Google’s story over the last two decades has been a tale as old as time: enshittification for growth. The once-beloved startup—with its unofficial “Don’t Be Evil” motto—has instead become a major Internet monopolist, as a federal judge ruled on Monday, dominating the market for online search. Google is also well-known for its data-harvesting practices, for constantly killing off products, and for facilitating the rise of brain-cell-destroying YouTubers who make me Fear for Today’s Youth. (Maybe that last one is just me?)
Google’s rapid rise from “scrappy search engine with doodles” to “dystopic mega-corporation” has been remarkable in many ways, especially when you consider just how much goodwill the company squandered so quickly. Along the way, though, Google has achieved one unexpected result: In a divided America, it offers just about everyone something to hate.
Here are just a few of the players hating Google today.
Hopefully DeGoogleing will go a bit like the cable “Cord Cutters” did in terms of headlines over time:
- Is cutting cable feasible?
- Some are are finding solutions to lower their cable bills.
- Industry denies cord cutters are impacting profit.
- Providers cling to sports broadcasts as a way to short-circut cord cutters.
- Are young people the “never-cable” generation?
- Here’s where to watch the Olympics online.
Of course, streaming is worse than cable now… so lets learn from that.
“streaming is worse than cable now” is it though?
I stream for weeks on end without a single ad, watching only what I want. I go to an older person’s house and I hear the same friggin commercial jingles, the same canned studio laughter, and shows that are designed for the stupidest common denominator.
I grew up in the era of Saturday morning cartoons. My brain was liquidified on cereal commercials. I won’t allow cable into my house under any circumstances.
But I do agree that we should learn from too easily replacing the working with the next big thing without any regulations on how the next big thing is allowed to operate
I stream for weeks on end without a single ad
But that’s now changing. The bottom tiers of many (most?) streaming apps include ads, and it’s not a stretch to think that they’ll include ads on the higher tiers eventually, or just increase prices until people downgrade to ad-supported tiers. Yeah, you can use an ad-blocker, but you could also use a DVR for cable that also filters out ads.
I’m bailing on both and just buying physical media again. I hope that doesn’t die out, but I’m done with paying for subscriptions. We don’t watch a ton, so I’m probably going to save money this way.
I wish we had a streaming equivalent of a DVR, then I might actually want streaming again.
“streaming is worse than cable now”
Ironically, pirating has never been easier lol
Between private torrent trackers and Usenet, pirating has never been easier. I love it!
We demand infinite growth. Why? Because shareholders want to buy shares and sell them later for more.
Do anything it takes to make that transaction happen, cut people’s jobs en masse, whatever.
Forever.
Stock holders demand infinite growth. If the management doesn’t make money, they put in place new management. A company is only worth the value of the next stock buyback or dividend. It’s baked into the structure of corporations, especially publicly-owned corporations.
Stock holders can sue the company if there’s a loss, too. That shouldn’t be a thing, but here we are.
its a human flaw… insatiable greed.
we distilled this greed and removed all actual responsibility creating an entity, ‘the stock market’. this well of irresponsible greed has reached a singularity… a point of no return. we are all too dependent on this terrible thing and so it cant be removed.
the majority of us just get to suffer while being told ‘theres no other way’
we cant have nice things because humans are just so fucking greedy and incapable of controlling that greed.
No, it’s a capitalist flaw. Capitalism is not an intrinsic trait of humanity. We can create systems that have effective self-regulation and appropriate feedback loops. It’s just that most countries, for one reason or another, haven’t really tried.
I disagree, I think it is basic human/biologic that drives us to grab up resources and hoard them to ensure survival/reproduction/future generations. Capitalism is just a vehicle in which we are capable of expressing that biological greed on a global scale.
I’d argue that capitalism is unnatural because even if we work from the assumption that resource hoarding is natural, it’s also necessary to take into account the fact that evolutionarily, humans got to where we are via traits like altruism, cooperation and forming communities. Capitalism is far from natural — it’s an insidious subversion of human nature
All negative basic human instincts are like this though, but it’s greed that we allow to grow unfettered. Anger is considered socially acceptable until you go berserk and start killing people and breaking things. Lust/sex is fine, until you start humping everyone and everything you see in the street. Greed has no upper bound like these though. And it’s high time that we started imposing some sort of control to stop this growth.
we cant have nice things because humans are just so fucking greedy and incapable of controlling that greed.
That’s not completely true though! One thing that a lot of people forget about Google is that they didn’t have to become a publicly traded for-profit company. A lot of people around 2002-2004-ish saw Google’s meteoric rise and wondered what path they were going to take. Some speculated/hoped that they would go the Wikipedia route and become a service that existed for the public good instead of a for-profit venture.
We all know what happened after. The pursuit of profit inevitably leads all companies to becoming sociopathic and evil. They didn’t have to be this way. And this is true for lots of tech startups. I wish we had seen more of them become wikipedias instead of googles.
It’s also worth pointing out that the original founders did want to make a company that was good and not evil. They tried to succeed by creating legitimately good products, and not screwing over their users. They did make mistakes along the way, but their intentions were at least good. The major problems started (as they usually do), when the second CEO took charge of the company, and it was evident that he had not clue whatsoever how to create a product. All Sundar Pichai knows how to do is suck as much blood as he can out of a stone. But Google’s founders are not blameless here: they were the ones that set the corporate structure up this way, and they were the ones that got bored and decided to fuck off. And they cheated on their taxes the way all corporations do, so no matter how good their intentions were, they were still pretty awful people.
Despite the convenience of some of its tools, the hardcore tech set increasingly prefers tech companies like Signal or even Apple, which is currently running expensive TV ads about how other browsers (read: Google’s Chrome) spy on you.
One important thing to be mentioned is that, while Apple is correct when highlighting that Chrome is a privacy nightmare, Apple and Google are cut from the same cloth and they’re both user-hostile when it comes to privacy, monopoly enforcement, censorship, etc. Both deserve the hate that they get. (Alongside Amazon, Facebook and Microsoft.)
They took down the Don’t Be Evil sign.
