About

- Penelope Scott, artist, from Elongated Muskrat/Rät off of Public Void (Scott)

I've always been into tech stuff, for as long as I can remember. I used to (and still do) make spreadsheets to track random things like information for a game, just for fun. It's kind of sad and ironic being a person simultaneously into tech and things like ethics and politics. I love using and creating with tech, but I have to do so with the knowledge of what detrimental harm the companies that create them do to the world.

I've also always generally hated ads, dating back even longer to before I knew anything about the world. Starting when I was maybe 13, I used Blokada to block all ads. At some point one of my friends showed me ReVanced, and I was blown away that that was even possible. I've just never been a fan of wasting what little time we have on this plane watching ads. Initally it wasn't political, but as I've grown more political it's became so. What used to be just me hating ads was now me hating the corporations that make the world what it is today.

Something that's always bothered me is that people don't seem to care. Not just with the concerns I raise with tech companies here, but just in general. I'm not sure if this is a uniquely US or historially imperialist country thing, but it makes me sick. We have so much that comes from people who have so little becasuse of us, and no one seems to put any effort or thought into making that stop. I hate going about life knowing that the random people I interact likely don't care about anything past how much money they make a year, how their stock portfolio is doing, or if their chosen political team is "owning" the other one. Specifically to me, I hated that everyone, even my friends who aligned with me on ethics, used big tech things without a care despite acknowledging the harm they've done and do to the world. If I ever asked them why they still use Google or Microsoft despite caring about the environment or AI, they'd say they don't care enough to stop using them or that they don't know how to not use them. So I decided to do something about it.

Being the anti-big tech but pro-tech person I am, I was in a unique spot to actually be able to help people. I was inspired specifically by one of my friends who, as a med student, used their knowledge about medical things to educate their peers about the dangers of pseudoscience and people like RFK Jr.'s antics. I thought that I should use the knowledge that I uncommonly have to help others. I believe we should all do that. If there's something you know you're knowledgeable about that others often aren't, help them with it. Make a guide on the things you wish everyone else knew about your field, specificaly regarding what they can do to be the change they wish to see in the world.

I don't know if this work will actually make a a difference, but I hope it can. I don't expect to even make a dent in the billion-dollar corporations or anything nearly as ambitious as that, but hopefully I can at least help make others make ethical decisions in an area they normally wouldn't think about. Now my friends have no excuse to use big tech, as I've now taught them both the why and the how they said they didn't know before. Hopefully you can use them as well. Thanks for visiting; I hope it was helpful and inspiring.

- Penelope Scott, artist, from Elongated Muskrat/Rät off of Public Void (Scott)

This project has gone through two very different stages of development. I've been working on it since probably around July of 2025, when it was a less than one page Google Doc simply titled "Tech Guide". I would constantly bother my friends with things like blocking ads and piracy, so I'd inevitably want to send them the links of the things I'd mentioned. I got tired of constantly re-finding the same links to send to people, so I thought "why not just put them all in once place?". That way I both didn't need to go re-searching for links and so if I sent it to someone for them to, let's say, block ads, they could then also get the info on piracy. At this point it was incredibly minimal, just the link and a less than one sentence description for about three or four things.

But I had a lot of fun making it, so my guide - now titled "The Internet Experience" - kept growing and growing to the point where I had different sections and lots of resources. At this point I had things like NextDNS, Proton VPN, r/Piracy, AdNauseam, ReVanced, and maybe a few other things all in the document. I also made a nice, Instagram friendly graphic, mainly for blocking ads and increasing privacy, that I could post for my friends to see. That was really the first time the project was "public". None of it was really based on the ethical concerns of big tech companies, it was just about improving your online experience.

Eventually, I finally started to de-Google. It was a long time coming; I had wanted to for ages. Along the way I added everything I found to a seperate document (now on Proton Docs). At the top I had one sentence bullet points on the evil things Google has done: pollution, genocide, war, AI, privacy, and control (in that order). The original and the new one linked to each other. They both only continued to grow and grow to the point where, at their peak, I think they were each around 4,000 words. Some info was on both of them, like Browsers and Search Engines. I had thoughts about really expanding it into a whole project that I shared online and stuff, but for now it was limited to the few friends I had sent the link to. I was working on it like I would one day expand the scope to more people. I realized people who came just for blocking ads probably wouldn't transfer over to the de-Googling page, so I condensed the two pages and got rid of the repeated info. But that lead to the problem that now I had a 8,000-ish word document where people would need to be able to easily flick back to certain sections as needed, without an easy way to do so. Proton Docs doesn't/didn't have a table of contents type feature like Google Docs dpes, so the next logical step was to finally expand the project to a website.

At this point, it was mid January. I started by simply downloading the massive document as HTML and cleaning up the generated code. After that, I attempted to make it look pretty and usable for a solid 30 seconds before I realized I wasn't going to be able to beautify it. I knew HTML and CSS, but knowing the language and making a pretty site are two very different things. I decided to use a template from HTML5 UP as a starting point, although it's been modified heavily since then. From there, I just kept grinding away at improving the content and expanding the scope of the guide. As I'm sure anyone who knows me in real life would attest, it was all I could talk about. I expanded the scope of Rejecting Corporations to include more than just Google, but the bullet points as to why you'd want to were still just bullet points. Eventually I hit a small lapse in new ideas and took a break before coming back harder than ever.

At this point, it was just a tech guide for things like blocking ads with another page teaching you how to de-Google, as an aside. I realized this was all connected. There was no reason for Rejecting Corporations to be as disconnected as it was. When I thought about why I was doing this, I was doing it not just to help people block ads and increase privacy but to get away from the evil corporations entirely. Why wasn't the whole site about that? This is when the second evolution of the project took place. Now the whole site was directly about fighting back against our corporate overlords. This is when the "Why is this important?" page came into being, using the bullet points from Rejecting Corporations as a starting point, and when it became as long and as in-depth as it is now.

This project's original name, "The Internet Experience", wasn't the best. Honestly, I just couldn't think of anything else. It didn't really reflect what this project was anymore, past the fact that it had something to do with the internet. Even that wasn't even really accurate, as lots of the things covered aren't necessarily online. While researching the Luddites - which were a group from industrial revolution England that opposed how the recent advances in technology were being used to disenfranchise and abuse the masses - I came up with the name "Machines Against the Rage". While nowadays the name "Luddite" is mostly used as a pejorative against people who are generically anti-tech, that's not what they stood for. They were fighting back against the capitalist's use of the new technology in destroying the environment, decreasing wages and living conditions, and utilizing child labor. "Machines Against the Rage" better encompases everything this project is. It likely immediately reminds you of the popular anti-capitalist rock band Rage Against the Machine, although the term did not originate them them. It is often used to describe the Luddites, as they would physically "rage" against the industrial "machines" that kept them powerless when they desroyed them in protest. I believe we have a duty to follow in their footsteps. It also suggests what this site contains, "machines" that are against "the rage" - that is products and services (the machines) that are alternatives to everything wrong with the world (the rage). Lastly, it suggests that "the machines" that help capitalism continue to exist and evolve are against our collective "rage", that is at every turn they do what they can to stand in the way of reform of important issues like climate change and genocide.

If I wasn't on a list before, I definitely am now. I guess this makes me an activist or something, doesn't it?