Monthly Mosh Pit - Jun 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 open)
The big stories in June were the UK's proposed social media ban (in the Age verification & Digital ID section below), and SpaceX's IPO at an inflated valuation (in the AI Bubble section below). Both increase big tech power without any accountability. The ban would hand big tech even more power by requiring them to verify and track every user, while doing nothing to actually protect children - as Australia has proved. The SpaceX IPO made Musk a trillionaire and gave him unilateral control, based almost entirely on AI speculative value, with no accountability. Both were enabled by the same political, investor and media class that believes every word tech billionaires say. In the same month as becoming a trillionaire Musk has been branded a dictator-level mass murderer. What a world where such people are rewarded.
Meta had yet another disgraceful month, suffering an embarrasing security breach, trying to justify its paedo chatbots, persisting with its push for facial recognition in sunglasses and silencing a whistleblower in true authoritarian style.
Surveillance via citizen data harvested from the RTB system, cars and data brokers continues its trend of normalisation, and facial recognition software continues to spread. Google, being an advertising company, has decided to prevent the use of the uBlock Origin ad blocker in Chrome, and have also lobbied the EU to keep cookie banners. Meanwhile Apple are being sued for monopolistic practices.
Palantir have experienced some pushback in the UK, following great public campaigns. But the spread of data centers continues. Ireland serves as a cautionary tale.
The AI bubble continues to inflate. Seeing OpenAI's real financials, however, and signs of financial sweating by Google and Oracle, signal that the 'pop' is nearing. OpenAI being sued for its chatbot helping to plan multiple murders is not a good look for an industry rapidly losing the respect of the public. Neither is the publication of a database proving how much AI has ripped off musicians. Despite this, however, three of the main AI bros were seen at the table at the recent G7 summit. The pattern we're seeing is: those in power love AI, those below them are skeptical.
On the bright side Rebel Tech Alliance has now published its Big Tech Walkout as a series of online courses, and some great EU software is now being developed to encourage digital sovereignty. Privacy got a win as the US Supreme Court ruled in favour of requiring a warrent for law enforcement searching up people online, and a more far reaching Act is being considered.
In the Big Tech cesspit
June was yet another bonanza of big tech horrors, so let's warm up those neck muscles, and open up this pit, people!
General
https://krebsonsecurity.com/2026/06/hackers-used-metas-ai-support-bot-to-seize-instagram-accounts/ Meta's AI chatbot in Instagram allowed people to reset passwords for other accounts and take them over. Because Meta is too poor to afford real customer support, or basic security..? 🤦♂️ What a shit company - now they've notified more than 20,000 people who were hacked due to this.
https://protonprivacy.substack.com/p/google-is-finally-killing-ublock Google is changing Chrome so that Ublock Origin (the best - and free - ad blocker) won't work. If you're still using Google's spyware browser, then now is the time to switch to an alternative.
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c932d1r0p96o Apple is being sued by UK consumer group Which? for £3bn, for the monopolistic practice of trapping users in their iCloud service. Other services are available but Apple kneecaps their functionality by limiting access to their OS - which is classic Apple.
https://www.wired.com/story/meta-pauses-employee-tracking-program-following-internal-security-breach/ Meta's internal spying programme (tracking precisely what employees do so they can replace them with AI) has been paused because they were caught doing it. Which is the only reason Meta ever does the right thing.
https://noyb.eu/en/eu-member-states-and-google-suddenly-want-keep-cookie-banners Google has lobbied the EU to keep cookie banners, instead of the EU's proposal to have a standardised browser-level 'refusal' flag. And, painfully, Germany and France have fallen for it, and are going to vote to keep the banners 🤦🏼♂️ We've reached out to noyb to start a campaign on this, but in the meantime you could contact your MEP. This gives you an idea of Google's bargaining power when they lobby:
👆🏼 https://thehill.com/homenews/house/5936899-khanna-challenges-elon-musk/ a US politician has called out Elon Musk as a mass murderer for the deaths he has caused for using DOGE to axe the USAID program. As a direct result of Musk's decision to cut USAID over 700,000 people have already died, and by 2030 that number could be as high as 14 million. That puts Musk (and by proxy, Trump) on par with Hitler and Stalin, according to the figures in this list.
If you take part in The Big Tech Walkout (which is now a free online course!) 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:
https://www.cso.ie/en/releasesandpublications/ep/p-dcmec/datacentresmeteredelectricityconsumption2024/keyfindings/ "The percentage share of metered electricity consumption used by data centres (in Ireland) rose to 22% in 2024 from 5% in 2015". And they are adding huge amounts to the cost of Irish household electricity bills. They also raise local energy prices in the US. Let this be a warning to the UK!
Palantir
Lindsay Clark
The Science Innovation and Technology Committee (UK MPs) has called for Palantir to be kicked out of UK public sector contracts. This is good news, but needs to be read in the knowledge that the UK government is really tight with big tech and Palatir have already got their hooks into the NHS and the MoD.
https://www.reuters.com/business/healthcare-pharmaceuticals/uk-reviewing-palantirs-nhs-contract-amid-pressure-use-break-clause-2026-06-09/ However a few days after the Science Innovation and Technology Committee request, the gov is reviewing the NHS contract. Fingers crossed.
Paedotech
https://www.wired.com/story/meta-contractors-pretending-to-be-teens-chatbot-testing/ This story clearly shows that Meta is not only aware of but is also very keen on its 'pivot to paedo': they tested competitor models to see if they would allow sexy or self harm conversations with children. If you want to know what we mean by 'pivot to paedo' read this article, but be warned, it's ugly. Please boycott this revolting company.
Death tech, smart spies and facial recognition
Ashley Belanger
👆🏼 OpenAI sued by the state of Florida for selling death tech - assisting the planning of several multiple murders. Big tech's is an 'anti-human manifesto' so of course they have no regard for human lives. No one counts as real outside their billionaire bubble.
https://www.wired.com/story/meta-smart-glasses-face-recognition-nametag-connections/ As per a previous mosh pit, Meta have been threatening to put facial recognition in its spy glasses but it has been blocked before. They are, of course, totally amoral so they went ahead and seeded the code in their apps anyway 🤢. HOWEVER, as a result of that Wired article they have now deleted the code, as per this Wired followup!
https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2026/06/meta-is-testing-facial-recognition-for-police-and-military.html not to be deterred though, Meta then moved on to prototyping facial recognition in glasses with a Pentagon supplier. They love stalking and death tech. Please boycott them.
Hugh Langley
👆🏼 A director at Google has resigned due to the death tech they're building. Very occasionally employees of big tech grow a conscience.
https://edri.org/our-work/its-not-just-spyware-scandals-eu-is-funding-the-industry-that-spies-on-europeans/ article covering the Follow The Money exposé into how EU funds are going to Israeli spyware firms. Sign this petition to help stop this.
https://sf.gazetteer.co/why-do-these-castro-gay-bars-have-tsa-style-face-scanners facial recognition cameras in gay bars in San Francisco. Orwellian. The data is shared with other bars and who knows who else. How long before this comes to Europe?
https://www.channel4.com/news/met-police-to-expand-use-of-drones-facial-recognition-and-ai-despite-concerns UK police expand their use of facial recognition tech again 😔 This trend will continue unless the public push back by making noise about it (e.g. through Big Brother Watch's campaign).
https://www.404media.co/meta-smart-glasses-starfire-kylie-jenner/ New Meta spyware glasses ('Starfire') seen in creepy ad featuring Kylie Jenner. Just... no.
Your car is a computer on wheels, and it's phoning home
👆🏼 This is why I haven't bought a new car for over a decade. They are computers on wheels and they spy on you! This video from Proton is a really good explainer. We highly recommend you watch it to the end because they advise on how to reduce the data leaks.
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
Department for Science, Innovation and Technology
👆🏼June was a huge month for digital privacy, as the UK government announced it wants to bring in a full ban on social media for under 16s. This would be enacted from January 2027. We've written an article about why a blanket ban is a bad idea.
https://www.gov.uk/government/news/new-plans-to-stop-children-taking-sharing-or-viewing-nude-images Just before the social media announcement the UK government stated that it intends to force tech companies to install scanning tech on all devices, and age gating. And claims this is "holding big tech to account". We've not yet seen a way this can be done whilst keeping privacy and security intact, and in fact this seems more like the tail wagging the dog. The unparalleled level of verified surveillance would empower big tech, not hold it to account. Read Signal's statement for a good rebuttal.
The UK and other countries look like they also want to age gate VPN services. Look at this great ad billboard in Picadilly Circus by Mullvad listing countries that restrict VPN usage - and they're all authoritarian.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cwykw759v3po Ian Russell, father of Meta victim Molly Russell, tells the government their proposals for social media are rushed, and Ofcom are not enforcing rules already in place. He opposes a ban, which says a lot.
https://gulfnews.com/uae/uaes-under-15-social-media-ban-what-tiktok-instagram-snapchat-facebook-x-must-do-and-penalties-if-they-dont-1.500582129 UAE votes for social media ban. Requires tech firms to alter their product, but also age verify.
https://www.thenerve.news/p/under-16-social-media-ban-keir-starmer-surveillance-parents-online-safety-bill-heather-burns Good opinion piece in The Nerve about why age verification, as part of the proposed social media ban, is a bad idea. It's about control.
https://cyberinsider.com/anthropic-to-introduce-age-and-id-checks-for-claude-users-on-july-8/ age verification is coming to Claude next month. They use Persona for it. Persona are backed by Peter Thiel and do not appear to be able to secure their software. Avoid.
https://web.archive.org/web/20260624231444/https://www.theguardian.com/media/2026/jun/24/australia-under-16-social-media-ban-no-substantial-effects-study 80% of Australian teens are circumventing the social media ban. So the UK would impose age verification and all the privacy and security problems that come with it, for just 20% compliance?! We've been saying a ban is a bad idea!
https://uk.news.yahoo.com/scotland-childrens-commissioner-hits-starmer-092635827.html here's the Scottish children's commissioner saying the social media ban is the wrong solution.
Big Tech vs democracy
https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/business/business-news/peter-thiel-tribunal-journalists-trial-1236617579/ we have the first journalist target of Peter Thiel's project Objection AI. Remember that a free press is one of the pillars of democracy.
https://www.thenerve.news/p/carole-cadwalladr-sarah-wynn-williams-tim-wu-hay-festival-careless-people-gagging Meta whistleblower Sarah Wynn-Williams (who wrote Careless People) was silenced by a gag order, leading to a bizarre silent interview with Carole Cadwalladr live on stage at a festival. Not just unable to talk about Facebook (Meta), but unable to talk at all. Privatised authoritarianism. But because Wynn-Williams is a total badass she's now suing Meta for preventing her promoting her book!
👆🏼 https://www.axios.com/2026/06/20/ai-tech-moguls-g7 Tech bro CEOs as heads of state? Pretty much already happening - this is from G7, and reported as such in mainstream business media! It's great it's getting mainstream attention, but the presence of AI bros at the G7 is deeply worrying - they hype is believed at all levels unfortunately.
https://www.wired.com/story/leak-exposes-members-of-peter-thiels-secretive-dialog-society/ Ever wondered about those billionaire elite groups that conspiracy theorists talk about? Here's one hosted by Peter Thiel - and he's holding it in Ireland (urgh... the shame)
https://archive.is/dPBPk Talking of Thiel, his new project is making moves in Argentina , since the president there, Javier Milei, is so red pilled on AI. This financial times articl is him gushing about AI, including the ability for an AI to 100% run a corporation. You can't make this stuff up!
https://www.thenerve.news/p/harborne-receipts-boris-johnson-christopher-harborne-gift-flights-ukraine-nigel-farage Christopher Harborne, the same crypto billionaire who donated large sums to Trump in 2024 and £5m to Nigel Farage, is also funding Boris Johnson. Tech Bros + populism....
In the AI bubble
Paresh Dave
👆🏼 Anthropic (Claude) file the first paperwork to start the ball rolling towards an IPO. Finally we're going to see their bullshit numbers! As always with Anthropic this was timed with another funding round.
This follows SpaceX last month filling their S1, in which it was revealed that
The filing envisages a $28.5 trillion total addressable market (TAM), the vast majority of which ($26.5 trillion) is ascribed to AI
So Big Tech are going all in on AI, despite having other companies and product lines. Is this bubble the biggest pump and dump in history?
https://www.wheresyoured.at/exclusive-openai-financials/ Ed Zitron then reveals in an exclusive that OpenAI's financials are even worse than you'd think! They set $38 billion on fire in 2025 😳 They are not a real business.
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2026/jun/07/anti-ai-tech-extremism-violence there's a danger that a few nutters taking the law into their own hands will damage legit non-violent protest against the poor product design and lack of accountability of AI companies. RTA does not condone violence.
https://theintercept.com/2026/06/06/anthropic-ai-investor-abu-dhabi-china/ for those who think Anthropic are the "good guys" remember that they are partly owed by the "bad guys", and just as keen as OpenAI to portray their bottom line as a matter of national security.
https://techcrunch.com/2026/06/03/alphabets-record-breaking-85b-raise-for-googles-ai-business-is-a-helluva-good-signal/ Google selling their own stock to fund AI, meaning debt is harder to come by, meaning banks are freaked, meaning the bubble pop is nearer. Meta are also planning on selling their stock.
https://www.flyingpenguin.com/the-boy-that-cried-mythos-verification-is-collapsing-trust-in-anthropic/ Anthropic's Mythos model hype fest turns out to be bollocks. There is no evidence for the "too dangerous to release" marketing hype, just an incremental improvement. Surprise surprise. But it helped them raise and burn more money though.
https://www.404media.co/google-employees-internally-share-memes-about-how-its-ai-sucks/ Google employees hate Google's AI they're forced to use 😂
Archie Mitchell and Kali Hays
SpaceX concludes its IPO on the Nasdaq at a valuation of $2.2tn, raising $75bn for the company (and making Musk a trillionaire). Most of the future growth forecasted by SpaceX for the IPO was in AI not space travel (by a huge margin) as SpaceX owns Xai.
"Musk's 42% ownership stake in SpaceX gives him essentially unilateral control over everything it does. He can spend the money being invested however he likes."
That people invested at this valuation, and with no accountability for Musk, proves (in our opinion) that they have lost all sense of reason and have totally given in to greed - hence why this is in the AI bubble section. The people who will pay are the pension funds and investors in index funds that are roped in to buying SpaceX stock at this inflated valuation. Also: SpaceX bought Cursor shortly afterwards for $60bn further cementing them as an AI company, not a space company🤦♂️
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/scientists-invented-a-disease-to-test-whether-ai-knew-it-was-fake-then-chatbots-started-saying-it-was-real-180988924/ all the main AI chatbots (ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini), and some human researchers, were fooled by a deliberately made up research paper about a made up disease. Be warned: AI companies scrape the internet for everything, and don't check if it's true. So not only is the Bullshit Machine hardwired to hallucinate, but it's trained on bullshit too.
https://www.theatlantic.com/category/ai-watchdog/ The Atlantic have made a searchable webpage that shows if a band's music has been stolen by AI Bros. Spoiler alert: yes it probably has. I found music from my friends' bands that are struggling to make a living 🤬
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c4gy0x0j5deo Oracle has cut 21,000 jobs saying it's "due to AI". That's true but not for the reason you think - they've waaaaay over committed on data center build and need to stem the cash bleed. Ed Zitron has shown how Oracle might be taken down by the AI bubble.
https://gptzero.me/news/investigations-kpmg/ surely the likes of KPMG aren't putting out slop reports to boost the adoption of AI? That would be really unprofessional. Oh wait, yes they are. This study found a report from last year was riddled with hallucinated citations. The bullshit machine will be the undoing of lazy idiots.
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://www.wired.com/story/a-court-has-ruled-that-google-is-liable-for-false-statements-generated-by-ai-overviews/ finally some accountability for Google over its crappy AI summaries in search. It is now liable for the bullshit it makes up.
https://european.social/ an open declaration of solidarity for open social media in Europe - with all the right ingredients: open source, decentralised, EU infrastructure, diverse business models.
👆🏼 And here's an example of a product that can spring up in such an environment: Office EU. This follows the announcement of the likes of Euro-Office and creates a diverse and healthy marketplace.
Andrew Crocker and Jennifer Lynch
👆🏼 A win for privacy: on 29th June 2026, the Supreme Court of the United States ruled 6-3, in Chatrie v. United States, that police need a warrant before they can sweep up your cell phone location data from Google. Seems like a big win for privacy, but this blog post argues that "The ruling only stops police from forcing a company to hand over your data without a warrant. It says nothing about police buying it without a warrant - and buying it is exactly what they’ve been doing for years". (This is what we've been warning about since we started RTA - that data is freely available via the RTB system).
However a new bill that is potentially more effective in its scope, the Surveillance Accountability Act, is currently being considered by Congress 👀. It was co-authored by Naomi Brockwell, one of the brightest minds in privacy activism. See her talking about this Act here.
The Onion Staff
👆🏼 Satire is not dead! The way to beat these techno-fascists is via humour.
For example:
Honest government ads
👆🏼 this is priceless - excellent work ridiculing the tech broligarchy, made by The Juice Media
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
Polotno Studio - a small-tech alternative to Canva, Photoshop and Microsoft Designer. You can use it without an account (click 'Open the editor ->' in the top left of the screen) so it's ideal for casual use. It's good for making image collages, and can do some basic image transformations like remove background. We use it to make some of the images for RTA (e.g. the big tech cesspit image for this post!).
Book recommendation
Empire of AI - Karen Hao. Karen got inside access to OpenAI and exposes their disfunctional nature in this excellent book. It is very well researched and well written. It documents how the race to dominate the AI sector has all the hallmarks of colonialism, and reveals the dark costs of such empire-building, especially in the Global South.
Blog recommendation
How to Survive the Broligarchy - Carole Cadwalladr. Carole is a super star in this space, and has been tracking the fusion of tech bro and corrupt politics since November 2024 in this excellent blog. She doesn't post that frequently here (she has a newspaper) but the content is always on point.
Film recommendation
Heads of State (2025). John Cena and Idris Elba as the US president and the UK prime minister? Somehow it works, and is really funny. It also has a great turn by Priyanka Chopra Jonas as a total badass. Whilst being 100% a work of fiction, it does give an interesting depiction of Echelon, the surveillance system used by the 5 Eyes nations. We have an article coming soon that's all about that.
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 (unless you're a billionaire).
