Now that the world is waking up to Big Tech and its shenanigans, there is less need for me to post about them. Finally, what was once very evident to me is becoming mainstream thought, from Big Tech’s kowtowing to the suppression of a free press.
I posted because it was frustrating to see everyone ignoring what, to me, was extremely obvious. None of these trends are new, nor did I cherry-pick them to suit a narrative. Google was lying for years about privacy. Facebook was planting questionable software under false pretences or locking accounts. Pre-Musk Twitter was removing accounts that did positive services like identify antisemitic bots. Amazon was a giant swindle. And if they were doing these things, things that I encountered as just a regular user, what didn’t we know?
Plenty, it seems, from Facebook being complicit in genocide or Google working with the Israeli military after saying they only worked with civilian services and firing their own people protesting their work. Others have reported these far better than me.
I never set out to have this blog be a catalogue of Big Tech misdeeds. I only began recording them as a regular Joe, frustrated because there was often no other record, or few records, of what was happening. One example was Facebook’s so-called malware scanner in 2016, which wound up being the most-read posts on this blog. No one was calling out the tanking of Microsoft’s Bing. Semrush got into my crosshairs last year because, again, no one was posting about how its guesses (represented as actual data), combined with “AI”, created harm, whereas I had to put up with it in a major way for nine months, and I am still dealing with the results of disinformation that their program inspired. Just like Google, they’ve earned themselves various bans, including making sure their bots do not sully our spaces.
I also blogged to remind myself how I got myself out of a certain tech-caused situation. I only needed to do so because the official documentation often said the exact opposite to reality—something that oddly (or intentionally) afflicts Big Tech more than anyone else. Most other people seem to know how their own products work. Not Big Tech.
What next, then? There are definitely eras for a lot of things, and maybe it’s now time to talk about our work. Or maybe another tech misdeed creeps up that needs to be recorded. This blog has always developed in an organic way, and in some ways it’s a relief to leave the bigger tech subjects to others. I was never the alarmist. I was just insightful—years early.
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