How to Fight the Broligarchy (50501ny.substack.com)

đź”— https://50501ny.substack.com/p/how-to-fight-the-broligarchy
Posted on Jan 1, 1

🧭 Overview & Context

In this May 15, 2025 post from 50501 NY, an anonymous author (“R”) breaks down how Big Tech oligarchs have created a system of digital entrapment, comparing platforms like Amazon, Google, Meta, and TikTok to gated surveillance enclaves that addict and monetize users. The piece names this structure the “Broligarchy”—a mashup of “bro” and “oligarchy”—and calls for collective escape through intentional tech migration and activism.

🔍 Core Argument

  • Big Tech platforms operate as open-air digital prisons designed to maximize profit through surveillance and behavioral manipulation.
  • These platforms extend monopolistic control over infrastructure that businesses and users alike rely on, locking them into exploitative dependencies.
  • Escaping these enclosures is not impossible, but difficult, as alternatives are often co-opted or isolated.

🛑 Key Warnings

  • AI systems like ChatGPT and Musk’s “Grok” are accused of information control, environmental harm, and misappropriating user content.
  • Copyright enforcement is undermined, with the Trump administration firing officials who challenged AI overreach.
  • Businesses suffer too, paying high rents to exist inside monopolistic ecosystems like Amazon or the App Store.

✊ Resistance & Alternatives

The article proposes a suite of actions:

  • Tech Migration: Switch to platforms like Bluesky, Mastodon, Pixelfed, and Signal.
  • Economic Resistance: Cancel Amazon Prime, ditch Google tools, and boycott Big Tech-aligned businesses.
  • Education & Media Literacy:
    • Follow Carole Cadwalladr, Gil Duran, and Jenny Cohn.
    • Subscribe to Wired, and privacy-focused newsletters like How to Survive the Broligarchy.
  • Online Behavior: If you must use surveillance-heavy platforms, use them strictly for resistance efforts.

🧠 Cultural & Philosophical Notes

  • Cites Yanis Varoufakis’s Technofeudalism to illustrate how tech monopolies privatize the commons and extract value through digital “landlordism.”
  • Ends with a reference to Bo Burnham’s song Welcome to the Internet, as a cultural lament for what the digital world has become.

đź“Ś Citation

50501 NY. (2025, May 15). How to Fight the Broligarchy. Substack. Retrieved from https://substack.com/inbox/post/163588566
(Summary generated by ChatGPT, GPT-4-turbo, July 2025)