For a long, long time (feels like forever 🫠), Google has been the backdrop of our online lives.
When a platform is everything and everywhere—influencing the way you write, work, search, email, store photos, navigate your neighborhood, talk to friends—it ceases to be something over which you can exercise choice.
And it's true: you didn’t really choose Google. You wanted the old internet’s bright optimism—the promise of connection and the commons; a vast and expanding space made up of uncountable rooms and barriers to dismantle. A place of curiosity, of creativity; open-ended and alive.
Fast-foward to now. Your drafts live in Google Docs, your memories live in Drive. Your search history records your curiosities, fears, illnesses, obsessions (writers sure have a lot of those). The cloud functions as the external hard drive of your existence.
Once inside, leaving feels like cutting off air.
But Google’s main product has never been search, or docs, or email, or storage. They are tools to extract its real product: data. Google's business model is baked into every layer—to function as the biggest, broadest bank of human behavior and data ever assembled.
Gemini sounds eerily like you because it was fed on your words. Google’s AI image generator creates photos indistinguishable from scenes of your 19th birthday back in 2021, because it was trained on the pics your friends took of you on your wild drunk night out.
You’re mirrored in these products because they were built on your life.
Once upon a time, Google “wasn't evil.” Now it's too big not to be. When a company has this much power—too embedded to boycott, too rich to fine, too essential to regulate—it becomes a monster of itself, mowing down anything that stands in the way of profit.
That's why, this month, we want to talk about Google and its all its abuses: in privacy, data misuse, AI training, surveillance, censorship, environmental damage, political capture, the doom of our time… y’know, all that. We'll talk about what it means for writers, and why moving on from Google really matters.
We’ve been talking about de-Googling at Ellipsus for… forever. Right now, we’re in the process of doing that (no small feat for a team of nine!). And we know that 280k of you (!) already have, because of a growing sense that the things you write (and the things you love) are no longer safe where they used to be.
If it sucks, hit da bricks.
Consider this an invitation to name what feels wrong, compare notes, and imagine what comes next. Because the cost of inaction keeps rising, and at some point we have to ask ourselves: what do we stand to lose?
We’ve said it before, and we’ll keep on saying it: writing has always been an act of resistance. Increasingly, that means where we write. Choosing where your words live is an important step to breaking up Google's monopoly. Because without you, they're nothing.
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