Criticizing harmful practices doesn’t require building a replacement from scratch. Saying “just build your own SaaS company” is a deflection, not a real argument. We don’t demand people create alternative governments to criticize corruption or build new roads to complain about traffic systems. Some practices — like vendor lock-in or exploitative data handling — are worth rejecting simply because they’re harmful.

Also, markets often do come up with better, more ethical alternatives — but only after society pushes back against the harmful defaults. Ecologically, people used to say there was no alternative to burning oil or dumping waste into rivers. That didn’t make those practices okay — and change only came because they were first criticized, regulated, and in some cases outright banned. Progress doesn’t start with “there’s already a perfect alternative”; it starts with “this is no longer acceptable.”