Why we’re moving our website away from Wix: the challenge facing systems change organisations
There are zero fully ethical options under capitalism – and in few places is this more true than Big Tech.
Here at Opus, we recently spent a fair whack of money and a not inconsiderable amount of staff time to migrate our website from one provider to another, with an end result that (hopefully) appears indistinguishable.
Why?
Our previous site was hosted by Wix, a Tel Aviv-based company which, according to the BBC, “created an employee group chat [in its Ireland office] to "support Israel's narrative" on its internal messaging-app Slack”. The fugitive leadership of Israel is currently evading charges of war crimes issued by the International Criminal Court. In the Republic of Ireland, where Wix employs 500 staff, company managers circulated messages in October 2023 encouraging employees to “show Westernity” in social media posts supporting Israel, adding “unlike the Gazans, we look and live like Europeans or Americans”. One employee was sacked after she criticised Israel online (she later successfully took Wix to court for unfair dismissal). Boycotting Wix is recommended by the BDS National Committee, the largest Palestinian coalition organisation leading the global Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions movement.
As a worker-owned company dedicated to dismantling oppressive systems, we decided we couldn’t continue to use Wix in good faith.
After assessing the options, we switched to Squarespace, employing a web designer to painstakingly rebuild the site just as it was on a new platform. But of course Squarespace, though now owned by a British private equity firm, is based in the United States, a country with its own corrupt and anti-democratic political regime.
This raises a thorny question for organisations that exist to do good in the world, especially systems change organisations whose raison d'être is to replace harmful systems that lead to these injustices. How far can you – and how far should you – go to stop using unethical companies?
This is a relatively easy question when it comes to ordering coffee for the office, or deciding which local venues to use for events. We’re in the final stages of developing an ethical procurement policy, and when it comes to our company finances we recently switched our savings to Flagstone, which allows us to choose to invest our reserves with ethically sound providers.
It’s much harder when it comes to software, or Big Tech in general. There are vanishingly few options for local, not-for-profit, co-operatively run organisations in Sheffield that can provide us with an alternative to Google Workspace, for example, which powers our company email, spreadsheet, and shared drive functions (among many others). And while some alternatives provided by big companies do exist, many of these aren’t as functional as the software we currently use – and besides, our systems and ways of working are now firmly embedded in Google’s technology (this is, of course, no accident on their part).
As such, these decisions are a constant series of balances, trade-offs and (inevitably, to some degree arbitrary) judgement calls. How ethically-minded does a company seem from the outside? Does that match up to the reality of what they do, and is it possible to fully know? How useful are its products to us? Do viable alternatives exist, and how disruptive would it be to switch? How much would this all cost us in money and time?
The implications of switching for not-for-profit organisations that deliver social goods are obvious: you end up diverting time and money away from the day-to-day work that you actually exist for (in our case, projects like The People’s Newsroom, that is pioneering new models of community storytelling, or The River Dôn Project, which is exploring how we can reaffirm nature’s right to thrive in South Yorkshire). So the question becomes: does the ethical value of the switch outweigh the resources taken from our main work?
In the case of Wix, we (and by we, I mean the workers who own and control Opus) decided that yes, it did. But we continue to use Google, which has a long and well-documented history of ethical failings, in particular around tax avoidance. As it stands, we can’t see a good enough alternative to Google Workspace that would justify the cost and disruption of switching.
We’re facing similar challenges when it comes to how we communicate as a company. Many organisations doing similar work to us will be familiar with the tricky balancing act of deciding what social media platforms to use and which to ditch. Is it worth sticking around to provide an alternative perspective, even if the platforms’ owners openly align themselves with vested interests of power and wealth? At what point does presence become complicity?
A few weeks ago we decided to stop using Twitter as Opus (some of our individual projects still use it). This was partly because of the owner’s repeated attempts to incite an armed far-right coup against the United Kingdom. But on a more prosaic level it was also because most of the nice people (including all the folk interested in systems change) have already left. We don’t get any engagement there anymore, and posting on the platform is pointless.
At the same time we opened a new Substack account, despite the fact that the platform’s owners recently allowed fugitive and alleged human trafficker Andrew Tate to join. But many of the brilliant, regenerative people and organisations that we work with are on Substack, and it’s pretty clear that it’s a much more effective place to share our work and our ideas than Twitter. Does that justify us being there? It’s an open question – one we don’t have a definitive answer for, and will keep coming back to.
These are fluid judgement calls that could change or evolve at any time as new information becomes available.
In the spirit of curiosity, we’d like to open up a conversation with like-minded people and organisations about how you’re approaching these thorny questions. This blog post doesn’t provide any answers, but hopefully outlines some of the challenges and considerations that are required when trying to operate as ethically as possible.
How are you dealing with these questions? Tell us on our Substack or on our LinkedIn.
