It's time to bring "Buy Local" [back?] to 'cloud' and other IT services

Thu, 24 Jul 2025 23:44:03 -0400 last edited: Mon, 18 Aug 2025 12:16:30 -0400 from ArrCay

The commoditization and outsourcing/off-shoring that started ~25 years ago along with maybe the start of the H1-B visa program almost made some sense back when there was a shortage of IT talent. Of course those practices were soon abused to replace American workers with foreigners simply because it was cheaper and meant more profit for businesses utilizing such practices, very often at the expense of quality - service and products (software/code, security, reliability, etc.).

Now, after many years of the "learn to code" and "IT certification farm" crowds, the IT field has just as many, if not more, American citizen "code monkeys" and "Certified I_dioT Professionals" as any other country. Well, maybe not as many as India - I'd have to find stats to verify that. However, the reported unemployment rate in the US for IT is nearly 6%. Because self-employed people, like myself, aren't counted in unemployment numbers (generally we don't setup an S-corp and pay ourselves as a W2 employee or otherwise pay unemployment insurance - and were even denied under the exceptions they made for clotshot-19 while they and the SBA were handing out millions in fraudulent claims, but I digress) and many just take a job doing anything even if it's not IT; the actual number is more realistically well over 10%, or somewhere around 500k to over 2mil depending on the numbers used to estimate the number of IT jobs, let's just say 1 million people. These are really rough guestimates based on some dated numbers from a quick search - they are likely alot higher than that, but let's go with it for now. Meanwhile, there's ~400k H1-B visas which are mostly IT, not to mention all the outsourced/offshored jobs which likely total in the millions.

The issue is not just with the bigtechs and global companies. SMB's and home-based entreprenuers are just as responsible for these problems by using the services/platforms/products of the direct offenders.

By practically all accounts there should be zero unemployment in the US IT industry. And personally I, with 30+ years of varied IT, and specifically Linux, experience, should be bringing in well over $100k (freelance or a regular job) rather than living in poverty.

For many years I've promoted using local services and IT support, as well as running servers and so-called "cloud" services in-house (self-hosted) or locally instead of using bigtechmegacorp. See also this post. Since I've spent years trying to provide web/domain hosting, several "cloud" services for SMB/SME and individuals, and convince people to use decentralized social media platforms like my own seen here, mostly to no avail... I've wondered why it's so difficult to lure people away from bigtech products, particularly social media platforms. Most everyone seems to acknowledge at least one issue (spam/scam/fake accounts, force-fed advertising everywhere, censorship/shadowbanning, surveillance state practices, etc.) at such platforms which they are dissatisfied with, but I've had no one express more than a passing interest in better alternative products and services.

I think the answer to the bigtech problem is decentralized services. Basically bring the "buy local" or "support your local farmer, coffeeshop, whatever Main St business" concept to Tech and "cloud" services. Bring that back to Tech really, because once upon a time it was all local - the "tech guy", the servers, the custom programmer/developer, and the internet service provider. Even the online game servers were hosted on 'just one of the guys' PC's - though often 'that guy' was at a university or some company that had at least a T1 line or better internet connection since ~$1000/mo+ was simply beyond reach for the average household.

It still amazes me that many small businesses, even those which tout the #buylocal philosophy, will use bigtechs (godaddy, shopify, amazon, etc.) for their website/domain/etc.; and even microsoft for their computer systems these days; and some large IT support company that uses offshore and/or H1-B techs/CS reps. Or use some bigtech freelancer platform to find one-off, occasional, even long-term support. The freelancer platforms are mostly full of side-gigging H1-B's, offshore techs and middleman support companies that just sub out to them. See also: "FieldNation officially sucks (...and I Reveal the Secrets of the IT Support Industry)"
and My Latest Upwork Proposal

The tech/software to run smaller systems locally which can be interconnected, and otherwise function essentially like the huge bigtech services, has been around for years. I started building ArrCay.com about a year ago from one such open source software project and as previously mentioned, was trying to convince people, to no avail, to use similar platforms for at least a few years before that.

Most people don't really care [enough] about things like privacy, their personal intellectual property (aka content they post/create) or copyright, whether their data/content/habits are being harvested, analyzed and sold or used to train generative AI, etc. But they will complain about fake/scam/spam garbage, and all the advertising, censorship and various features or usability problems.
Still for some strange reason people on Fecesbook (or fill in the blank with practically any bigtechmegaco) seem to have no interest in using a platform which has better technical features and doesn't have all the garbage. The whole dopamine/addiction triggers and the huge sums spent on applying such psychological research data to their interface/platforms must be a big part of that "some strange reason." I was reminded of this in seeing someone mention Josh Hawley's book, The Tyranny of Big Tech.

Practically all of the the large/popular platforms use such methods to draw and maintain their userbase. Part of the model in many cases relies on bots/fake accounts. The startup of most, if not all, such social media or similar platforms, used what I'd call the 'fake it til you make it' method - hundreds to thousands of bots (and maybe all the employees, etc.) posting stuff. I cover more on the bigtech "free"-for-all" ad revenue model in "Why the legacy social media model of bigtech is destined for the dumpster". Another one of the psych tools is the constant email notifications - "you missed blah, blah, blah..." etc. which on most of the platforms there is no way to completely turn off, even turning off every one you can find in the settings available, they either get magically reset, or still seem to send you notification emails about something. But enough about that.

As I stated earlier, I believe the answer for many of the problems such as I've mentioned here is to abandon the bigtechs and return to using local IT resources (that really are local - not just a local middleman/co. that uses offshore freelancers, etc.) and investing in running as much hardware/tech infrastructure in-house or locally as possible.

BTW, a PSA [because I've seen tons of (likely paid for) spam posting (on other platforms) for it]:
inhouseamerica . com is NOT an American company, not owned by an American, and their site is not hosted, or domain registered with, an American company. It's all South African - the owner, the company, even the website host and datacenter location.
-- And a sidenote on this topic: ArrCay (and/or Hubzilla) could be used to provide small business shopping cart / marketplace functionality.^note A bonus is that it wouldn't require another 'dead-end' account just for access/provide access to your online store. Your account could have your personal Channel and a Channel for your business. Anyone on a compatible platform could use their account/Channel to shop/checkout from your store Channel.
^note - There is a basic cart App available in Hubzilla. A similar App is currently in development for ArrCay. If anyone expresses an interest in such an app or would like to assist in any way or make a donation, it will be available sooner. 😉

If you're going to promote your business as #localfirst #americafirst #madeinamerica #madeinusa #usmade etc., you should start by practicing it with your choices of tech, web/internet/'cloud' services and IT support.

On that note, I'm available for general IT consulting, Systems Engineering, etc.
For services and qualifications visit this Channel's main page to view the pinned post which looks like the following image.

#smallbusiness #shoplocal #supportlocal #supportsmallbusiness #bigtech

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