Google is evil but there are greater evils, like Amazon and Microsoft. The fixation with fighting Google (the “deGoogle movement”) can actually worsen things if ppl turn to a competing tech giant. MACFANG is:

  • Microsoft (*)
  • Amazon (*)
  • CloudFlare (*)
  • Facebook (*)
  • Apple
  • Netflix
  • Google

I’ve marked with “*” the scumbag corps that I consider substantially more evil who have a more detrimental impact on the world than Google (all things considered- social injustice, tech freedom, privacy, environmental destruction, etc).

  • dirtfindrOP
    3·
    4 years ago

    I don’t think it should be company specific.

    Agreed. It should cover more companies; MACFANG in particular.

    To me, the deGoogle movement is about fighting against lock-in.

    It’s a lousy name. “deGoogle” is about boycotting Google. You can internalize it to mean other things all you want, but boycotting MACFANG is not what the masses understand “deGoogle” to be - and that’s the problem. When you look at all the “deGoogle” articles out in the wild, it’s clear that it’s a strictly anti-google movement.

    I see a lot of people praise Apple for whatever reason and think they’re high and mighty for switching to Apple from Google, but they completely miss the point.

    When you say they “miss the point”, they miss your internalized philosophy (which fixates on lock-in). But in fact your “point” is not captured by the “deGoogle” movement, which calls out just one company.

    You’re fixated on vendor “lock-in”, and disregard surveillance capitalism, privacy abuses, and a whole host of social injustices, so it’s no wonder that you would perceive Apple as being worse than Google. Once you consider environmental destruction (partnerships with oil companies like Total, cheap phones that masquerade as “open source” but actually still can’t be upgraded w/out buying new hardware [which then go to landfills in higher numbers]), the artificial intelligence that tracks people with great precision, xenophobic participation with human rights compromising private prisons/ICE, Google is a clear loser compared to Apple, if one must choose between them.

    I say boycott both. Boycott MACFANG.

    I don’t see the problem with a specific company, I see the problem as relying on any company and being at mercy to their policies.

    There are specific companies that are particularly good at disempowering and controlling the people (MACFANG). Underdogs not so much. Underdogs can’t take market share from the tech giants if they’re going to be equally evil – they don’t have the leverage. If you neglect to identify specific bad players, call out the worst of them, and boycott them, you’re not really working against them to the extent needed.