This morning I was unable to stem the tide of bile rising in my throat out of loathing for Google: its crap Chrome browser recently (for reasons I’m not interested enough to pursue — so, yes, maybe something stupid I happened to have done) started insisting I use a profile, and since I am squashed into GMail for work — for one thing — it seemed I needed TWO profiles, one for work and one not, but this made it difficult to use ONE browser instance for everything (as I’d been doing) … and I’m on a fairly old laptop (running Windows of all horrific things, so it is often a strain to run ONE browser instance) … and when I out of despair leapt back to Firefox I suddenly started getting alert after alert after alert from Google when I tried to log in to GMail, so …

Yeah, I could describe all the stupid problems I was having, but it wouldn’t be interesting. I’m dead sick of G’s pervasiveness, the sense that they were following me everywhere, insisting on this, on that, sending dozens of notifications and alerts and … sigh.

I’m old enough to remember when the Internet — well, the Web, at least — was interesting, and full of promise. This would have been in the mid-1990s. It seemed like a glowing forum for … oh, golly, all kinds of information. Sure, most of the websites were skin and bone, just words on colored backgrounds (with some animated .gifs if you were … cough … lucky: under construction; *HOT*, indeed!). My first taste of what things would eventually look like came from the unlikely-seeming direction of a nine-year-old kid who showed up at my workplace: I proudly showed him the website I’d made for the company and he then showed me his, which sported animated heads of all his friends and did this and that and played music and shredded cheese and … oh, kids! It was my future as an undistinguished IT guy, rolled into the person of one nine-year-old.

But then commerce got its claws into the Web, and managed to ruin everything, as it always does. Now it is impossible to “surf”* the Web without a kerjillion passwords, which in themselves aren’t enough but have to be paired with passcodes so we can have multi-factor authentication, etc. etc. etc., and “Bob” help you if you turn on an ad-blocker, which can be the only thing between you and gibbering madness trying to access the content you thought you were going to consume, and heaven help you more if you aren’t in the fucking mood for cookies right now, and dislike being chased around by your own interests which you thought were yours and not some company’s property, and eventually you decide nothing is that interesting here and decide to chuck the whole shining rectangle and get offline and read a goddamned book.

Because at least the goddamned book doesn’t BEEP at you.

And so and so I am doing the de-Googling thing, which is said to be next to impossible, but kee-ripes I am way beyond sick of these people. To paraphrase the late Richard Wilbur, I weary of the confidence of Google.

So yeah, Google, you’re evil: you suck, and you make things suckier with every little sucky step you take. You’re invasive, and pervasive, and 110% horrible. Please, take a look in the mirror and despair, and do everyone a favor and plunge something sharp into your throat and fucking die.

* surfing what feels like a giant bowl of kefir studded with potatoes — this is a very inelegant image but it’s the best I can do today.