? The chatbot by Elon Musk, who has repeatedly supported far-right politics, whose social network X has been found to funnel users towards such politics and whose AI tools have enabled the widespread generation of sexual abuse material?
And then there is Meta. United Nations investigators concluded that Facebook played a “determining role” in the spread of anti-Rohingya hate speech during the ethnic cleansing in Myanmar that forced hundreds of thousands to flee the country. Internal research revealed that Instagram was harming teenage mental health, yet the company resisted corresponding changes when they threatened revenues.
Investigations have also shown that Meta’s advertising ecosystem is heavily infiltrated by fraud and scam operations that generate billions in revenue. The Cambridge Analytica privacy scandal also still looms large. Why would its AI break that pattern?
And that’s before we even get into the long list of Big Tech’s broken promises to address harms related to child safety, privacy, election integrity, extremism and national security.
With alternatives like these, you might as well stick with the devil you know.
Short of going full Amish and withdrawing from digital technology entirely, the reality today is navigating a tightly controlled digital ecosystem dominated by a handful of corporations whose infrastructure now underpins modern society, from communication and commerce to politics and warfare.
The result is a world in which a few digital giants shape everything from supermarket logistics to immigration enforcement. The military–industrial complex has been perfected and large parts of society now operate within its orbit.
Under these conditions, ethical consumerism becomes performative: ineffective at best, harmful at worst.
Cancelling a chatbot subscription may offer a fleeting sense of moral superiority while doing nothing to dismantle the political economy that produced these technologies.
History should make us sceptical. The famous boycott of Nestlé in the 1970s forced changes in the marketing of infant formula. It is often cited as a case for ethical consumerism. Yet decades later, the global agricultural system remains characterised by unequal trade relations, precarious labour conditions and corporate power concentration. Capital adapted. The structure remained.
Digital capitalism is even more resistant to consumer pressure because it operates through network effects and platform lock-in. Leaving one platform often means losing access to professional networks, communication systems or essential services. Or it simply means switching to another interface running on the same infrastructure.
You cannot simply opt out of surveillance capitalism.
That is why telling people to “just unsubscribe” risks reproducing the very ideology it claims to challenge. It shifts the blame from institutions to individuals. Systemic dysfunction gets reduced to lifestyle choices. We have seen this pattern of neoliberal victim-blaming before: from blaming harmful car-centric urban planning on “jaywalking” to shaming consumers for their “carbon footprint” and ridiculing so-called “frivolous lawsuits”.
“Responsible consumption” is not the solution when the problem is that the concentration of economic and political power leaves us with irresponsible choices only.
Over the past four decades, neoliberal policies across the West have allowed a handful of corporations to accumulate unmatched influence over digital infrastructure. The result is an extreme concentration of power over public life in the hands of a few tech billionaires.
Addressing that reality requires something far more uncomfortable than deleting an app. It requires confronting the political and economic structures that created this concentration of power in the first place.
That means strong antitrust enforcement capable of breaking up dominant platforms. It means robust regulatory protection from surveillance capitalism and data extraction. It means taxing and restricting corporate monopolies that function as de facto digital infrastructure.
Most importantly, it means building public digital infrastructure: Open-source AI systems, accountable social media platforms and algorithmic institutions governed democratically rather than by venture capital and shareholder returns.
Cancelling ChatGPT may feel like comfy resistance, but the future of digital society will not be decided by subscriptions.
You cannot simply unsubscribe from techno-fascism.
You have to dismantle and replace the system that keeps creating it. The alternative is not simply using a different app but reclaiming digital infrastructure as a public good.
Dr Raffaele F Ciriello holds a BSc in Information Systems from the University of Stuttgart and an MSc and PhD from the University of Zurich (2017). He is a Senior Lecturer in Business Information Systems at the University of Sydney, specialising in compassionate digital innovation.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Australia License
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