06 Feb 2026
One way to think small
In Thinking Small, George Tannenbaum asks,
But what small acts can we do that will have big impact? What small, daily behaviors can we begin that will have big impact?
We can’t not pay tax like Thoreau did to protest Polk’s Mexican war. Tax is taken from us automatically.
How do you fight their power?
What small thing can we do for outsized impact?
Good question.
In way, though, there are two taxes that you can still evade. The Big Tech ad duopoly makes more money from ads that they can represent as “personalized.”
So one small act is to put a fine on them. Do what John Oliver suggests in Make yourself less valuable to Meta. Turn off the Facebook and Instagram features that enable cross-context ad personalization.
Then do a similar task for the Google ads: Click this to buy better stuff and be happier.
How much will this cost them? Depends how much your eyeballs are worth on the internal auction. Rough estimate is that if you live in the USA, ads targeting you are costing about $100 per month, and the duopoly gets about half. Studies of “open web” advertising tend to show that personalized ads go for about half what the non-personalized ones do—and if that applies to the inscrutable internal systems at the duopoly, that means if you do both tips you’re costing the two companies half of half of $100, so about $25/month. So it’s not nothing. Might be more or less. As a bonus, these tips will probably not just cost the Big Tech central planners and their politicians some money, doing these will make you better off by helping to avoid scams.
As far as daily actions go, more of this kind of “tax evasion” can be found in a good privacy checklist article such as Opt Out October: Daily Tips to Protect Your Privacy and Security from EFF, in The Big Tech Walkout 2025 from The Rebel Blog, and in my effective privacy tips. (My list is ordered by my best guesses on biggest business impact.)
Bonus links
The
Tech Elites in the Epstein Files by Brian Barrett. To be clear, a
name appearing in the Epstein files does not mean that person has
committed any kind of crime….Even so, the files reveal just how
intertwined Epstein’s network was with the tech industry—even years
after his 2008 guilty plea for solicitation of prostitution and of
procurement of minors to engage in prostitution.
(and while Brin and
Page party with Jeffrey Epstein, NGOs and reporters do their quality
control. Nudify
app proliferation shows naked ambition of Apple and Google by O’Ryan
Johnson.)
A
letter to the 300 axed Washington Post staffers from Carole
Cadwalladr We’re only four months in and it could all go horribly
wrong but speaking personally I don’t care. The world is on fire. The
entire media industry is a shitshow. And the only interesting, impactful
thing to do in this moment, I believe, is to be bold and brave and to
try something new.
(ICYMI: Revealed:
Palantir deals with UK government amount to at least £670m – including
£15m contract with nuclear weapons agency)
Ditching
bike helmets laws better for health by Chris Rissel. We didn’t
see the kind of marked reduction in head injury rates that would be
expected with the rapid increase in helmet use. In fact, any reductions
in injuries may simply have been the result of having fewer cyclists on
the road and therefore fewer people exposed to the risk of head
injuries.
Everyone
is stealing TV by Janko Roettgers. SuperBox and its main
competitor, vSeeBox, are gaining in popularity as consumers get fed up
with what TV has become: Pay TV bundles are incredibly expensive,
streaming services are costlier every year, and you need to sign up for
multiple services just to catch your favorite sports team every time
they play.
Firefox
148 Will Let You Block All Built-In AI Features by Arthur Kay.
For users who want a clean, distraction-free browser, there will be a
single toggle labeled “Block AI enhancements” that shuts everything off
in one step.
The
Scam Ad Machine from Gen Threat Labs. Over a 23-day period, Gen
Threat Labs analyzed 14.5 million ads running on Meta platforms across
the EU and UK, representing more than 10.7 billion impressions. Nearly
one in three of those ads (30.99%) pointed to a scam, phishing or
malware link. In total, scam ads generated more than 300 million
impressions in less than a month.
The
Dumbest Thing I’ve Seen This Week by Physicsmatt. I’m going to
spend most of my time on the cooling issue, because that’s the real
“what the fuck are you thinking” issue. I’m go through the others
quickly, in part because they touch on issues I’m not as qualified to
speak about. But again, if you’re goal is to put a GPU farm in orbit and
have it turn on, all of these issues can be defeated via the power of
giant piles of money. So none of this is saying you can’t build a
datacenter in orbit. I just want to point out physical limitations that
make it really questionable to me as to why you’d view this as a
solution to anything.
Books
as signifiers, the paradox of tolerance, and Nazi bars by Baldur
Bjarnason. For a moment, I genuinely thought somebody had mocked up a
fake manuscript with the most dreadful clichés they could think of just
to get a rise out of me, no, it was real.
More: ‘AI’
is a dick move, redux
A Man Bought Meta’s AI Glasses, and Ended Up Wandering the Desert in Search of Aliens by Maggie Harrison Dupré. (Now it’s clear that the woman who busted that dude’s Meta glasses on the New York City subway was doing him a favor.)