Category: Uncategorized

An open letter to Google

To whom it may concern,

My name is Joseph Vasicek, and I have been a regular user of your company’s products since 2006 when I set up my first Gmail account. Until the events of the past week, I was also a satisfied user.

The recent firing of James Damore over the controversial internal memo titled “Google’s Ideological Echo Chamber” has profoundly shattered my trust in your company. I have read the memo and find it eminently moderate and well-reasoned. It is not an “anti-diversity screed,” as many in the traditional news media are calling it, and their characterization of the memo–as well as your own characterization, given by your vice president of diversity, Danielle Brown–is manifestly false to anyone who has actually read it.

Your handling of the controversy has been nothing short of Orwellian. I find this especially disturbing for the fact that your company controls almost every gateway to the internet that I use on a daily basis.

My phone is an Android device that is deeply integrated with your products. My personal and business email accounts are with your Gmail service. I use your search engine on a daily, almost hourly basis, and routinely default to the first three sites listed in the search results. Whenever I’m lost or traveling to an unfamiliar place, I use your maps and navigation service to guide me. Until this memo controversy, Chrome was my default browser. While I lived in Utah Valley, I even used your fiber network too connect to the internet.

It is abundantly clear to me now that I have been far too complacent in allowing myself to become wholly dependant on your company for almost every facet of my online connection to the world.

I cannot, at this time, fully divest myself from Google in the way that I have already divested myself from Facebook and Twitter. However, I can make gradual changes to lessen my dependence on your company’s products in the coming months and years. This principle will guide my future purchasing decisions, as well as the online products I use and the personal data I share.

In the world of tech, if you use a product or service without paying for it, then you are the product, wittingly or otherwise. This was not a problem for me when I still trusted your company. But you have profoundly violated that trust.

I won’t say that it is impossible for you to win back that trust. It would take an extraordinary act, but you are an extraordinary company. At the least, it would require an acknowledgement of the legitimacy of my concerns, and a reversal of the fascistic Orwellian turn that your company has taken. It would require, for example, changing the search results page for “Abraham Lincoln” to reflect that he was our first Republican president, not just a member of the National Union Party (which was simply the Republican Party, rebranded for the 1864 elections when Lincoln was the sitting president. He was elected in 1860 as a Republican, and calling him anything else is deliberately misleading.)

Without an extraordinary effort to win back the trust of the millions of Americans like me whose trust you have betrayed, in the coming months and years, you will see much less of me as I reduce my dependence on your products.

Sincerely,

Joe Vasicek

Daily Thought

Money is not wealth. True wealth is our time and energy. It is the value of the things we create, and the service we render to our fellow men and women. Money is simply a tool for measuring, storing, and transfering our wealth.

Daily Thought

Isn’t it wonderful that we live on a planet where our most valuable resource falls from the sky in a readily usable form?

Daily Thought

The end result of all authoritarian political systems is to establish the state as God and to destroy the Liberty wherewith God has made us free.

Daily Thought

The life of Simón Bolívar is the tragedy of a great and magnanimous man, whose lack of self-mastery over his own passions ultimately drove him to become the very tyrant he had sworn to defeat. A man who loved deeply but never faithfully, the last mistress whom the liberator cheated was Liberty herself.

(with a hat tip to Mike Duncan)

Thoughts on Dunkirk

This movie is fantastic. It’s so fantastic, I saw it in theaters twice.

It’s one of the best war movies I’ve seen in years, but it’s not like other war movies. There is no one main character, there is no heroic charge or last stand, no clear victory or defeat. At the same time, there are cowards as well as heroes. There are men who care only about survival, and there are others—many others—who put their lives on the line to save people they’ve never met.

There’s lots of chaos and death, but very little blood. There’s also very little gunfire for a war movie, and very few explosions. When they happen, though, they’re all the more earth-shattering for the long lulls between them. That seems a lot more realistic to me—and a lot more terrifying.

I really love the fact that you never see the face of the Germans. For the guys on the ground, they’re more a force of nature than something they can actually fight. Even the guys in the air are more worried about how the dogfighting depletes their fuel than they are about actually getting shot down.

One of the things that really fascinates me about this movie is the context in which it happens. Most World War II movies take place in the second half of the war, during or after the Battle of Britain. When the Nazis failed to invade Britain, it was clear that they were going to lose (or at least that it would end in a stalemate on the western front). But when Dunkirk happened, everyone fully expected the Nazis to invade and conquer the UK just like they’d conquered France. It appeared at that time that the Germans were going to win.

It also strikes me that Dunkirk was where World War I met World War II. In the run up to the first world war, the Germans expected to sweep across France and push the British into the sea. They expected that victory was only a matter of weeks away. In the run up of the second world war, they expected a repeat of the brutal trench warfare that bogged down the western front for years. Instead, they got exactly the scenario that the Germans had expected in the first war but never gotten.

This movie made me think a lot about the major defining conflicts of previous generations and what our major defining conflict is going to be. I don’t think we’re far from another Dunkirk. Will we rise to the level of heroism that the British civilians showed when they rescued their soldiers stranded across the channel? Will we come together in the face of the next existential threat, or will we come completely apart?

Dunkirk is a fantasic movie, and I highly recommend it. It’s definitely one of Christopher Nolan’s bests.

Daily Thought

Things are like people. They serve you best when you show them gentleness and love.