We all have a choice

If you're on The Internet and you work in tech, you're probably feeling painfully burned out at the State of Things right now. Your feelings are very valid. And you are not alone.

Over the last decade, technology companies that started out as honest and independent hubs for innovation have gradually and very slowly been swallowed whole by something that, for those of us who have built our lives around being ethical, being nice, being good, and Doing The Right Thing, we just cannot comprehend. It has been a slow but sure bait and switch.

The media and public discourse would have us believe that This Is The Way Things Are; we're locked in now and there is no other way. But that is what these companies rely on: you're too burned out to take action right now. And so as a collective we continue to pay for services that these companies provide and, by proxy, support these organisations in moving further and further away from what is right and good.

I often speak about how your tools don't matter and how telling your story about what you're creating is the most important part of building for the web. But in 2025, the tools we choose to use, support, build community around and pay for send an important message to our peers about what we believe in, what we're willing to tolerate, and ultimately, who we choose to be.

Yesterday the CEO of Vercel posted a proud selfie to The Internet, posing with the Prime Minister of Israel, Benjamin Netanyahu. Regardless of how utterly absurd this actually is, this whole circus act sent a very clear and frankly, harrowing memo to the entirety of the technology industry.

Those of you are are ethical and nice and good but also invested in the Vercel ecosystem are probably a little shaken up right now. And maybe you hope this is a one-off because you really don't have time to migrate all of your projects to another deployment platform right now, let alone migrate away from Next.js to a new web framework.

But we all have a choice.

Taking action and Doing The Right Thing is often difficult, always exhausting, but it is what we must do, together. We all deserve better. The world deserves better. It'll take a little work to get there, but there is hope.

There is hope if we do it together. The Internet is ours.

We all have a choice.