Big Tech is gaslighting us into waste

After being nudged to ditch yet another working device, I’ve had enough

Jean Kabasomi

Jean is a consultant working with financial and Christian organisations. She also writes and broadcasts.

A flat screen on a desk displays a colourful pattern.

BoliviaInteligente on Unsplash,

I wasn’t supposed to write this article. Actually, I was going to about a month ago. But I decided against it because I had a good experience with a Big Tech company, but today I changed mind. Let me start from the beginning.

Back in 2018, I bought a Samsung flatscreen TV for a flat I was renting in Southfields, if you don’t know South London well, that’s basically Wimbledon. I had just moved back to London. I remember I was excited about it because I hadn’t bought a TV for any of the other places I had lived in. I remember doing all the research. I wanted a Samsung because I am not an Apple person. I couldn’t afford the latest Samsung flatscreen, so I got a mid-range one. It was just as good as I thought it was going to be. In fact, I was pleasantly surprised by the quality for the price I paid.

When I moved back home during the pandemic, it became the kitchen TV and is still going strong. This Samsung TV is fantastic. The picture is crisp. If I am streaming a show in HD, it gets even better, noticeably better. Compared to the new, bigger TV, in the front room, it’s like night and day. Imagine my surprise when, some of the apps I regularly use on my good old kitchen TV stopped working. The TV works perfectly, but the apps no longer support my TV. In other words, Samsung and the app providers want me to buy a new TV when my TV is not broken. How can I throw away or upgrade a TV that isn’t broken?

Now you might be thinking it’s not necessarily a deep concern to hold. But this has happened to me before. My tablet, yup, another Samsung product, works perfectly well. It does what I want it to do. I bought it in 2020. I have no need, reason or desire to upgrade or buy another tablet. I was absolutely fine. That is until earlier this year, when Samsung rolled out a software update. My phone was updated automatically. The user interface changed, security is better and Gemini, Google’s version of ChatGPT, has been integrated into my search engine. The update was so transformative, that I questioned why my tablet also hadn’t updated automatically. I kept refreshing the updates screen, hoping it would come through, but nothing happened. So, as any self-respecting millennial would, I googled it.

What did I find? Samsung is no longer providing updates for my tablet. It is five years old, how does that even make sense? Again, I find myself with a working product, no scratches, no malfunctions, no problems whatsoever. A product I love but I am again being forced to eventually ‘throw it’ because Samsung have stopped providing software updates for it.

In sharp contrast to Samsung's sudden obsolescence in my life, I was left delighted after, yet another tech fail instead led to a positive outcome. Last month, the screen on my Fitbit suddenly stopped working. My steps and sleep were still being captured and recorded in the app, I just couldn’t see anything, including tell the time. As you would expect, I thought, ‘Here we go again, another Big Tech company forcing me to buy another product’. I had determined I wasn’t buying a new Fitbit. Instead, I decided I would contact Google. In the Fitbit app, you can get Google to call you back. So, I did and immediately, I found myself speaking to a lovely gentleman in San Francisco. Within five minutes, we concluded that there was a genuine fault. I sent my broken Fitbit off and two days later I received a refurbished replacement. After this experience, I felt okay again about Big Tech. I was in a good place, no need to write this article. Until today.

This afternoon, as I opened Microsoft Word. There was an announcement. From 14th October 2025, Microsoft will no longer support Office 2019. I am actually shaking my head in disappointment as I type this. Why is this a big deal? When I bought my PC in 2020, I made a deliberate choice to buy the packaged version of Microsoft Office and make a one-off payment. I did not want to entertain or engage in Microsoft’s attempt to turn a packaged good product, Office, into a subscription product Microsoft 365, to extract more money from me in the long run. But here I am again, being forced to do away with a perfectly good, working product by another Big Tech company all in the name of profit.

These things annoy me because I am being coerced into making choices that go against my value system. I would not describe myself as overtly climate conscious, but I am against waste. I do not subscribe to the idea of a culture that creates and fosters a society driven by consumerism at the behest of profit. Whilst Microsoft, isn’t asking me to throw away a physical product, its actions are causing me to think it is okay to do away with a perfectly decent product for no good reason. The only reason why Samsung and Microsoft are forcing me to change my working products, products that I am happy with is, so that they make more money. I am loyal to them. I have nowhere else to go. They provide a good service we have all encountered, the gradual, then sudden decline of our phone batteries around about the 18-month mark. Another example of unnecessary waste.

It all feels a little disheartening. We can no longer take these brands’ values at face value. Excellence and quality no longer mean superiority and long lasting. Instead, they mean ‘excellent until we release a new version next year when you ought to buy again or else we will stop supporting you’. No wonder we are all slightly suspicious of Big Tech, we don’t believe they represent what they say represent. We no longer trust that their ‘yes means yes and their no means no’.

Sadly, in politics the climate discussion has been reduced to a debate around the viability of achieving net-zero in x many years. But what would happen if we broadened out the conversation, and we looked a little bit deeper into the areas of genuine waste. Areas where our consumerist profit driven approach is forcing us to waste rather than steward the world’s limited resources. What would it look like if governments held corporations accountable for practices that force consumers to buy more than they need? Not to stifle innovation or growth but to stop waste. I don’t want to throw away my phone, tablet or TV but sadly Samsung is forcing me to. That just can’t be right.

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Nationalism

17 September 2025

5 min read

I protested against the Unite The Kingdom protest

The need to see one another

Thomas Sharpe

Thomas is a writer exploring the intersection of faith, politics, and social justice.

CCTV footage show two rival protests divided by a line of riot police.

CCTV image of the rival protests on Whitehall.

Met Police.

I don’t know why I was so concerned about the horses. I kept noticing them swaying through the sea of shivering bodies. I was so drawn to them that I tried to take a photo, a rare occurrence for me, but I was too far away. The horses riders, dressed in full riot gear, were being pelted with beer bottles. Maybe the horses were getting hit too, but it felt like they were recoiling on behalf of their riders.

In front of the horses, engulfing Trafalgar Square, were tens of thousands of “Unite the Kingdom” protestors. From what I could see, they were predominantly white men. Many of them were dancing and waving flags, but a sizeable contingent was furious, drunk, and insisted on attacking any unfortunate police officer in their way.

Behind the horses, lining the streets of Whitehall, were five thousand counter-protestors, including me. Unlike our opposite numbers in Trafalgar Square, we were trapped, surrounded on every side by St George’s flags, Union Jacks, and, oddly, some Georgian flags too. Maybe the shop had sold out. To my right, I could see the counter-protestors defiantly dancing. To me left, I could see a group chanting “Nazi scum, off our streets” whilst swearing towards the St George’s flags.

There in the middle, I found myself feeling a curious mixture of discomfort, sadness, and anger. Uncomfortable because I’d been trapped for four hours, stuck on a continuous cycle of rinse and drain. Sad, because I knew that much of the “Unite the Kingdom” violence was built on misinformation and the scapegoating of refugees, a group I know well, and because this fog of violence blew over the counter-protestors as they hurled insults towards the St George’s flags. And angry, because figures like Elon Musk were using their extraordinary wealth and influence to spread fear and lies: “Whether you choose violence or not, violence is coming to you. You either fight back or you die. You either fight back or you die. And that’s the truth. It’s only a matter of time till that happens to towns and villages. It will spread. And no one will have any peace.” Over the years, I have spent many hundreds, if not thousands, of hours with refugees and asylum seekers, both in my home and at my church. I had experienced no violence. In that moment, I was surrounded by “leftists”, socialists, and trade unionists, and the only violence I was experiencing was from the glint of beer bottles raining down on the police two hundred meters away.

I was grateful for the interruption of an elderly lady asking if she could get past. I’d been asked a number of questions throughout the day, primarily because I was one of a group of four Christians holding signs like “Jesus was a refugee”, “love thy neighbour”, and “I was a stranger and you welcomed me”. At the start of the protest, an older lady and a young man joined our circle. The young man asked “I’m glad to see there are some Christians here. What do you think of Christian nationalism? Your religion doesn’t feel much like Jesus?” He was a brave Saudi Arabian refugee with a bright smile, earnestly questioning the fractures in my community of faith. Taken aback by the poignancy of the question, I fumbled a response before being rescued by one of my friends.

Protest signs written on cardboard. — *Tommy's protest signs before the rain.*

After a while, the older lady started speaking. “Sorry for interrupting. I used to be a Roman Catholic, but I’ve lost my faith. On days like this though, I always want to pray. I don’t feel much hope for the church. A while ago, I went into a catholic church. I asked if the church could do anything about the divisions in our community and the anger at refugees. The priest shrugged and said no. I’m glad you’re here.” Her short, staccato sentences mirrored the tension of the day. I told her about how our church serves refugees, how I struggle with the anger of days like today, and how some of us have forgotten that the bible tells us to welcome the stranger dozens of times. As they walked away, I felt touched by the honesty both the young and old had gifted to four strangers, and I was glad to be carrying our smalls signs of hope.

The megaphone brought the present back into view with another question. “Could everyone please get ready to leave up the left of Trafalgar Square?” it said. The police had cleared a path for us to leave, the sea of flags artificially parted by riot gear. We were escorted to Green Park tube station, at which point we turned off towards Oxford Street. My wife remarked at how quickly normality returned. I was devastated by the day, but felt too tired to weep. I wasn’t quite the same Tommy that I’d been that morning. The man who shares my name, and the chaos he wrought on my city, had turned a dial in me a little further than it had been turned before.

I knew that I would have more days like this. In the midst of my discomfort, sadness, hope, and fear, I knew that I was supposed to be there, holding my soggy “Jesus was a refugee” sign, shivering in my damp clothes, and praying under my breath. I knew that I needed to gather other reluctant protestors alongside me, holding their own soggy signs and praying their own prayers.

And I also knew that there was a better way to carry this fragile message of unity in our increasingly fragile land and increasingly fragile time. As a half-British, half-South African man, I’ve had the privilege of growing up with the stories of the anti-apartheid movement, stories which steward the hard-earned truth that defiant, tenacious, persistent love is the only antidote to hatred, misinformation and fear. As Desmond Tutu once said, “when we can accept both our humanity and the perpetrator’s we can write a new story”. Saturday left me feeling that we desperately need a new story, and that requires us to look beyond the swaying horses and see one another clearly.

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