this post was submitted on 30 Jul 2026
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I used to love Google. Now I wish for them to die.
Same! Remember how exciting gmail was in like 2004?
Getting that invite made email cool again. And they promised to not be evil, and started to develop loads of cool things and phones you could do anything with... then realized being evil is more profitable.
Should have seen it coming. Of course a company who's main source of revenue is selling ads and positions in search results is going to end up fucking the entire Internet up for money.
I like the company from the Upload TV series's motto "don't be evil, obviously"
We were also pretty naive then. An editor for Wired magazine attended a party with Larry Page, Google's cofounder in 2002. He asked how Google was able to offer their services for free - and Page told him how their long term plan was to gather as much data as possible through their free services in order to build artificial intelligence.
So while we all thought a free GB of storage and searchable email was awesome in 2004, we were just blindly feeding what's happening today with the AI craze.
Remember watching your storage capacity increase like some sort of fucking witchcraft? That was the good era of the internet.
I think the early days of Google docs were peak google-love for me.
It didn't just happen like the stars moving overhead. People with names and bones did it.
https://www.wheresyoured.at/the-men-who-killed-google/
We should take their bones away from them as punishment.
It's an interesting choice, do you take their bones and go with a saw style punishment, or take their names and go with a black mirror style punishment?
Idk. Didn't think about it much. That person up there ⬆️ said that the evil was done by people with names and bones. If we took their names away they might be confused on what to call each other for a while, but they'd figure it out. Stealing their bones seems like it would teach them a much more severe lesson.
Plus evil tech nerds shouldn't get to have awesome spooky skeletons living inside of them like we do.
"Deprive them if skeletons" is an awkward slogan, but it's one I can get behind.
Poetic as fuck
There's an alternate reality where Google was good. They improve the world and push humanity forwards with creative and helpful technology. Instead, we get Gemini
It's all those damn bastards at CERN to blame for this mess. They just had to try sending a message back in time, and suddenly history changed. Nelson Mandela lived a long and respected life instead of dying in prison.
They didn't expect it, but they felt like they had made the world better. Then the next message only caused the Monopoly Man to lose his monocle. The next time the Barenstiene Bears changed their name. Such random, stupid little changes.
So they went for the gold, and tried to stop the skirmish some folk called World War 1.5. But this time Hitler gave up on painting and blowing dudes in back alleys for nickels and instead of WW1.5 we got WW2.
Of course they had to keep trying to fix that and change things back. Now the US and Israel commit genocide, China beats the US in personal freedoms and the relatively low level of constant government espionage of it's own citizens, Crime is legal in the US, we're dropped the War on Drugs in exchange for the War on Science and Medicine, crime is officially legal for the wealthy, the bulk of the sitting US administration including the President and folks like the King of England's own Brother raped loads of kids and almost definitely killed some of them and everyone in the world knows it but no one does a thing about it.... and also Sinbad's Shazaam movie never happened and Darth Vader no longer says "Luke, I am your father."
Those last two aren't quite on the same scale as some of the rest, but I liked that fucking Shazaam movie as a kid and it never even existed now.
And to say they had "Don't be evil" as their official motto in the early days...
Yeah, if you need to remind yourself not to skin puppies it's probably something you've considered more than once and you're not a good person.
I thought it was more like "We're a tech company. Other tech companies have become evil. Let's not do that."
While it was a nice sentiment, there was no formal plan to not become evil, so of course it happened.
Prolly. I'm trying to be hyperbolic with hyperbole chambers.