I’ve been writing for a while about the political operating system transformation we are deep within. Everything looks the same, there is the appearance of continuity. The facades remain but they are wooden fronts on a movie set. Government and its somewhat electeds are stepping back from the mobs, and its proxies Google, Facebook, LinkedInMicrosoft, Amazon, step forward.

What is a country?

What is a flag? What is a logo?

What is a citizen? What is a consumer?

What is the Constitution? What is an End User License Agreement?

Which do you prefer, Free Speech which can be outrageous and/or offensive or the guidelines of Facebook and Twitter

Which do you trust more, Google or the US Government? Which has better governance, more transparency, accountability and legal protections?

What uses capital more efficiently, Google or the US Government?

Who will keep you safer, Microsoft or The US government?

I am going to ignore any of the political, statistical or microcosmical devilishness. There is a type of person who will find weeds to get tangled in so as to avoid the forest, of course this person would argue into the granular that also. Here is a case in point so that you can determine which type of person you are:
Google algorithms are coerced to suppress some results and overweight others. If you’re looking for the stat to support that assertion, guess which person you are
Here’s another see if you go 2 for 2. Google, using an appendage that the Google CEO created, gave the Hillary Clinton campaign unique information it promised its users that it never would.
If you bat 2 for 2, stop now.  Life is too short to make your heart flutter an extra few beats.
My point in this whole post is not to wear the blue shirt or the red. I don’t give a shit. I just want out of Google. Full stop.
I don’t want Google ‘politics’, that’s not an app I installed. I also didn’t install an app that gives them permission to own my identity. Google is a porcupine needle that burrows deeper and deeper.
They are increasingly controlling the information I receive and, through that, control too much of what I buy, think,  read or hear about, and, who I hear it from. Or don’t. They decide what emails they want me to see and which go straight to spam folder jail.
A Google extraction must be done incrementally. There is no ‘easy’ alternative to YouTube, GoogleDrive, so forth on down the line. It also time-consuming to get out of Google. You can click to delete your account and you can export, but there is no ‘other’ place to import to. I don’t want to go from one monopolist to the other, I am looking to stitch my own components together.
This is part 1 and I’ll be updating in the coming days with progress, or not, reports. Starting here…
Google Chrome Browser is the best swap to start the wean. You will miss it until you don’t, it’s like an emotional wound that you need distance from. I don’t want Google holding my passwords, bank account numbers. I don’t want them one day driving my car. For my Android phone I am now using a VPN almost always on. I use combinations of Orbot and Orfox, sometimes TunnelBear. For just simple browsing I use Ghostery and/or Naked Browser. Both are stripped down. Naked is very stripped down. Unless you configure it for images it doesn’t waste your bandwidth and it loads ultra fast. Ghostery leaves nothing behind. With all of these don’t log into Facebook et al, or give them any credentials, if you do you’ll go full circle and be back where you started, you won’t belong to you. Nothing has that instant familiarity of Chrome or the same shit different day of the other high-end alternatives like Firefox, but they also don’t have the intrigues.
Google search is the next swap out. DuckDuckGo is the easiest swap in. It lacks precision that’s a good thing because that ‘exactness’ that Google has is acquired from all their discrete interventions like geo locating me, previous searches and all those other bits and pieces that it owns of me. I want to know what Google doesn’t want me too. The molested Google algorithm seems to have moved a lot of sites out of visibility. Wikileaks, Black Agenda Report. News on the right and left has ‘been gotten’ (a term from The Wire)
End of part 1. See you later!