Degooglifying My Life

Dear Friends,

I’ve posted the second chapter of my novella Defender at Cult Classic.

Best,

Sam

DEGOOGLIFYING MY LIFE

On a daily basis I probably have more interactions with Google than I do with anything or anyone else, with the sole exception of Apple. It’s been this way for a very long time — I came of age right when Google was breaking though, and there is the sense of it as a constant companion. I’m too shy to look at this even now, but there are probably hundreds of Google searches every day on my Google browser, plus my Gmail plus Google Maps plus the Google Drive that is the mainstay of my work.

And I am a dissatisfied customer. It’s been building for a while — the concerns about privacy and censorship and the deliberate manipulation of search results — but, recently, I’ve been having flashbacks to when I lived on MacDougal Street and every twentieth guy or so would come up whispering if I wanted weed or coke. If I’m writing a message, the AI tools are like the spouse from hell trying to finish my sentences for me. If I’m anywhere in the Google Suites the AI tools are like the unctuous waiter out of a Monty Python sketch, asking if it can yet again fill my water, if it can provide some service that I have absolutely no interest in. If I try to search, the AI tools are like a nosy neighbor that remembers where I went out to last time and what I did and has its suggestions for what I might want to do instead.

So a few weeks ago I had a purge, which felt more like a party. Honestly, it felt wonderful. I downloaded Firefox and then DuckDuckGo, I set myself up on Proton Mail.1 And, if we’re being honest, I shouted and cursed at the screen as, one by one, I deleted Chrome and then every Google tool that I could get rid of. And for the tools that I felt obligated to keep, I opened up all the control panels that I could and turned off any ‘smart’ setting wherever I could find it.

It was cathartic, and I highly recommend doing this — just as a reminder that we’re not locked in, that we actually can pick and choose the tools we use. And, several weeks later, it’s been…a mixed bag.

Changing to a different browser is no problem and probably helps with privacy. Switching search engines from Google to DuckDuckGo, though, is a real change — it’s like switching to surface roads only when you’re used to driving on highways. My point was that I didn’t want AI showing up anywhere in my searches and I didn’t want predictive text — I wanted to be searching in my own words, without any guidance or memory of what I searched before, and I wanted links only — and doing this was a rude reminder of how addicted I already was to AI searching. The compromise was to let myself use “Duck Assist” if I felt like I was having trouble, but that felt like a return to the dial-up internet, so the last few weeks — when I’ve had a project that involves a lot of simple search queries — my default has largely been to use the Firefox or DuckDuckGo address bar to type in Google.com and Google the search from there. Point Google. And then meanwhile I wasn’t really ready to switch away from Gmail, which I use for work and has been the heart of my communication for years. And I didn’t have an alternative to Google Drive, which I used to stay in touch with multiple teams. And I use Google Translate, Google Maps, and YouTube all the time — so, many points to Google. Google wins in a landslide.

I was going to give up on this — I still feel good about using DuckDuckGo as a default if only to make myself consciously aware of it when I switch to Google — but was basically going to surrender on Mail and Drive, and certainly not say anything about this publicly, when I tried to work on a Google Doc and a new tool, ⌘G, as in Gemini, started popping up and following me around everywhere.

Did I want Google to actually write my document for me? No, I definitely did not. Did I want it to employ a new feature that matches my style for me? Um, no thank you. So as I have gotten adept in doing, I searched around (Google, naturally) and finally found the settings that Google keeps well-hidden to disable the AI tools and went to my email to disable the ‘smart’ settings that had somehow toggled on in the past weeks and turned those off. Then I went back to the Google Doc and wrote in peace for about ten seconds until a new button, “refine,” showed up and started following me around.

It’s pretty obvious that what I’m doing is quixotic. Google is the greatest monopoly in human history, and I have been locked in since the beginning, and my very simple ask — to use the product as it was in the 2010s — is far too much of an ask. But I am also determined not to give up.

In 2025, I declared a personal AI boycott, and it’s been very easy actually not to have any AI apps on my phone — when they’ve been there, I really for the life of me can’t think what to use them for. About a year or so ago I de-Metaized my life and that’s been a piece of cake as well — I don’t think there’s been a moment when I’ve wished I could see a Facebook update, and if I’m cut off from a certain amount of commerce on Instagram, it’s really no loss.

Google is definitely a tougher nut to crack, but I’m determined not to give in. There are several points here.

One is that Google really did betray the trust of their client base. I remember the ‘don’t be evil’ era of Google when they were giving away really extraordinary services — Maps and Books especially. And then little by little the squeeze was on. I think I felt it most acutely with Books, these cunning features to keep you even from searching within a book for the reference you needed, and then when Books weren’t as profitable as they were supposed to be, quietly dropping it from the toolbar, and this whole treasure trove of digitized literature was all for nothing. Google News went through a similar evolution. As Barry C. Lynn argues in Harper’s, Google is “the most powerful middleman in history” and they have used that to push algorithmic slop, to systematically violate privacy and trust, and in the end to turn their whole product over to maximally-intrusive AI.

Then, there actually is a clear line here. I am really used to this from chess. The computer, and AI, came for chess before it came for the rest of society, and all chess players have had a generation or two of being worse than the computer programs. That doesn’t mean the end of chess, or computers playing only against computers, it just means that very clear lines have to be drawn and tightly enforced. The whole point of the game is to play yourself and to have fun; if the computers are allowed into it, then there’s really no point. All tournament organizers, even online, know this, and have very strict rules in place to keep out computers. Same goes really for activities like writing, of which the whole point is to express your distinct truth in your distinct way. By trying to insist on doing everything for you, Google is way over the line from offering itself as a tool to co-opting a core part of your self.

Then, whenever I make these sorts of points, I get accused of being a reactionary — the future is somewhere in the direction of the internet and AI, so hop on board. But nobody thinks in this fanatical way about any other activity. Everybody knows that there are distinctions between a glass of beer every so often and getting hammered at 9 in the morning, between a toke of marijuana and the kind of street cocaine that the guys on MacDougal Street were pushing. It’s just a matter of knowing your drugs. And the internet seems to be dividing up between tools that have a degree of agency to them and tools that insist on doing everything for you. I have no issue with Microsoft — their products are just helpful and supportive. Apple in the post-Steve Jobs era seems to have lost its ambition, and if they have predictive texting they haven’t embedded AI in everything. But Google is way over the line — they were over it with manipulative algorithms and now they’re in a whole other planet with AI. Even if it’s a losing battle, given how dominant Google is, I’m convinced it’s important to fight it. The stakes are whether we control our own behavior — or just give it away to an extractive and rapacious corporation.