Tonight, I open this blog with a celebration of great victory for myself...

My Untangling from Google!

I've reached the high mantle of no longer paying Google for cloud storage.

They lured me in a few years ago when my entire ecosystem was Google-oriented... before I learned about better privacy practices. I needed space for email, drive and photos which were all being exploited for Google's advertising dollars.

I've moved onto Proton since for the equivalents as they've arisen. And so the satisfaction of not giving Google the satisfaction feels entirely liberating! The baiting, the enshittification... I can't begin to describe how dirty I felt sending money to a tech behemoth that not only doesn't need more funding, but ought to redistribute their gargantuan wealth in the form of taxes. Needless to say they are rich and powerful beyond their means, like many of their calibre. Therefore, any opportunity to stick it to the technofeudalist man that I can take is a win in my book. I honour this victory alongside my detachment from YouTube Premium a few years back.

The future has to be open source, privacy-respecting, and non-exploitative.

Now finances are one thing; their grip on my mental faculties is another.

They still occupy a tiny space in my vocabulary because every so often I find myself referring to 'searching for something on the internet' as 'googling'. Why? Because it's easier to say. And I know the moment those syllables spill out of my behaviourally-ingrained mouth, I immediately regret it. So, it'll take a much greater effort to evict Google from my head. That and Google Maps which I still use, again by habit, because it is such a killer app.

Thus, the struggle is not over yet and the metaphysical untangling continues. I hope you're inspired to do the same.