The fact that Google’s parent company is called Alphabet or that Amazon’s logo is the letter A linked by a smile to Z suggests their awareness of the territory at stake: our life in letters, our presence of mind, our spirit coded and rendered into data. “We’re creating God,” as Mo Gawdat, former chief business officer of a Google AI research arm, modestly put it.
I’ve had a bit of an anti-Google impulse lately. Nothing crazy, I don’t think, and certainly not anything I’d call a boycott. (I rarely boycott anything. And I can’t help but laugh when I hear things like “Boycott Chic Filet” or “Boycott Target.” Since I find myself in a Target about two times a year, and at a Chic Filet approximately once every five years, the thought of me boycotting them is self-evidently hilarious.) It’s more of a “just do the right thing” kick. Or, since that notion naturally sounds like something we should all be doing all the time (“That is what we’re doing, right everybody? Right?”) it’s just my conscious effort to extend that notion to an area that I (and, I’m pretty sure, most of us) rarely think about.
I know that I will not personally make a dent in the monopoly or the corruption or the overconfident manipulation or the data theft of a company like Google, and I’m okay with that. But I can absolutely do without it! (And so can you.) In fact, it’s been fun so far figuring out how to, like our friend above in the Honda Element, give Google the middle finger.
Chrome is gone, on the phone and the computer. I’m trying Firefox for now, and I’m perfectly happy thus far. The only things that might count as “loss” in the process could be described as simple reflexes: I’m having to change the way I reflexively use apps and browsers. I’m more or less choosing to see that as an opportunity to relearn, and therefore re-appreciate, what I do with these devices. But it’s amazing how much these reflexes alone dictate what I/we will do with or do without, what changes we are willing to make. (Spoiler alert: the folks at Google know this about you and they know it better than you do.)
For email, I have an ancient Yahoo! account that I’ve used for most of my adult life, and I have a couple of Gmail accounts. I have not yet figured out how I will get away from this. WordPress, for instance, offers a custom domain email (such as, suchandsuch@tinyroofnail.com), but it seems like they use Google to do this anyway. Proton Mail might be a good solution, but I’m still looking it. But, like I mentioned before, I’m not boycotting Google. If there are some areas that Google works well for, I’m fine with that. Gmail might just be one of them; I don’t know yet (but it probably isn’t). Google Maps is certainly not. Neither is Google Search.
Instead of Google Maps, I’ve been using an app called Pocket Earth. While you can use it to navigate much like Google and Apple Maps, I have found it much more enjoyable to use like you would a physical map. And you can download regions by state to use offline. As for search engines, DuckDuckGo does everything I need a search engine to do.
The fact is, there are plenty of alternatives to a company like Google. And barely 10 years ago any one of them would have seemed unbelievably fascinating and helpful and convenient. Yet Google dominates almost everywhere. It doesn’t have to be that way. With devices that easily occupy 25% of our conscious life—not to mention how much of our unconscious life—why should choosing which apps I use be any less important than choosing which store I buy from, which company I shore up, which candidate I support?
On a similar note, while I have not done it yet, I think I’ve decided that, in the very near future, it will be worth the 30 or 40 dollars per month for an extra cellphone line, to have a second “dumb phone” to leave the house with when I so choose. I admit, I rely too much on the smart phone for regular, weekly tasks to get rid of it completely. So for now, I’m planning to take a baby step, to pay for a certain kind of freedom — that is, a certain kind of openness — that I think is very much worth paying for.