De-Googled

Over the course of the last year, I have slowly been taking steps to pull myself out of actively using the Google ecosystem. It’s hard sometimes – they feel almost ubiquitous – but when Gemini came around and it became clear that active enshittification was the name of the game for the big G, I had to start finding ways to get free.

The other inspiration was just what a fucking miserable experience searching the web had become. So my first de-googlefication was stopping use of Google, and starting to instead use Kagi. This has been a delightful experience, and I’ve talked a number of folks into coming along with me (enough that I have a family plan!), as changing your browser to search somewhere else is fairly low effort.

Rambling about static site technology

Ed Zitron is right on the money again in Never Forgive Them, a look at the way tech companies actively make your life worse with the growth-at-all-costs mindset that has the tech industry in a death grip.

Why wouldn’t people feel insane? Why wouldn’t the internet, where we’re mostly forced to live, drive most people crazy? How are we not discussing the fact that so much of the internet is riddled with poison? How are we not treating the current state of the tech industry like an industrial chemical accident? Is it because there are too many people at fault? Is it because fixing it would require us to truly interrogate the fabric of a capitalist death cult?

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