The last sentence of the video is “google wave, because... because... fuck you exasperated sigh”. I burst out laughing at that and I’ve been trying to figure o

The last sentence of the video is “google wave, because... because... fuck you exasperated sigh”. I burst out laughing at that and I’ve been trying to figure out why. Laughter is an act of destruction, an emotional declaration that this thing is not part of reality and wiping it out of existence. A lot of what tech companies do feels like a fuck you. Killing Google Reader without explanation, disabling the full capabilities of ad blockers, removing headphone jacks, letting third parties exploit our social data, hiding the full scope of data collection behind a vague “we will use your data to improve the service”, and so much more. The relationship between tech companies and customers wasn’t nearly so adversarial 20-30 years ago. In the 1980s, it felt like Microsoft was really on a mission to bring computers to everyone. Sony was creating tech to allow us to listen to our existing music collections. By the late 90s, Apple’s big idea was basically “candy color are pretty, they will make our users happy, so let’s make good colorful cases”. And up to the mid 00s, google really seemed like a champion and advocate for internet users. It felt like (though in hindsight it was an illusion) that when policy decisions were being made, we could trust Google to be our voice when we weren’t in the room. “Because fuck you” would not have been at all funny back then.