Hirobenhito

On a random day, I read the news about Israel paying 45 million usd to google to deny the famine in Palestine.

“As part of the broader campaign, Israel also spent:

• $3 million on advertising with X (formerly Twitter)
• $2.1 million with French-Israeli platform Outbrain/Teads
• An undisclosed amount promoting Israeli-aligned content across Meta’s platforms”

Then I remembered about BDS movement campaign, and how Google is on the list of boycotts

“In May 2021, as the Israeli military bombed homes, clinics, and schools in Gaza and threatened to push Palestinian families from their homes in occupied Jerusalem, Amazon Web Services and Google Cloud signed a $1.22 billion contract to provide cloud technology to the Israeli government and military. By supporting Israeli apartheid with vital technologies, Amazon and Google are directly implicated in its entire system of oppression, including its unfolding genocide in Gaza. Join the #NoTechForApartheid campaign. “

I said to myself “What can I do? How can I make any differences? It’s not like I can do anything to those companies” and I turned a blind eye.

A couple of days later, youtube implemented a new policy for youtube family, a stricter rule, which disallowed me to continue joining my “family” that was based in Indonesia as a way to obtain cheaper subscription fee because I am currently in another country. I knew I could try to work around that youtube problem and find another way to find cheap subscription, get a student discount, or just pay the full price, I don’t have any problem with that financially. Also because I think it’s a fair price to pay for a service that has been beneficial for me. However, that moment made me realize how reliant I had become on youtube, youtube music, and other google products.

For those who don’t know, one thing I love to do right now is browsing reddit since it’s not blocked here so I don’t have to pay for vpn to access that. I immediately searched about that new policy youtube implemented on reddit to see people’s reaction. As expected, It sparked a lot of annoyances and after scrolling down the comment section long enough, I found an interesting comment that said something along the line of “time to degoogle” and it pointed to the deGoogle subreddit.

It was all history from there. After lurking in that subreddit for quite some time, I discovered a lot about the deGoogle movement and reasons why deGoogling is worth a try. It fueled my willpower to take matters into my own hands and I will list both their main reason and mine to deGoogle.

REASON #1: Privacy & Enshittification

As an Indonesian myself, I don’t really have much privacy left. Our government willingly hands over our data to every entity possible. Clearly privacy is not my main concern. However, people don’t seem to realize that their lives have been heavily shaped by big companies like Google, META, Apple and Amazon, The FAANG.

The Case for Google

Google offers services which will make your life seamless, everything is integrated by a touch of a finger and most of them are free, but nothing in this world is truly free. We all know that one fundamental rule of life, right? We have to pay with something, in Google’s case, our data. With Google’s business model

WE ARE THEIR PRODUCTS.

What’s the consequence of having our data being saved by Google?

Have you ever think about something or talk about something to your friends and seconds later you see ads on your phone that correlate with the topic of your discourse? I think it’s been a public secret that our phones are listening to us.

They will display ads based on your needs or desires which they predicted based on informations they gathered on you. Sounds convenient, but it can lead to over consumption and many other consequences which we are not 100% aware of (cuz who reads those wordy terms & conditions eh). They will profile you and they will shape your views, your behaviors and even your personalities (indirectly). They will know you better than you know yourself.

The worst part is, Google understand really well that they are the biggest platform in the world right now and they fully take advantage of it.

It’s even more ironic when I found out from wikipedia that google’s former motto was “Don’t be evil.” Oh how times have changed.

According to another account, by Google engineer Amit Patel in 1999.^[12] Buchheit, the creator of Gmail, said he “wanted something that, once you put it in there, would be hard to take out”, adding that the slogan was “also a bit of a jab at a lot of the other companies, especially our competitors, who at the time, in our opinion, were kind of exploiting the users to some extent“.^[10]

LOL

The Case for META

In 2015 – 2018, a political consulting company named Cambridge Analytica collected the data of at least 87 million Facebook users. They used an app called “This Is Your Digital Life.” Then, they used user data to personalize political campaigns in the US during the 2016 elections. This is an example of how our data can be used to shape or skew our view.

In 2021, a former product manager at META, Frances Haugen became a whistleblower and leaked thousands of documents showing Meta was aware of and ignored the negative effects the platforms had on users. The key revelations include:

• Meta ignored its research findings that Instagram negatively affected the mental health of teenagers.
• Meta algorithms have promoted misinformation, inflammatory content, and disturbing content.
• Meta’s platforms have contributed to violence, hate speech, and misinformation in developing countries.

During this timeframe, class action lawsuits against Meta piled up. The allegations were that Meta still tracked users after they opted out, collected biometrics, and violated privacy laws like the HIPAA and VPPA. One settlement in Texas led to a $1.4 billion payout.

In May 2023, Meta was fined a record-breaking 1.2 billion euros ($1.3 billion) by the Irish Data Protection Commission (DPC) for breaching the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). The DPC ruled that Meta broke privacy laws by transferring Facebook EU users’ data illegally from Europe to the United States

And the newest one, In July 2025, meta reportedly ban accounts without real justifiable reasons. They claimed it was due to the misfiring against AI contents and in the end, they downplay the situation and nothing much can be done by people whose account are banned.

How can we keep trusting a company which records show, time and time again, that they have zero respect on you and your privacy. Now they are developing the META glasses… are they actually being fr. NOT to mention instagram is the weirdest app ever. It keeps changing its layout like it’s the diaper of a newborn. Oh while we’re at it, let me shit on their instagram reels. Compared to tiktok, instagram reels are more obvious on trying to feed the same content up your ass. I just find it funny, because it feels like I’m escaping the matrix every time that happens. Zuck, do better.

The Case for Apple

I don’t know much about Apple as I never owned an Apple product. Their entire branding revolves around privacy and security. Their environment is really closed. So maybe it’s the best out of the bad bunch. They still collect your data and they still circulate ads, but it’s mostly to advertise their product. In a way they have shaped their customer to have the lifestyle that needs Apple environment to work, but they are being open and honest with it. I respect it. They really have an interesting business model and branding. It’s like a widely accepted cult. I don’t want to be a part of any cult tho.

They did have one class action lawsuit regarding Siri unauthorized data collection which they lost and will pay settlement for. Also they were once being pressured by the US govt to hand over some of their customer’s data. They declined, nevertheless it goes to show that governments, at the very least have a power against these companies.

The Case for AI

AI is now used as a buzzword more than anything, there are many layers to AI. However for the average consumers, the AI they have in mind is usually the LLM based generative AI. Which I think is used as a weapon of mass stupiditification. Internet is dead because of AI and stupid people. I can no longer scroll through twitter and see a video without thinking “this must be AI”, every posts feels like a linkedin-esque monstrosity and engagement bait generated by AI. BOTS are filling up comment sections, buzzers can be seen everywhere, and I’m sick of it, especially israeli’s bots. Fuck Them AI and Fuck THEM ISRAEL zionis babi.

The latest update is OpenAI bought shit tons of RAM from all major RAM manufacturer like Micron, Samsung, SKhynix. It causes RAM shortage and inflated prices. Not only RAM, they also gatekeep all the storage like SSDs and HDDs, oh also GPU because AI needs that. Why is this a big problem? This means average consumers like us will find it harder and harder to own a personal computer. The future lies in cloud services, which will be provided and charged by the companies that gatekeep the resources from us. “We will own nothing, and we will be happy about it.” This is basically like Gen-Z and house ownership, late stage capitalism in action.

REASON #2: Just Because I Can

Let’s be fair and honest, it’s not for everyone. Not everyone care about privacy, they’re rich enough to pay for cloud services. They also don’t care about swallowing ads everyday, I clearly don’t. Hell, sometimes I purposefully click on IG stories just to see the ads in between (lol). My strongest motivation was born from a mix of humanity and pettiness. I just want to prove that I can because I am petty like that. I might be the pettiest human being alive, if you go low, I go lower (it is easy for me cuz im short)

On a serious note, I want to fight this engineered sense of helplessness that had been drilled into my head for decades, especially as an Indonesian who had been fucked countless times by my own govt.

All those researches that I had done enraged me and it culminated into one firm decision, I will deGoogle my life. Although I specifically use the word Degoogle, I actually mean it as an umbrella term for decreasing my dependencies on Big Tech companies and tech products.

It was really convenient that my work and my lifestyle fit my goals nicely right from the get go, so why nutz? My goal is to simply be more mindful about the services I use and submit myself to. To reclaim the life that I’ve been handing over to those really convenient services without fully understanding the consequences. Ultimately, I don’t know how the world will look like in the next decades so I want to be the main stakeholder of my own data and privacy although not fully.

As I mentioned before, these companies purposefully engineer the sense of helplessness into our brains. We use “google” as a word that means searching in the internet even though there are other search engines available. Now we use chatgpt to refer to AI prompting. I am also not saying that we should not use AI at all. What I am saying is we have to be mindful about it. I also fully acknowledge that there are a lot of folks out there whose works really depend on the interconnection provided by companies like google or apple.

Nevertheless, we have to know that in reality, we have other options. You don’t need to be tech savvy to use those alternatives. You just have to be tech literate, something that I think is as important as book literate in this day and age. Tech is now becoming a currency, a bargaining power, it’s the fundamental building block for our future, so everyone has to learn it, not just those tech people, not just engineers.

In investment, the most widely known advice is to diversify our portfolio because we have to manage risks. So why don’t we apply the same thing with our choices of tech product, because we are also investing our life and privacy in that.

“Don’t put all of your eggs in one basket”. Even women have two ovaries (and men have two balls except El Sawit).

Also one thing that I noticed always deters people from doing something is the all or nothing mindset. Your goal is not to run the whole Big Tech to the ground, your goal is to lessen their control on you. We don’t need a big heroic act. We need small, incremental, and sustainable steps. Hope is the most important thing in this world, don’t let misplaced expectations get in the way between you and your goals by killing your ability to hope in the process.

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In this part I told you why I chose to deGoogle my life. In the next part I will tell you how I do it. I will touch on FOSS (Free Open Source Softwares) which is my way to diversify my tech product choices and also I will tell you about my personal challenges that I face trying to do that.

Thanks for reading!

As always, don’t forget to have a whimsical day and also don’t forget to grow a spine,

cheers!