We are the Rebel Tech Alliance

Welcome to the Rebel Base!

“Gather round and listen up. Our enemy is powerful and creepy. They have the machines but we, the people, have the numbers...”

We'll help you move away from big tech, stop 'feeding the beast', and start using ethical tech.

But why....?

“Why would you set up a company to weaken big tech’s business model?”

“What’s wrong with big tech?”

“You’re wasting your time. Why bother?”

For many people this is the reaction when we say we’ve set up a non-profit to ‘weaken big tech’s business model: surveillance capitalism’. Fair enough. What even is a business model anyway? That’s an easy one to start with – a business model is how a company makes money.

Surveillance capitalism (sometimes referred to as the surveillance economy) is big tech’s method of making money: by surveilling us. What does ‘surveilling us’ mean? It means spying. Always watching (in a digital sense). Always gathering data, always recording, always profiling us.

So why do some people think our efforts might be futile? Answer: the surveillance is done silently, on the sly, in the dark. And it’s done on devices and services that are fun, and really useful. So even if you suspect something creepy is going on in the background, you shut it out because you don’t want to have your shiny toy taken away. Convenience is king.

So we set up the Rebel Tech Alliance because we’ve looked through the mirror and seen the full extent of the creepy spying. We’ve seen the dark side to big tech. And this realisation was greater than our love of convenience. And we can’t unsee it. So we started reading up on it. And the more you look, the more alarming it gets.

Bullies

There’s another reason too – we hate bullies. And when one or more kids in the playground get too big and start beating up the smaller kids, we’re not going to just stand by and not say anything.

Simply put, collectively as a society we’ve let big tech get too big (read this page on our site to see how they got so big). And now they’re starting to throw their weight around. Worse than that, it’s not just the other kids, they’re starting to ally with the worst teachers and have a say in how the whole school is run.

The Learn section of our site is full of great info so you can catch yourself up on why the surveillance economy is such a problem, and help your friends and family understand it too.

But can anything be done?

If big tech are so powerful, and they’re running the school, then is there really anything we, the normal wimpy kids, can do?

Well actually there is. It turns out that the dystopia they’re building has a weakness in the design. That behavioural data of ours that they’re constantly collecting – they actually need to keep that up to date, all the time, or the machine doesn’t work properly. We built their empire by giving them the data, and we can unbuild it by withholding that data.

We can collectively weaken the machine by starving it of data. And it’s actually easy – you just need to stop using their services and apps.

The alternatives are good!

Our Alternatives section of the site lists out all the trusted, vetted apps and services that you can switch to. All tried and tested. And all of them are good!

They are laid out (in the Alternatives menu) in an order which we feel is a good way to work through them at your own pace. Start at the beginning of the Alternatives section: https://www.rebeltechalliance.org/stopusingbigtech.html and pick up the basics, like a password manager, and not accepting cookies. You’ll also see a great map on that page that shows the vast array of great tech alternatives and where they are based.

And don’t stop there. You can make this part of your Big Tech Walkout 2025: aiming to go (mostly) big tech-free by the end of the year!

You do that by following the steps for the Big Tech Walkout on our Collective Action page. After the data footprint basics this will move you on to the first pages of Alternatives: e.g. https://www.rebeltechalliance.org/adblocker.html There’s a link at the bottom of each page to progress through the areas of your digital life, and take the power back.

A great way to track how your doing (and which services you need to replace) is to use our free Big Tech Migration Checklist spreadsheet. No email needed – click on the big tech checklist (labelled as from Rebel Tech Alliance) to download a free document for you to use. While you're there have a look at all the other great resources on that page. For example, have you seen the documentary 'The Great Hack'?

No surveillance, no bullies

If enough people move to alteratives en masse, then we’ll have (with not much effort) collectively built a better school: one with no surveillance and no bullies.

So why did we set up the Rebel Tech Alliance? To help make the internet less creepy.

Sign up to the blog to get regular updates 😊