The OG/corps you already know about.
Microsoft
Google
Apple
Meta
Amazon
You can also think of them as much of what is ginning up the American stock market. And if you're not alarmed by that, what have you been doing with your life since 2008?
Other stuff you mostly already know and that you can live without
OpenAI
Twitter/X/whatever you want to call them
BlueSky
Anthropic
Substack*
*This is a good time to mention that anything that is fascist or Nazi-adjacent qualifies for this list. And if you court Nazis, you definitely qualify.
And now we start to have a little fun, because as you scratch a little closer, you find that the things you thought were "ethical" alternatives really aren't, and you have to admit to yourself that you don't have options.
Proton
LibreOffice
Tuta
Kagi
Mozilla
Brave
Linux...this was when it started to get really fun
Internet Archive....this was when you might have stopped breathing
Wikipedia...which we could have suspected because Wales brags about being a libertarian, so not liking unions tracks
Omarchy...but that's a Linux distribution, and eh, you already had a problem
Mullvad...someone want to list a good VPN that isn't fascist adjacent or corrupted with AI? Please?
Stripe
PayPal...This one is *special*, and maybe should have been on the first list
Discord! They are moving to "age verification", and that is going to go really badly, I promise you. But why believe me when you can just look at tumblr?
VIM
Shopify
Framework...which brings me to a certain someone who made a couple of recommendations that ended up being on this list. You know who he is. If you see him recommending anything, treat with caution.
The reason I need to put this list up is because I know I missed something even as I was typing this up. I can't keep up, which is maybe part of the design.
But it shouldn't be this way, and it doesn't have to be.
Wix
WordPress...both added because they are pushing their AI tools pretty hard
Graphene
It shouldn't be underestimated how serious it is that these companies are not just bad but evil. Try getting a phone in the US that doesn't run on an Android or Apple operating system (yes, I know that's called iOS).
Yep, I'll wait. And while I'm planning on pitching my smartphone again, 2FA makes it practically a requirement. (2FA, necessary in part because sites are trying to protect against AI/scraping bots.)