guides

Reduce Your Reliance on Big Tech

Beltway Breaker

14 Feb 2026

If you're interested in reducing your reliance on big tech companies, this is the place to start. Many activists, technologists, and researchers have tested and recommended alternatives to some of the increasingly evil tech companies that control our online experience. This page seeks to collate those resources and suggestions, and highlight the recommendations that we at The Beltway Breaker recommend for doing so.

Activist Resources for Eliminating Big Tech From Your Life

Disconnect Blog: Getting off US Tech

Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF): Tool Guides

Decentralized Internet Alternatives

Secure Scuttlebutt

Meshtastic

Decentralization: The Left Must Reclaim...Web3?

The increasing centralization and privatization of technology is strangling our ability to use technology the way we want. There are plenty examples of this, from social media companies’ increasingly restrictive content moderation policies, to nation and state governments imposing bans on entire apps and services. We have, in a very

Staying Private Online: What Works, What Doesn't

Staying safe online (hereinafter OPSEC, “operational security”) is like every other sphere of information online: social media discourse about it is flooded with disinformation, exaggerations, and paranoia (some warranted, some not). We have found during our time in activist spaces that many people hear something about being “secure” or “insecure,

Why Data Centers Matter

Nobody ever thinks about data centers. Well, that isn’t quite true, IT administrators probably think about data centers a lot. Beyond them, though, it is easy to understand why data centers have not occupied space in most people’s minds. The cloud, after all, is to most of us

A Better Way To Share: Turning the Internet Into a Public Utility

It is not a mistake that you and I, and people across the world, are retreating into caves of isolation, hearing only what we want to hear and growing farther and farther apart from one another. While the Internet allows us to perform tasks without going places, access knowledge with