I agree with you that we should stop using those detrimental products and top working for those detrimental companies, but unfortunately, there is no "we". Personal responsibility was an argument first used by big food in the late 60s-70s to absolve themselves of responsibility for making people sick. And yet, they're making people even sicker today. That argument works so well because it's hard to refute and as a solution, it is impossible to apply across a population of hundreds of millions of people. Genius, really.

We can all see it, in hindsight, but precious few of us have the time, energy, resources and temperment to predict which products will be detrimental in the future and eschew all of the products and services available today that are detrimental. Health insurance, search, social media, food, delivery/transportation, air travel, financial products, etc., almost everything we create today has detrimental effects that aren't required to deliver the benefits we actually want, but are required to maximize the flow of money to billionaires (the terminal nodes in the economic network). And through monopolistic partnership, we actually can't make a choice. Let's say you're an average person who chooses to stop giving Google your data. You will be astounded at the portion of your life you have to cut out to actually do that, even after a symbolic antitrust suit that is not likely to ever happen again. And that's just one of many.

None of those men (or the companies they built) set out to create addictive or detrimental products, but when the opportunities presented themselves to choose between profits and not harming people, they chose profits every time. Now, every decision they make harms people. A company making such a decision is a relatively small group of people acting in close collaboration. In the personal responsibility scenario, hundreds of millions of people would have to predict the detrimental effects of using a particular product or service and avoid it from very early on, before it generated addiction or entrenchment in society.

Which of those two groups -- the small coordinated group in a company completely focused on a particular product, or hundreds of millions of unconnected people living their lives -- should we hold responsible for the harm that product causes? Which one could most quickly and effectively remove that harm?

So yeah, personal responsibility is a nice, simplistic, easy to swallow, but completely ineffective smokescreen that allows abuse to continue. It is quite literally gaslighting.

Even knowing all of that, I still agree with you, we should stop using big tech products and working for those companies -- in effect create an incubating economy underneath the rotted shell of the existing one that can eventually mature and shed the dead skin like a caterpillar or molting lizard, but history doesn't support that as a likely outcome.