My wake-up moment wasn’t some grand ethical revelation.
It was reading about Francesca Albanese being sanctioned by the US. She’s the UN Special Rapporteur on Palestine. It’s literally her job. The UN – imperfect as it is – exists because we collectively decided human rights matter. And then one of the main signatories just… cut her off. Emails gone. Banking access gone. Everything.
Same happened to the lead prosecutor of the International Criminal Court – Karim Asad Ahmad Khan. He is one of the world’s foremost experts in international criminal law and international human rights law and in February 2025, the US department of treasury sanctioned him for doing his job – issuing arrest warrants for Netanyahu and Gallant for alleged war crimes in Gaza. Both Khan and Albanese lost access to their emails, their credit cards, their ability to move about the world and as a result their family and friends are also deeply affected.
I’m utterly insignificant compared to these people. I know that.
In my insignificance – I try to do the right things (most of the time). Recycling. Buying sustainable products. Checking where my coffee comes from. Trying to be an ethical consumer.
And yet.
The companies doing the most damage – funding genocides, causing human rights catastrophes, paying pittance for resources extracted through violence – we’re paying them each month for the privilege of doing our jobs. We’re complicit. But we’re complicit because we’re also trapped. We NEED this technology. They’ve done an excellent job making it indispensable. Easy to connect. Professional. Integrated.
But in making our lives easier, we’re putting our feet on the necks of other people.
I don’t think we all need to stop overnight and shame each other. That’s not the point. I once read that “the right looks for converts, the left looks for traitors” and though this is not a right/left issue – the sentiment is true. Often the push for social and ethical progress feels preachy, pushy and alienating. We don’t bring people in – we push them away by shaming, a tactic that creates more problems than it solves.
But there will come a time when we all have a wake-up moment – left or right.
And if some of us haven’t done the early work of seeking out ethical alternatives, there won’t be companies there to help us move. They will all have been swallowed up or squashed by the big monopolistic giants. What is frustrating about all of this – is that these big companies provide a great service and they could reform, they’re not beyond redemption – if the market moves towards viable ethical alternatives, they’ll follow the money. They’ll become more ethical because that’s where the market goes.
But we have to stop buying the glossy sales pitch. The “look over here at our sustainability initiatives” while they’re funding conflicts elsewhere, supporting civil rights abuses, extracting resources through violence and putting shareholder value ahead of human rights generally.
We have to make ourselves a little uncomfortable. Especially those of us who can. This isn’t on people who can barely breathe. But for those of us who can? We need to start thinking about it and when the time is right, we can make small changes.
I’ve started with my tech stack. I don’t have it figured out, it’s been really uncomfortable. The choices we make don’t have to be perfect – todays ethical provider could be tomorrow’s problematic monopoly but if we act, we will have stood up once and can do it again.
Just the fact that you have read this is a step in the right direction and every step matters.
I’d love to hear other people’s experiences with their ‘wake-up moments’ or their migrations to more ethical tech providers too!
Next in this series: My actual migration from Google to Infomaniak (Swiss alternative to Google Workspace) – what worked, what was painful, and what I wish someone had told me before I started. If you’re considering making changes to your tech stack, subscribe to follow along. I’m documenting my whole messy process.
If you want to talk with someone who can help you make sense of your options – book a one to one Spark Session.