How And Why To De-google Your Life

Google is the patron saint of enshittification. Sure, the tech giant faces some stiff competition from the likes of Facebook and Microsoft, but when it comes to creating a product that became so widely indispensable, so ingrained into modern life that it’s permanently rendered as a verb, and then systematically degrading said product for the sole benefit of shareholders, Google stands alone.

These days, this tendency is best exemplified by two of current-day Google’s defining traits: Its use of monopoly power to crush competitors that otherwise might offer a superior service and its headlong rush to replace core services with inferior AI products that promise to keep users on Google’s platform longer. Just this week, a court in Sweden ruled that the search giant owed $1.5 billion in damages for systematically favoring its own shopping service over PriceRunner, a Swedish eCommerce site.

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Meanwhile, Google’s shift to serving often faulty AI search results rather than its traditionally indexed links to direct sources continues apace, upending the very way information is delivered, obtained, and organized on the internet. As a result, a lot of people have had enough, and are looking for alternatives, not just to Google’s once-hallowed search engine, but all of its AI-saturated products.

I myself have begun the process of dislodging myself from Google, and will aim to do so to the fullest extent I can, and I’ll have a writeup of that process with some ideas, tips, and suggestions for anyone looking to do the same in short order. (The dark horse hardest-to-replace app? Google Docs.) But with Google in the news now, I looked to someone who’s got a head start: My good friend Paris Marx, the host of the foundational tech critical podcast Tech Won’t Save Us, and author of the forthcoming book Hyperscale, has been working to get himself off of US tech altogether.

Since Silicon Valley started openly and aggressively sidling up to Trump in 2025, and partnering with the federal government to help facilitate domestic surveillance, ICE operations, and military campaigns, Paris has been extricating himself not just from Google, but all US tech products, and writing about the process on his blog, Disconnect. As such, I thought I’d bring him on to the new podcast to discuss his own adventures in de-Googling.

We had a good and wide-ranging chat about why it is that what Google is doing with AI is so pernicious, especially to small businesses, independent journalists, and creatives of every stripe, and what alternatives to the monopolistic AI-all-the-time model might look like.

(This also happens to be the first interview we actually recorded for the new show, so viewers can enjoy the visual effect of my hair changing lengths throughout, as I got a cut shortly after my chat with Paris was recorded. Guess I should have used one of the surprisingly numerous AI hair filter apps to fix it in post.)

Also on the show this week, the data center rebellion expands to Canada, where hundreds, perhaps thousands of protestors took to the streets in Vancouver to oppose a slate of new projects approved in the region.

Meanwhile, the Summer of Ludd is underway in New York City, and I wish very much that I could be there for it. (Alas, I had another long-scheduled trip planned; my wife is teaching a semester in Paris this month, which is why I’m recording and writing all this from a short-term stay apartment that is decorated a bit like a college dorm room. If you’re in Paris and know of any luddite goings-on here, please do drop a line!)

The Ludd stuff looks amazing, it’s getting great press coverage, and if all works out, I’ll have one of the organizers on the show next week for a dispatch from on the ground. (I have a partial schedule of Summer of Ludd events in this edition of the newsletter, for those interested in joining in.) The pro-Luddite vibes aren’t limited to New York, however. A new Hily survey of single people finds, as Mashable puts it, that according to Gen Z and Millennial daters, “it’s sexy to be a Luddite.”

Sixty percent of Gen Z and 54 percent of millennials would find someone extremely attractive if they admitted to never using AI to make personal decisions, according to a Hily survey of 3,500 American Gen Z and millennial daters.

Meanwhile, 64 percent of Gen Z and 56 percent of millennial daters wouldn’t date someone who does. Even more (75 percent of Gen Z and 68 percent of millennials) would be immediately turned off if a date used AI to decide whether they should go on a second date.

Finally, Fox News has been absolutely banging on the drum that the data center protest movement is an astroturfed foreign conspiracy seeded by China-based business interests bent on destroying US tech companies. Politically speaking, it’s truly one of the dumbest lines of attack I’ve seen pursued, and one that seems more destined to fail than other rightwing efforts to generate moral panic—largely because half the people showing up to data center protests are conservatives themselves, who can see for themselves what nonsense it is.

Still, I plan on digging into this phenomenon in an upcoming piece, because, dumb as it is, it signals an escalation in the systematic effort to label anti-data center protestors domestic extremists by federal and local authorities, which could have actual legal ramifications. To that end, apologies again that I went light on writing this week; between hauling the fam to Europe, getting set up in the new place, and producing the new episode amid it all, there wasn’t as much time for writing as I’d have liked. I’ll be back at it next week, however. Promise.

Until then—hammers up.

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