My dependence on Big Tech

Saturday, 6 May 2017

Farhad Manjoo:

What’s the order in which you would drop Apple, Amazon, Google, Facebook from your life, if forced to — from first to last.

  1. Facebook is already not part of my life. (That’s a lie, but it’s at a minutes-a-month level. And they are most reluctant minutes.)

  2. Apple… I would greatly miss the quality of various aspects of their products, but using them already requires compromise. So I would make do.

  3. Amazon is mostly of use to me in terms of research: I use it to browse reviews and to find niche products I wouldn’t know how to search for otherwise. It’s not a big part of my life and I try to keep it that way, but losing it would be painful on those occasions where I have come to rely on it.

  4. Google’s loss would be painful every single day. I wish I could sever my dependence on their web search and their maps, so I’ve looked for alternatives repeatedly and in anger. None come close.

(The distances are nowhere near even. Facebook trails the pack by a very large gap; Google leads it with a significant one.)