Cory Doctorow: Firefox has my business, no matter how shiny the Chrome is
guardian.co.uk
guardian.co.uk
I think there is a severe disconnect with the rah rah privacy Google is bad and the "oh but I really like their apps". Hopefully the cognitive dissonance doesn't make that poor man's head explode.
Also, all of these "Google won't let Chrome do X" arguments really weird me out. You have the source. Do what you want with it. Seriously, the concept of permission is really fuzzy when talking about adding features to open source projects.
He wants Google to not play in China because he thinks its morally wrong. Yet, he uses Google even though he views their policies as morally wrong.
Do you see what I mean?
There's no intellectual dishonesty there, it's simply having a more complex thought process than a three year old. If you're Cory Doctorow, and you only use products from companies whose policies and actions you 100% agree with, you'd starve to death.
Look, I'm glad there are things people care about, but the correct way to care about things are not passive-aggressive image swaps but speaking with your dollars and eyeballs (at a minimum). I feel the same way about things like Darfur, it seems to be more fashionable to be outraged than to enact meaningful action.
I tell people I don't have to be perfect in order to make things better.
Or the similar: what's the point in fixing X if Y is so bad. Same thing - you can make things better even if you can't make things perfect.
It's like that for him. He can't do anything about what google does, so he does what he can do. He doesn't have to be perfect and avoid them completely - he did what he reasonably could.
Politicians have this disease: they both agree that X needs fixing, but disagree on Y. So neither side will pass a bill with just X, because they want the bill to also have Y in it - their version of Y, which they can't agree on.
So they do nothing.
It's a disease. You can fix one thing without fixing everything. You do not have to be perfect in order to criticize someone! You can even do the thing you are criticizing and still criticize them (as long as you are aware, and mention, that you do it too).
Instead he continues to use and support a company that does many good things while speaking out about the bad ones. That seems entirely reasonable to me. Maybe when you turn four, you'll understand :)
In the case of Google one could start by not clicking on advertising, not using Google to advertise or not using AdSense (assuming of course that one is currently generating some sort of revenue for Google).
Writing convincingly about an issue you care about is probably the most effective thing you can do, unless you're already powerful in the domain you want to change.
I would switch to Apple as an alternative, but as you have to have an apple computer to run OS X I don't even consider it. I'm not going to throw out over $1000 on a macbook, and god forbid I want extra ram installed at apple they'll take another $600 for sticking two little chips in two little slots. The guy who does it must be making $550 an hour cause I can install two ram chips for little over $50 tops! (that includes buying them, I know this because I did it just last weekend for someone, $38.99 for 2x1gb)
So even though I detest microsoft, I hate them less than the rest.
Firefox isn't entirely non-profit. The for-profit Mozilla Corporation exists as a subsidiary of the nonprofit Mozilla Foundation and makes a substantial profit. Said profits are reinvisted in the company, but that's not so different from Google. What is different is that there are no options or shareholders.
"Changes the Google logo to a "Gulag" logo showing Google's place as part of the Great Firewall of China, providing a constant reminder to me that for all that I trust Google with lots of key data, I must never forget that it has demonstrated a historical corporate willingness to participate in censorship and surveillance efforts when its profits were on the line"
You could say that it was about technology, since he's talking about GreaseMonkey (though the same thing could probably be accomplished with user stylesheets, which I'm sure Chrome does/will support), but really he just wanted to inject his opinion about something pretty irrelevant and couldn't figure out a better way.
Plus replacing the Google logo like that is a petty thing to do in the first place.
Well, that's your use case. Cory Doctorow has his own use case -- one which Firefox addresses much better than Chrome, at least for the moment.
Certainly not! I do business with plenty of people that I disagree with. So do you, no doubt.
This is a classic (i.e. "really old") line of argument against political activists. To testify to that, I give you MIT's most (in?)famous political activist, Noam Chomsky:
As to how I tolerate MIT, that raises another question. There are people who argue, and I have never understood the logic of this, that a radical ought to distance himself from oppressive institutions. The logic of that argument is that Karl Marx shouldn't have studied in the British Museum which, if anything, was the symbol of the most vicious imperialism in the world... But I think Karl Marx was quite right in studying in the British Museum. He was right in using the resources and in fact the liberal values of the civilization that he was trying to overcome, against it.
Remember, the goal of an activist is not to throw the baby out with the bathwater. The goal is to convince the baby to join the activist's side. Which you accomplish by living inside the baby's culture, appealing to its better nature, and using all the tools at your disposal, including the baby's tools.
It's not as if the whole idea of Google is fundamentally evil. It's a few specific aspects of Google's business practices that Cory dislikes -- aspects which, he might well argue, could easily be reformed without significantly affecting Google's prosperity.
One thing is to do business with an entity you disagree with, another thing is to act unethetical (or "evil") yourself in order to do business.
Is hiring a hitman wrong? Is shopping at a known hitman's store, knowing that the profits he makes will be invested into killing wrong?
It's an extreme example, but if you feel that something a company is doing is wrong, financially supporting them is also wrong.
If you say "I'm supporting an entity that does wrong, but the benefit it brings me is greater than the guilt I feel from using them" is one thing. saying "I support them financially, but I disagree with them, therefore I'm not supporting immoral behavior, and am still moral" is just stupid and hypocritical.
Say you shop at a store that sells meat. Your money helps them buy that meat, even if they make no money on the meat, as they can use it as a loss leader: they have your funding to fall back on. So you stop shopping there.
But, hold on, the employees at that shop get payed by the other customers there, right? Customers like, say, the baker and the landscaper that you use. So now you can't pay them either, as they'll go out and pay the shop, and then the shop will go out and buy meat.
Take it as far as it can go, and it's clear that you can't participate in a capitalist society that also contains immoral business transactions without rendering yourself immoral.
No, you can never support only entirely moral entities, but you can still make a difference. It's not an either-or proposition.
In theory nothing, but you have to draw the line somewhere. By eating at a restaurant where the cook uses a pan made in China, you are indirectly supporting the Dafur genocide. So you draw an arbitrary line, which is better than the alternative, which is cynicism.
[1] "China" is a word for a very big place. Does it refer to the government, or the people? Is there a difference? This footnote is too small to contain the volumes of debate which might ensue from this question.
But at what point do you throw the baby out with the bathwater?
You may not share these concerns, but his argument is by no means irrational.