Divorcing Big Tech: Google
The Kunlangeta Part V
"We are stuck with technology when what we really want is just stuff that works." -Douglas Adams
We have serious problems and they become more acute by the day. While I am instinctively suspicious of centralized technology and monopolies, I had not yet taken all the steps I needed to take prior to the pandemic to limit my liabilities.
I should have begun divorcing myself from Google the moment that I saw how Dr. James Todaro's document about hydroxychloroquine got censored from the day before President Trump's first mention of the drug and for weeks after during the time when Americans and others might be searching for information. Even worse, Google promoted the WHO's sabotage of medical research for months:
As those of you who have followed me for a while know, I would usually stop and document a dozen instances of YouTube censorship of doctors and researchers talking about effective early treatment medicines. But I'm going to skip that story for the moment and assume most of you know half or more of the best examples already. I know some excellent podcasters searching for new homes.
Truthfully, I should have divorced Google when they stopped saying, "Don't be evil," or even before that when they threw Chinese dissidents under the bus in order to get a taste of that sweet sweet Chinese market that made the eyeballs of the corporate masters pop with dollar/yuan signs. I'm a bit ashamed that I didn't. The Silicon Valley tech cultists all just went along with it, and the world keeps moving---and quickly.
When you give others excessive control over your life...well...they have excessive control over your life. Are a million Silicon Valley mimetic sociopaths sucking from the teats of the kunlangeta the people you want designing your world?
So, I'm taking that back, step-by-step.
The process won't be simple. My own plan includes investing in and moving into next generation cryptocurrency technology that decentralizes power dynamics to the degree feasible.
Steps I am taking include,
Email: I have new email accounts, including protonmail accounts. This step is taking time. It's been ongoing for weeks. I bought an organizer into which I am gradually transitioning information about all the services and relationships for which I connect through gmail. Hopefully this will be complete by the end of the year. Losing gdocs and spreadsheets will be a serious inconvenience (minor for the spreadsheets, but honestly irritating for the gdocs of which I have many thousands of pages, but I keep backups).
Browsers: In around a month I have stopped using Chrome. I now mostly use Brave, but for organizational purposes I use some other browsers. But I recommend Brave generally for people stepping into cryptocurrency because it comes with a native cryptocurrency that can eventually be used for tipping blogs and social media posts, and works well with the MetaMask wallet, which is a good educational experience for a lot of people new to cryptocurrency.
Search Engines: Adwords has always been by far the most important product of Google, and using other browsers is not hard. Google does have some cool features in their search engine. I may use those once in a while, but others will catch up, and a Web 3.0 powered by cryptocurrency might quickly catch up or leapfrog anything I might miss. Here's a list of the top 48 search engines. Have at it.
Video Hosting. YouTube is its own hideous machine. BitChute, Rumble, Odyssey, and others are growing up as competitors, but don't have the staff to catch up all at once. And again, decentralized video hosting may become more of a thing with cryptocurrency, so maybe we'll have a full on post-Tor network in the near future? I have a few dozen videos in various places on YouTube, but my plan is to post elsewhere in the future. Like most of this list, it's going to be an irritating transition, but one I can envision in the near future.
So, there you have it. Hopefully, at the end of the year, I'll be done or nearly done with Google.
Have your own story about divorcing Big Tech, or taking greater control over the technologies that make you productive. Please share. I'm in transition.
Thanks for this pragmatic reminder to disentangle ourselves from the enablers. Catherine Austin Fitts often recalls the day when she was writing a check from her Wells Fargo (I think) account and suddenly realized she was empowering the very villains she was attempting to bring to justice. It took her several years to sever all of the tainted connections, but she felt much freer and happier for it.
I have been using Duck Duck Go for a while but recently discovered their results seemed a bit skewed on certain topics, disappointingly. I have started using Qwant and was impressed by the relevance of the results and the absence of apparent tampering by shadow-banning or manipulating counter-narrative content.
I split up with Google about seven years ago. It can be done. It's even possible, although inconvenient, to live without an Amazon account. I've found that, among deeply "technical" people, especially those who live and breathe "open source" / "free" software, there's a sizable minority who go to surprising lengths to avoid all megacorps. "Don't be evil" was always doublespeak, and Google (now "Alphabet", wink wink) was always aligned with the deep state. It's not what they "be", it's what they do.
Don't use stock Android, either; LineageOS is a workable alternative. Block all ads, everywhere. I don't really trust Apple, but they're probably not so bad if you steer clear of their cloud services.
There's a deeper and more universal principle that one can apply. It's well known among tech workers: if you're not the customer, you're the product. Any "free" service that makes money has no real incentive to act in your interest, or even be honest about what they're doing with your data. If it's not genuinely free, with no profit motive, you're much better off paying for it yourself.
What I've come to understand is that this isn't really about advertising, it's about influence. It's about the power to censor and promote. It's all about thought control. It's about countering the destabilizing tendencies of inherently decentralized internet tech, an attempt to shore up and ultimately succeed the control. capabilities of the crumbling non-participatory legacy media. Most of these giants were built on Sand Hill Road venture capital, with little concern for profit, and they're all ultimately owned by the same people.