Goodbye, Google

What if a technology company becomes so rich, so powerful, so exploitative, and so oblivious that that the harm it's doing begins to outweigh the quality and utility of its products? What if that company happens to run the world's dominant search, advertising, email, web, and mobile platforms? This month's episode of Soonish argues that it's time to rein in Google—and that individual internet users can play a meaningful part by switching to other tools and providers. It's half stem-winder, half how-to, featuring special guest Mark Hurst of the WFMU radio show and podcast Techtonic.

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Back in 2019, in the episode A Future Without Facebook, I explained why I had decided that it was time to delete my Facebook account. In short, I was tired of being part of a system that amplified hateful and polarizing messages in order to keep users engaged and drive more advertising revenue for Zuckerberg & Co. 

I knew at the time that Google also engages in such practices at YouTube, and that the search giant's whole surveillance capitalism business model rests on tracking user's behavior and serving them targeted ads. But I continued as a customer of Google nonetheless, while keeping one eye on the company to see whether its tactics were growing more toxic, or less.

The moment when Google finally exhausted my patience came in December 2020, when the company fired a prominent Black computer scientist and AI ethicist named Timnit Gebru in a dispute over a scholarly paper she'd co-written. Gebru and her co-authors argued in the paper that without better protections, racial and gender bias might seep into Google's artificial intelligence systems in areas like natural language processing and face recognition. Google executives thought the paper was too harsh and forbade Gebru from publishing it; she objected; and things went downhill from there.

It was a complicated story, but it convinced me that at the upper echelons of Google, any remnant of a commitment to the company's sweeping motto—"Don't Be Evil"—had given way to bland and meaningless statements about "protecting users" and "expanding opportunity" and "including all voices." In fact, the company was doing the opposite of all of those things. It was time for me to opt out. 

How I went about doing that—and how other consumers can too—is what this episode is all about. I explain the Gebru case and other problems at Google, and I also speak at length with guest Mark Hurst, a technology critic who runs the product design consultancy Creative Good and hosts the radio show and podcast Techtonic at WFMU. Mark publishes an important site called Good Reports, where consumers can find the best alternatives to the services offered by today's tech giants in areas like search, social media, and mobile technology.

Hurst emphasizes—and I agree—that leaving Google isn't an all-or-nothing proposition. The company is so deeply embedded in our lives that it's almost impossible to cut it out entirely. Instead, users can uncouple from Google step by step—first switching to a different search engine, then trying a browser other than Chrome, then switching from Gmail to some other email platform, and so forth.

"Setting a goal of getting ourselves 100 percent off of Google is is unrealistic," Mark says. "And it's I think it's a little bit of a harmful goal, because it's so hard that people are going to give up early on. But instead, let's let's have a goal of learning what's happening in the world and then making some choices for ourselves, some small choices at first, of how we want to do things differently.