Monthly Mosh Pit - Jul 26
Big Tech news is horrifying, but don't be angry about it every day. Instead focus your rage in the mosh pit once a month 🤘🏼 with our news roundup, then get back to your life!
SUMMARY - click to expand
Finally, we are glad to report that Big Tech oligarchies have become self aware and will begin remediations that benefit humanity!
Just kidding.
July was another month of doubling down on their manifestos. Big Tech continues to disrupt replace society. Convenience surveillance economies stay top of the agenda. Innovation layoffs remain their primary focus as AI strategies hallucinations continue unabated while lobbying corruption is still by far the accepted way to do business and operational expenses regulatory fines balloon to unimaginable levels.
This month's gems:
- Meta continue to disgrace themselves but July was particularly bad, with no less than 13 horror stories! These span lawsuits, addictive design, surveillance, AI misuse, smart (pervert) glasses and more child safety failures.
- AI BubbleMaxxing continues: OpenAI lying to boost another funding round, layoffs, more, more, more data centres, slowing returns and growing scepticism
- Big Tech continued influence: monopolistic behaviour, lobbying, surveillance, and an increasingly cosy relationship with governments and public institutions. Palantir rear their ugly head again.
- The EU and some governments show signs of backbone, though, with a big fine for Google and some progress with digital sovereignty
In the Big Tech cesspit
Last month was a doozy for big tech horrors, so let's open up this pit, people!
General
Meta Lawsuit - July 2026 Update updates on the lawsuits Meta is involved in for addictive design and social media harm. Four more states are filing lawsuits against Meta, with combined claims of $1.5 Trillion. Finally that's a big number that will make them take notice.🤞🏼
👆🏼 this is a great video from Proton showing you all the ways that Meta (Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, Threads) spy on you. They also show you ways to reduce this spying! Just for fun here's an article from 2021 referenced in that video, that shows how Meta tracks you on WhatsApp. That can't happen on Signal - so install it now and run it in parallel.
https://ec.europa.eu/commission/presscorner/detail/en/ip_26_1579 Meta found to be in breach of the DSA for their addictive product design. The DSA is the EU's Digital Services Act. The Act came into force in 2022 and finally defective product design is being examined! They also found TikTok guilty recently for endangering children, and fined AliExpress €550 million for selling illegal products.
Meta lawsuit: Employees allege discrimination in AI-assisted layoffs It's Meta again! Employees are alleging that Meta use AI to conduct layoffs. They would do this because AI can create an 'accountability sink'.
Laura Cress
👆🏼 Google fined €4.1bn by the European Commission for "using its Android mobile operating system to block rivals". This includes paying phone makers to preinstall Chrome and Google search as defaults, and making it difficult or impossible for alternative Android 'forked' OSs to compete. Classic monopolistic behaviour. The fine is the largest ever given out by the European Commission. Still just a 'cost of doing business' for Google, as it only represents 3.5% of their annual profits, but a good start.
https://www.rnz.co.nz/news/science-and-technology/700735/missed-the-mark-meta-removes-ai-feature-on-instagram-after-global-backlash Meta announced on the 7th July that their products would be able to train their AI on any user images unless they opt out. Then shortly afterwards they had to walk that back. As usual they only do the right thing after an outcry (which they call "missing the mark" 🤮).
https://futurism.com/future-society/backlash-meta-pervert-glasses-afraid backlash against Meta's pervert sunglasses is so strong that many owners leave them at home. Good. But don't worry their next model will be always on with no record light 🤦♂️
Victor Tangermann
👆🏼 and this advert an organisation placed in London bus stops was absolutely on the money!!! It shows Jeffrey Epstein wearing Meta's creep glasses, and the caption is "For those who don't do consent" 💥 The ad was made by activist group Everybody Hates Elon. Well played.... well played.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/m002z1j2/the-tech-billionaire-takeover the idea of weird tech billionaires taking over goes mainstream - as this BBC documentary shows. It focuses on crypto billionaires, but tech bros like Thiel are mentioned too.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c982857nlrlo the UK government proposes a midnight curfew for 16 and 17 yr olds to be on by default in big tech social media apps. But they can just switch it off. RTA believes the business model underpinning big tech SM precludes healthy change, so the only safe way to use SM is to switch to alternatives like Mastodon. You can do that and much more if you enroll in our free Big Tech Walkout courses - see link boxes in this article.
https://unwall.app/www.wsj.com/lifestyle/careers/ai-knows-what-you-did-online-now-your-employer-does-too-49796adc We've warned before not to put any personal information into AI, and that goes for social media too obviously. This article reminds us that employers (or whoever wants to) can and will dig into the internet to find out stuff about you. Now that incudes AI. If you need to use AI, use privacy-preserving services, as listed in our article about that.
https://www.404media.co/ice-to-pay-thomson-reuters-125-million-to-find-voter-fraud/ and you shouldn't put personal information anywhere online, especially in the US. Once data brokers have it, this report shows that ICE will buy it and could use it against you. Or your neighbour.
https://unwall.app/www.theguardian.com/us-news/ng-interactive/2026/jul/21/amazon-tactics-prices Great investigation into price fixing/gouging by Amazon. Your 'convenience' is allowing a monopolist to fuck the whole industry and actually ends up in you paying higher prices. But it's ok because delivery feels cheap, right? 🤦🏼♂️
https://substack.com/@qasimrashid/note/c-304133822 Meta are on a roll this month - entering into a formal partnership with far right publication Newsmax. Fits their pattern. RTA is apolitical and only speaks out against extreme positions.
Paedotech
Divya Arya
👆🏼 Meta runs ads for child sexual abuse! Just when we thought they couldn't stoop any lower... Please boycott this awful company. They hate you, they enable paedophiles and deliberately hurt children.
Death tech, smart spies and facial recognition
https://unwall.app/www.ft.com/content/ac282450-91a8-4597-8f60-9e6ef416865a?syn-25a6b1a6=1?syn-25a6b1a6=1 the FT reports on Meta's proposed new version of their pervert spy glasses - that will be on and recording the surroundings constantly. And include AI agents to keep you company all day long. Only a sociopathic android would push this. Lost for words. Who buys this stuff?
https://www.theverge.com/tech/970948/meta-smart-glasses-privacy-wearables Meta's rollout of their spyglasses is going badly. And activists are spamming New York, Washington and London with posters!
If you take part in The Big Tech Walkout then the issues in these newsletters will not affect you so badly. Start now, it's fun and easy, and can be done at your own pace:
Age verification & Digital ID
jovankrdiplomacy.edu
👆🏼 children bypass age verification checks, as shown in this study. Only 7% of children surveyed used a VPN (rubbishing that argument), and most just went to websites that didn't have age checks. This is a big risk - children will go to darker parts of the net. We warned about this is a previous blog post.
Palantir
https://www.ukfactcheck.com/article/295/andy-burnham-is-expected-to-block-palantir-from-the-nhs-if-he-becomes-prime-minister Burnham expected to take a tougher stance on Palantir 🥳
Julia Métraux
👆🏼 Palantir are involved in a public health data project in the US 😬 Perhaps due to increasing resistance in the UK to their crap software invading the NHS.
https://democracyforsale.substack.com/p/its-just-a-waste-of-time-inside-palantir-nhs-peter-mandelson here you go: the full detail on the corruption and incompetence that surrounds Palantir - how they infected the NHS. UK lobbying rules really need to be improved. Watch the video in this article too - it's an excellent discussion that includes Beeban Kidron.
https://bylinetimes.com/2026/07/22/growing-number-of-councils-speak-out-against-palantirs-nhs-data-deal/ More NHS trusts are speaking out against Palantir 🥳
Big Tech vs democracy
https://unwall.app/www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/jul/23/cop-city-protester-phone the US officially moves from surveillance state to police state. A man was put on a terrorism watch list (for non-violent activism) and then treated like a criminal for wiping his phone when the goons seized him. 😳
https://futurism.com/artificial-intelligence/cambridge-analytica-ai-slop-farm remember how Cambridge Analytica once helped to break down democracy? Well, they're back and they're an AI-slop farm. Nice. Good to see their ethics didn't change.
In the AI bubble
Laura Cress
👆🏼 This was reported later in the month but we're featuring it because it illustrates the complicit nature of the media in the AI bubble. OpenAI claim one of its models went rogue, escaped, and hacked a startup. And the BBC reports it like fact 🤦🏼 This was a blatant lie, to hype up another funding round, similar to Anthropic's lie about Mythos being 'too powerful'. And sure enough, they announced a $40bn funding round two days later! Why are investors and the press so credulous? 😡 Greed, and complicity in hyping the bubble to invent demand to justify the insane amount of money being invested in the buildout.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cgrkd41n2v9o Ford has rehired engineers after AI couldn't do their job. Yeah, no shit, Sherlock... 🤦🏼♂️ A classic case of red pilled CEO psychosis. They don't understand that just because a silicon valley product is quite good a coding, it won't necessarily be good enough in other realms.
https://www.reuters.com/business/openai-proposes-handing-trump-administration-5-stake-ft-reports-2026-07-02/ OpenAI in talks to sell a 5% stake in the company to the US government, confirming Gil Duran's theory of an "exit through the state".
https://www.404media.co/henrico-virginia-datacenter-energy-cost-email/ County in the US with 37 data centres tells schools to conserve electricity to save costs. You couldn't make it up...
https://tech.yahoo.com/general/article/tech-layoffs-2026-nearly-165000-jobs-cut-at-oracle-meta-microsoft-samsung-and-more-companies-144545528.html carnage in the tech industry as 160,000 jobs are cut. Pretty much all of them state 'AI' as the reason. Tech bosses have always resented having to employ humans...
https://www.theregister.com/ai-and-ml/2026/07/06/even-banks-and-hyperscalers-are-now-sounding-the-alarm-about-the-ai-bubble/5266123 the Bank for International Settlements has issued a report saying that the AI bubble is showing signs of popping. This podcast (which is transcribed too) talks about that, and about how exposed Oracle is.
https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2026/7/7/canadian-province-sues-openai-over-alleged-chatgpt-linked-shooting-warnings OpenAI being sued for connection to the Tumbler Ridge mass shooting.
https://www.reuters.com/business/meta-sell-excess-ai-computing-capacity-via-cloud-business-bloomberg-news-reports-2026-07-01/ further signs that the required demand for AI is not there: Meta admit that they've over committed on data centre build, and are now going to use a lot of it to rent out to others as spare compute power.
https://www.reuters.com/business/zuckerberg-says-ai-agent-development-going-slower-than-expected-2026-07-02/ Meta's Mark Zuckerberg admits that AI agents cannot replace the thousands of workers he fired this year.
Bruce Schneier
👆🏼 the concentration of wealth in AI data centres is a threat to society. Bruce Schneier is an authority on the subject.
https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/2026/07/generative-ai-engineering-disaster/687901/?gift=drKwFSWFu_xQLaRl0-knoInxDpzCetrs0Lv3g98MOk0&utm_source=copy-link&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=share great (gift) article that reminds us that large AI companies are bad at business - their products don't scale well. Bigger = more expensive and less profitable. And this is happening just as Moore's Law is slowing down. Don't buy into the "LLMs must be massive" hype. The thinking at AI companies' HQ is more akin to a cult than a business.
https://thenextweb.com/news/ai-advice-suppresses-critical-thinking-wrong-answers-study Idiocracy beckons. People surrender their critical thinking just because AI is there 🤦♂️
"It is not just that people trust wrong AI answers. It is that the mere availability of AI suppresses the cognitive habit of recognising what you do not know."
https://www.cityam.com/grid-delays-force-starmer-backed-ai-data-centre-to-seek-alternative-power/ UK data centres under construction are turning to using gas-powered turbines because their grid connection is delayed. Similar to what Musk did in the US. If you care about environmental issues then this might be the final straw to start resisting these data centre builds? Data centres already consume 6% of the UK"s electricity so are we headed to where Ireland is (22%)?
Finally where would the Moshpit be without a mention of Elon Musk. Here is his interview with Zanny Minton Beddoes from The Economist: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XuoqKYxDHVc.
We noted how he just shrugs when told that the far right parties he is promoting contain real neo-Nazis. Watch and judge for yourself.
If you take part in The Big Tech Walkout then the issues in these newsletters will not affect you so badly. Start now, it's fun and easy, and can be done at your own pace:
It's not all bad!
https://cybernews.com/privacy/uk-vpn-ban-scrapped-teen-social-media-curfew/ in a victory for privacy (for now) the UK announces it will not ban VPNs for under 16s 🥳
https://criticalai.stanford.edu/manyfesto Critical resistance to AI has sprung up with the heart of silicon valley: Stanford University 🥳
Adam Goldsmith
👆🏼 incoming new UK prime minister Andy Burnham has said he will completely scrap the proposals for a Digital ID scheme. The current government had proposed a voluntary system, watered down from mandatory, but now even that will be scrapped 🥳
https://www.theregister.com/public-sector/2026/07/22/ireland-stalls-1b-microsoft-tender-amid-digital-sovereignty-questions/5276149 Ireland's government pauses to consider other options, not just auto renewing their Microsoft contract 🥳
If you take part in The Big Tech Walkout then the issues in these newsletters will not affect you so badly. Start now, it's fun and easy, and can be done at your own pace:
Tech tip of the month
Catima - store loyalty card wallet. This is a FOSS app (Free Open Source Software) and will not track, profile you or sell your data. Whatever app you're using for shop loyalty cards at the moment, we can guarantee they are selling you out - most likely location data. It's their business model.
Book recommendation
Don't Be Evil, by Rana Foroohar. Written in 2019 this book brilliantly articulates 'the case against Big Tech'. Foroohar is a writer for the Financial Times and her focus on the financial angle gives a much needed view into the mostly invisible: finance and tech both work in the background, silent code and systems that embed power. This book focuses on Google but all the usual suspects are in scope.
Blog recommendation
Offline, with Jon Favreau. Favreau used to be involved with the Obama white house and co-hosts a political podcast called Pod Save America. With Offline, though, he provides a thoughtful and non-technical critique of the pitfalls of our online lifestyles. Good guests and great topics.
Film recommendation
Nothing To Hide 2017 (YouTube link), by Marc Meillassoux & Mihaela Gladovic. This excellent documentary looks at the "I have nothing to hide" defence that people use to justify continually having their privacy destroyed by Big Tech. Back in 2017 this was an interesting question, in 2026 with big data and AI it is vital.
Rebel Tech Alliance is a non-profit dedicated to getting as many people off big tech products as possible. Why? Because that reduces screen addiction and the surveillance economy, which in turn reduces the surveillance state. And that's just good news all round.
