Life Without The Tech Giants
February 5, 2019 11:06 PM   Subscribe

Gizmodo Reporter Kashmir Hill cut 'The Big Five' out of her life for a week at a time, Amazon, Facebook, Google, Microsoft, and finally, Apple.
posted by ellieBOA (7 comments total)

This post was deleted for the following reason: Poster's request -- goodnewsfortheinsane



 
The series isn't quite complete yet - in the last installment, which should be published Friday (Feb 8), she blocks all five at the same time.
posted by Pandora Kouti at 11:25 PM on February 5, 2019 [1 favorite]


Google would be the most difficult because my Google account acts like the hub for pretty much everything I do online, e.g. resetting passwords, managing my android phone, verifying my identity, etc.
posted by Foci for Analysis at 11:38 PM on February 5, 2019


I thought that would be gimmicky and it basically wasn't.
posted by clew at 12:04 AM on February 6, 2019


From the article:

“Your smart home pings Google at the same time every hour in order to determine whether or not it’s connected to the internet,” Dhruv [Mehrotra] tells me. “Which is funny to me because these devices’ engineers decided to determine connectivity to the entire internet based on the uptime of a single company. It’s a good metaphor for how far the internet has strayed from its original promise to decentralize control.”

This - exactly this - was what the internet wasn't supposed to be.

The next frontier these companies want to get into is probably biology. Good luck getting them out of your body.
posted by Termite at 12:40 AM on February 6, 2019 [1 favorite]


but my body is already full of googles
posted by Bwentman at 1:02 AM on February 6, 2019 [3 favorites]


Agreed, surprisingly non-gimmicky, given how other journalists have treated this in the past. I like that she keeps pointing to articles about how these companies are dangerous monopolies.
posted by shapes that haunt the dusk at 1:47 AM on February 6, 2019


I would be hard to divest myself of Google stuff despite my strong and personal dislike of that company for a whole range of reasons. I could easily switch to a Windows laptop at work to get away from Apple but the system I work on runs in AWS and uses Azure AD for authentication/authorization so I'd have to quit to escape them. So I guess Apple and also Facebook are the only ones that I could fairly easily quit.
posted by octothorpe at 3:33 AM on February 6, 2019


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