- cross-posted to:
- technologie@jlai.lu
- cross-posted to:
- technologie@jlai.lu
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Google managed to create a very clean image of themselves in most heads, but looking closer it is an ugly profit maximization machine. It cares about shareholders. If it cares about you, then probably for spying on you and learn how to manipulate you and others better. I hope people start realizing finally.
And let’s state it clear: Google could have a voice. They could object to the Musk-Thiel-Trumpian destruction machine. They could be there for the world. But they’re not. Not at all. They serve the money. And if it pays off, then they are willing to ruin peoples lives.
Google is on the wrong side of history.
I agree with your points, but what do you think are some of the specific things Google or other similar tech companies in such a similar capacity could realistically and meaningfully do object the Musk-Thiel-Trumpian destruction machine?
I would like to learn more
They could decide not to give 1M to Trump, but they did: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2025/jan/09/google-microsoft-donate-trump-inaugural-fund They could use their reach and make a clear public statement: “we don’t support this”. But I’ve never seen any. They could give higher rating to actual useful information and try to show less fascist propaganda to people. I have to assume that’s going wrong as well.
Because of their giant impact, they send a message to all others. “We go with the fascists, we are not on the side of humanity but on the side of profit”. That creates dangerous dynamics.
Google has always been fuckers, they are still fuckers and going with the fascist flow they’ve proven that they will remain fuckers. Even if they switch side once the Trumpian monster stumbles, the can never be trusted.
This days it’s plain obvious. Before was slightly better hidden.
Literally nothing. A corporation, especially a publicly traded one like that, can’t do much but maximize (ideally long-term, but usually short-term) shareholder returns.
The Activision-Microsoft merger is a good recent example of this. During the anti trust trial, the CEO of Activision literally came out and said that he believes it’s a bad idea that will be bad for the industry and bad for the company in the long term, using the impact of consolidation in Hollywood as an example, but he has to side with the board. He’s basically legally obligated to.
I’m not saying it’s unjust or a bad system (and I’m definitely not trying to paint Bobby Kotick as a good guy), I just want to point out that corporations are very simple in their purpose, and nobody should be expecting anything more from them. If you’re disappointed that Google made this 180, that’s on you for falling in love with a corporation. They’re useful tools for producing goods and services, but terrible as a political tool for democracy.
But for some reason, it became popular to fetishize tech companies, and that spawned megalomaniacs like Elon, Zuckerberg, Horowitz, Thiel, etc who feel like they should be the supreme rulers of our civilization.
I am hoping that Google bites the dust from this. Having stuff like Peertube becoming common, would go a long way towards mitigating media moguls from controlling narratives. As we have seen, the media organs of the right are staying silent or downlplaying what has been happening.
Also, it would be nice if the folk didn’t have to deal with baseless copyright takedowns. A lot of culture has been lost to feckless corpotacracy.
“maintaining hundreds of moments manually and consistently globally wasn’t scalable or sustainable,” says the company, which also states that its “mission is to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful”, has the explicit goal of “mapping the entire world” and has, for example, already captured tens of millions of miles of Street View imagery… 🤣
Remove Google (Alphabet), Apple, Microsoft, Facebook (Meta), and Amazon from your life (and more, of course, but these are the big tech ones). Difficult but 100% necessary these days. De-Google your Android phone/tablet (basically Android without Google is possible), use Linux, order from small businesses, don’t use social media owned by big corporations, etc.
Fuuuuuck… I was really hoping I didn’t need to migrate away from gmail… But looks like this is it.
Fuuuuuckkkk I wish I could degoogle again
Don’t be evil, lol
I would only want actual state/local holidays anyway.
If I actually care about an event I am more than capable to set the event mysekf (e.g. Sysadmin day)Honestly I wish they had a setting for only federal holidays. The ones where banks close.
I also want to be able to switch back to general holidays too though. These people at google are chicken shit cowards.
Honestly I wish they had a setting for only federal holidays. The ones where banks close.
Those are bank holidays.
Ok
It’s a shame, but fuck Google regardless of this :)
Just shows that companies show their support to please the people in power and that’s just []-washing
Opinions are still divided on whether companies should have a political opinion
Next thing you know Facebook is going to get rid of Daughter’s Day!
I don’t understand why was this ever a thing. Fuck google, and fuck rainbow washing. They never really cared, and where just taking advantage of a noble cause.
Is there an alternative to Google Drive that doesn’t lock me into using MS Office. I particularly need to ability to share and edit files online.
Tuta is supposed to be developing one that’s using their post-quantum encryption but it’s been 2 years so, womp.
AES is already post quantum crypto so that sounds a bit marketingy.
Every time a straight person has wondered why I hate rainbow capitalism, shit like this is why.
“Oh but it moves your kind forward, you should be thankful they support you now!” They only supported us when the government wouldn’t take away contracts and people were sure they supported queers.
Same thing for every other company and every other minority. I can at least mask that I’m queer, black people can’t mask being black.
God I hate being right about horrible things.
Not very “ally” of you bruh
Did I say something stupid? I wrote this 10 minutes after waking up and not had coffee.
I am a white dude who happens to be a disabled queer, I try to include the fact they are targeted more for something they can’t hide, I can mask the things that other me.
If there’s something I can swap around or edit, lemme know.
I can’t say if it was bad sarcasm or plain stupidity, but I for one understood and totally agree with your first statement.
It was sarcasm… Corpo spent years pretending to be an ally and then just like that… No longer an ally
My apologies, I’m never quite good at tones, even in person. Thank you for responding nicely!
Bow!
well, it’s not that they removed anything, it’s that the company google paid to create the holiday events told google how much it was costing to include every substrata of celebration (i.e. national bean day, national micronesia first peoples remembrance), so google said, you know what, we’re just going to have federal holidays on our calendar and people can add the rest as they like. which i think is fair enough.
I’m sure it cost them a whole $500 to update the entire system every single year after adding the feature.
What a savings!
By Grabthar’s hammer…
The only thing I need to drop is my gmail account. Everything else went into the circular file.
I bought a domain and use Fastmail, I’ve just been switching what I need and letting the rest go to a dead Gmail.
It’s been fairly easy.
A good alternative. I moved across too.
Youtube is the only thing there isn’t a really viable alternative to at this stage.
It is a bit nuts how hard it is to switch email accounts. Although conveniently I believe gmail has a forwarding feature. Protonmail unfortunately doesn’t in its free tier (I recently switched from protonmail to self-hosted postfix/dovecot), and paying for a protonmail subscription just to forward my emails to a different email seems to defeat the point of paying for an email service.
I used Thunderbird to simultaneously access and download my gmail and protonmail, gradually migrating my ecosystem to the latter. The way I figure, Protonmail would be good, on account of being based in Switzerland. That means assorted EU protections - and now with Vichy America likely to become a thing, having the servers in a safe spot seems really helpful.
The odds of us having military action in our neighborhoods has shot up by a disturbing degree.
It’s not migrating my emails I need, it’s forwarding new emails sent to my old address. I mostly use duck addresses these days so luckily I can just change the address ddg forwards to in future, but prior to starting to use ddg’s email service I’d have a ton of services I need to change the email address for. Proton offers this service but I’d have to pay a subscription for it, and obviously I need it indefinitely if some service sends me an email eg 5 years down the line. Of course emails sent to an old email 5 years later are probably not important but it’s just convenient to not have to log into Protonmail to check if I’ve got any mail sent to my old address.
What’s your setup for self hosting? Do you use a vps or host on your own network?
VPS in order to go offshore due to being a political organiser/having state interest in me. If my domestic state was not interested in me I would use a home lab though; it’d wind up cheaper in the long run I reckon, better performance as it’s bare metal (though my VPS is KVM so performance hit is negligible), and better control since you both own and have physical access to the server. For most people’s purposes I’m sure an old laptop or a raspberry pi would work fine so you don’t need to splash out either. I probably wouldn’t suggest a VPS unless you have the same threat model as me (ie likely to get raided & server seized, or likely to have active monitoring of your internet activity via ISP); I don’t really think it’s worth the money long term. Or I guess if you do just have general privacy concerns you could rent a VPS in a country known for decent privacy, but just for peace of mind reasons instead of a tangible threat to you.
Edit: Also depends on what you use the server for. If you want it to not be linked to your real identity you’d probably want a VPS, otherwise every time someone emails you they find out the IP address of your home network.
