Welcome to the digital resistance, which apparently consists of subscribing to yet another newsletter and buying designer lamps. If you’ve been following the latest installment of the tech-bro manifesto—disguised as a helpful guide to “un-Big Teching” your life—you’ve likely realized that the path to digital freedom is paved with high-priced subscriptions and the ironically heavy use of the very infrastructure you’re supposedly fleeing.

The central premise here is that you can escape the clutches of Big Tech by simply surrounding yourself with “Verge-iest stuff.” It’s a bold claim: that the solution to tech saturation is, in fact, more tech. It’s the digital equivalent of trying to lose weight by switching from milk chocolate to “artisanal, small-batch, bean-to-bar” dark chocolate. You’re still consuming the same stuff, but now you feel intellectually superior while doing it.

First, let’s address the “un-Big Tech” methodology of switching apps. The article suggests moving your life to “Dot,” a new AI-powered calendar app. Because nothing says “I’m taking back my data from the giants” like handing your entire daily schedule over to a venture-backed startup that likely uses OpenAI’s API and hosts its data on Amazon Web Services (AWS) or Google Cloud. You aren’t “un-Big Teching”; you’re just adding a middleman who hasn’t gone public yet. True digital sovereignty doesn’t involve trading a stable ecosystem for a “waitlist” and a flashy UI that will inevitably be acqui-hired by Meta in eighteen months.

Then there’s the intellectual posturing. The guide suggests that to truly understand the internet, you must consume a specific diet of Ezra Klein podcasts and Tim Wu’s *The Master Switch*. While Wu’s book is an objectively brilliant piece of scholarship on the history of communications, reading it to “un-Big Tech” your life is peak irony. Wu’s entire thesis involves how open systems inevitably become closed monopolies. Using his book as a manual to justify downloading more niche apps is like using a book on the dangers of gambling to help you pick a better slot machine.

The assumption that “curation” is the antidote to the algorithm is equally adorable. The article positions the “Installer” newsletter as the ultimate filter for the “best stuff.” But let’s be real: curation is just an algorithm with a personality transplant. Instead of a machine learning model deciding what you see, it’s a guy who buys too many lamps and celebrates National Ferris Wheel Day. It’s still a filter bubble; it’s just one that smells like expensive espresso and San Francisco rent prices.

And speaking of lamps—nothing screams “digital minimalism” and “fighting the system” like an office tour that inspires you to buy more physical hardware. The logic here is dizzying: to free your mind from the digital abyss, you should fill your physical space with luxury lighting. It’s a classic distraction technique. If you’re busy worrying about the lumen output of your new desk lamp, you’re probably not worrying about the fact that your “alternative” browser is still built on Chromium.

The reality is that “un-Big Teching” isn’t an aesthetic choice you make by selecting the right macOS widgets. It’s a grueling, inconvenient process of de-platforming that usually involves using ugly open-source software that looks like it was designed in 1998. But that doesn’t make for a very “Verge-y” newsletter, does it?

If you want to actually reclaim your online life, stop looking for the “best” new apps. The “best” apps are almost always the ones with the most funding, the most data-hungry features, and the deepest ties to the platforms you’re trying to avoid. True digital freedom is found in the “worst” stuff—the boring, the analog, and the stuff that doesn’t require a premium subscription or an AI integration to tell you it’s Tuesday. But hey, enjoy the lamps and the Ferris wheel trivia. I’m sure the revolution will be live-streamed on a niche, invite-only app any day now.