down the ladder is now on neocities!*

Edit: (2024-11-16) - Down The Ladder is no longer hosted on neocities - but rest assured, I haven’t gone back to Google for all the same reasons I mentioned here. I found a private hosting solution that works better for me, but I’m leaving this article up because all of the stuff I said re: Google and vendor lock-in still applies.

Announcing a brief programming update — I’m now hosting Down The Ladder on Neocities. For most people, this won’t mean any significant change beyond the fact that following me on Neocities is now another way to keep up with the blog.

However, this decision isn’t a technical one — it’s a political one. So, if you’re interested in the “why,” I’ll elaborate further:

Up to this point, basically all of my online tech projects have been run through Google services in one form or another. That includes this site — it was hosted using Firebase, a platform that Google owns that makes it easy (in theory) to host applications in the cloud. Firebase was always overkill for this site in particular, but I used it anyway because it was technology that I was already familiar with from using it for other web development projects.

However, in the last six months, the already rapid enshittification of Google and its services has accelerated at a genuinely terrifying clip. The final straw for me was their decision to shove Gemini — their dumbass AI project — right into the top of Google’s search engine. I initially believed that it would be trivial to turn it off, but it’s actually fairly difficult to do it in a convenient and consistent way - and Google has made explicitly clear that they’re not going to let you turn it off.

As I frantically used Google’s browser to look up information on Google about how to disable a Google service only to have Google tell me that they weren’t going to let me, a genuine chill went down my spine. Frequent readers will know that I’ve been on a bit of a “return to tradition” crusade with regard to the Internet recently, and that’s part of a larger realization that I’ve had about myself — namely, that I haven’t really taken the time to consider whether my orientation towards technology aligns with my political values.

My interest and politics and my interest in technology have heretofore been totally separate “tracks” in my mind. I typed my article criticizing Apple’s walled garden (as well as the article you’re reading now) from a MacBook Air. I am well aware that critical technological infrastructure I rely on for my day job is run through what are essentially resellers of Amazon Web Services. For many of my creative endeavors, I rely on proprietary software made by companies that I very explicitly do not trust. I can of course still criticize the society that I am within while still reckoning with the ways that I am forced to participate in it, but it’s also worth thinking about whether I am being “forced” to do something or whether I am merely acquiescing out of cowardice, laziness, or ignorance. I am forced to use YouTube if I want to be a popular video essayist, but I am not forced to use a MacBook as my primary computing device. I am forced to use Instagram if I want to keep up with local events and creatives, but I am not forced to use Amazon Web Services. And so on.

There are many places in my life where I’ve identified that I have far too much complacency with Big Tech, and where I’ve unconsciously chosen to just surrender to their whims because it would mildly inconvenience me to do the thing that — were I to give it any real thought — I know is right. I have been trying to identify these failures and rectify them, and one of the biggest ones by far is my reliance on Google for so much of my critical developer tools and infrastructure. I can’t go cold turkey overnight (I have important services that I do for my clients that, for the moment, are in Google’s orbit), but one small thing that I’ve done today is move my most important creative project out of their grip completely — and, to me, that’s worth something.