Fuck Off Google
fuckoffgoogle.de
fuckoffgoogle.de
sigh Any attempt to undermine a major software services company that doesn't start from a place from understanding how many users do not want this is doomed to failure.
You have to provide users a better service, not "freedom," if you want to woo them away from the Googles, Facebooks, Amazons, Apples, and Twitters of the world. Users, on average, do not want to "control" their machines any more than they want to rebuild their car engines. For most users, that level of "freedom" would basically guarantee their systems would be owned by the first hacker to bother to come across their under-secured self-administered solutions.
Same applies with piracy. You can't fight on price on a service provided for free by motivated volunteers, but you can at least take the fight on the quality+speed of service and convenience.
Just understanding something isn't the best choice, is not enough. You need to have the ethical argument, better ideas, and better products and results and that is hard beyond my capabilities and don't know what the answer is
Compared to what google is evil specifically ?
If google is gone tomorrow there is with certainty better alternative ?
What is evil any way when contrasted with other organizations in similar space ?
Some of the listed evils include mass surveillance, mass censorship, participation in drone killings, stealing and exploiting people's data for profit, building murder robots, colonizing physical space, systematic tax evasion, law violation, corrupt political lobbying, so on and so forth.
To your point, measuring the evilness of something is going to be fraught, especially in a competitive space of a bunch of other seemingly equally evil entities like Amazon, Facebook, etc.
One of the interesting differences is your other point, the "better alternative." Alternative to what? https://wiki.fuckoffgoogle.de/index.php?title=GoogleAlternat... - their reach is so far and wide that it takes pages to list out alternatives for the bits and pieces of what we use Google software for now. "BETTER" is relative and difficult to define, especially when one of the major advantages to Google products is their ubiquity.
"What is evil anyway..." great question. At some point, it seems like you know it when you see it.
> May be I am naive,
Yeah maybe.
> Animal Farm is truly an important read .
Doesn't sound like it taught you much.
The argument is that nothing inherent in our technology requires this particular outcome - that the techniques of surveillance capitalism were developed, by specific people, at a specific point in time (when Google needed money desperately), and turn out to be exceedingly profitable.
Unfortunately, that also turns out to be exceedingly human-toxic. Machine learning flips the usual quality/quantity tradeoffs, and in order to get the highest quality, requires the most quantity. It's not that Google/Facebook/Twitter want to know a lot about you. It's that their profits are based on them knowing everything about you.
And that then leads to the whole "engagement" problem that is most of the modern internet. Google... collects a lot of what it needs by nature of mostly being "the internet." YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, and affiliated companies gather what they need by trying to ensure, by hook or by crook, that you spend as much time as at all possible on their platforms. Your time is literally their money. So out of this you get all the nasty little human psychology exploits that modern platforms use to "drive their users nuts" and keep them coming back, and the nature of the content, and what it's doing to their brains. Drive them down some crazy conspiracy theory rabbit hole? Great, they'll spend more time on your platform looking for more stuff (cough YouTube cough). Genocide in some exotic foreign language you don't care enough to learn to moderate? Whatever, it's engaging (Facebook?). And so on.
So the "elevator pitch" I'd use is that the reason the modern internet (and as a result most of consumer tech) is so rabidly human-toxic in most of the commonly used forms is a direct result of Google inventing the technologies that require that sort of engagement as a feed into the profit engines they've decided to use.
Has any journalist asked him lately how he feels about "Don't be evil" in the context of his Alphabet stock holding?
I'm not commenting or judging on Page - just curious to hear his contemporary thoughts about the company he founded. I've heard nothing at all from him since he retired from the organization.
They were shaped by evolutionary forces dealing with the rest of humanity proper, the great unwashed masses, who want to know nothing and be proud of it, and who if you ask a question that is too complex will be made to feel uncomfortable, inferior, or unworthy. In large part, it seems the genuine curiosity that lies at the center of the psyche that inspires the outliers who end up succeeding beyond their wildest dreams is terrifying to the vast majority of humanity. Sooner or later they give up, shrug their shoulders, and say "Well, what can I do, we all must make our own decisions."
And so they retreat to their islands, while the ugly mass of humanity slides into a morass of continuously demanding that an uncaring universe be bent to their perceptions of how it should be, rather than how it actually is.
The parties in question that started out on such a hopeful path are now decidedly hostile, I do not dispute that. But the reason they became so is not because of their nature, it is the swamp which they waded through.
And that process which does take place and largely constitutes what passes for modern life is then under the power and observation of parties who do understand how the underlying sausage gets made, how the parties whom they serve think and how they will react and behave. Is it any wonder they then proceed to arrange their products and services to benefit from the nature of the parties whom they serve, even in an increasingly ruthless fashion?
If people behave like cattle en masse, sooner or later a rancher will show up.
Apathy to suffering (and by extension other evil) is the same as being evil, especially when you are benefiting by it. Admittedly, good and evil is a spectrum - but there is a lot of apathy going around.
My faith in my fellow humans has been shaken lately, I'm afraid, by the number of people in my local grocers not wearing masks, despite a big sign on the door saying that mask-wearing is mandatory (it is - that's the law at the moment, around here).
Useless NPC demands X, provider provides X, provider observes useless NPC's consumption of X and models the behaviour of useless NPC to a very high degree of accuracy allowing them to exploit the attack surfaces of useless NPC by providing and charging for the exact things which those attack surfaces guarantee useless NPC will demand, and in so doing accrues power at scale.
All of this has a genesis in the attack surface of the useless NPC. You can't model and manipulate independent, self-reliant people who understand the nature of the world well enough to provide for themselves what you would otherwise be providing for them in an exploitative way, and the harder you try the more clear it is to those parties that what you're doing is exploitative, whilst the exact opposite is true when the exact same behaviour is modeled against the useless NPC.
And unfortunately it seems that the majority of the world is constituted by useless NPCs, the very fact that these exploitative agents prosper again and again when their strategies are tailored to be most effective on those useless NPCs and are repellent to the small minority of civilisation not constituted as such very clearly demonstrates that.
Maybe you'd say this is victim blaming, maybe that's fair, but it is as far as I can see over the entirety of my life watching very closely an accurate description of the way that civilisation tends to evolve. And we don't expect that attack surfaces won't be exploited in technology, instead we harden those attack surfaces, minimise them as much as possible, fix the afflicted targets rather than just expecting that they won't be exploited.
I don't see how the same logic should not be more broadly applied.
“Konstantin Sergiou, a member of one of the neighborhood campaign groups, told the Guardian in May that the Google campus signaled the kind of urban change “that has proven to be so problematic elsewhere, such as in San Francisco.” He noted that a several different tenants’ groups and activists had been working to halt gentrification in Kreuzberg. “When Google decided to move into the area, we were already organized.””[0]
[0] https://www.google.com.au/amp/s/qz.com/1435550/google-abando...
Plus ça change...
Facebook's embedded videos are routinely ripped from YouTube, and Facebook monetizes those videos, but is often tardy in enforcing DMCA requests.
Oil companies will cook the planet and destroy life on earth with how insanely reckless their policies have been.
Listen to Louis Rossman on Apple.
Look at the June oven, and how Amazon tracks trending products and redirects traffic to their own models.
I don't think they are, but the site/organization is just focusing on Google rather than "Big Tech" as a concept and industry, which is a reasonable approach given the size and magnitudes of it all.
> Google motto 2004: Don't be evil
> Google motto 2010: Evil is tricky to define
> Google motto 2013: We make military robots
[1]: https://twitter.com/BrentButt/status/412700627152961536
Implying military robots are inherently evil is like implying that punching someone in the nose is inherently evil. Context is important. If I punch a random person in the nose, maybe I am evil. If I punch a person in the nose who randomly punched me in the nose, I wouldn't consider myself evil.
I worked for an old and conservative company in my youth, and in the same way that the rules for wearing my suitcoat were imparted (the moment of crossing from carpet to linoleum), restraint of partisan expressions in the workplace was required.
Google does not adhere to this doctrine. They embraced Obama, reacted violently to Trump, and while tight-lipped on Biden, their position is well-known.
This particular example would be unthinkable in any of my past positions:
https://www.abc15.com/news/national/leaked-video-shows-googl...
The 2022 election is going to place forces opposed to Google into power.
I am able to work with both staunch conservatives and liberals, though I am neither. This is not the Google way.
I am sure that Google's lobbying efforts have been both widely placed and generous, but I would not recommend any bias with YouTube or other outlets of partisan expression for the immediate future. Nancy is not going to be able to protect you in 2023.
If so I would probably be happy to take the other side of the bet :)