I'm getting that itch again to leave the Google ecosphere. One might argue that as I read deeper into the organization, I have a greater tendency to want to bug out. I suppose that's true, though I'm leaning more toward bringing back and entwining the things that work in 2020 and 2021.

In some ways, I'm embracing things—LIFE, that which I delighted from the '90s. I remember the Internet back then—it wasn't this place of MEGA-monopolies in a surveillance virtual state—gosh, by comparison to the past, we live in an ACTUAL surveillance state for driving through a single intersection, there's gotta be twenty cameras, right?!

For me, the Internet back then was a place where I could augment myself—become better. Add something new to myself, then walk away and thrive. In time, yes, the crackle of the modem would fade out and I welcomed leaving an AFK status on my AIM client, the answering machine of the digital age. But, I wasn't ALWAYS on it; I wasn't ALWAYS being watched by my Cylon benefactors; narratives weren't being actively shaped for my behavior modification. I had a virtual identity that was not 1:1 analogous to reality, something largely forgotten from today's Facebook "real person" mandate.

My break from everyone and everything in 2020 was instrumental in that I find it bizarre how so mindless everyone laps up the rhetoric of what is good these days. They claim the maverick title while sharing the nectar stein of popularity. Indeed, "how narrow is the gate and difficult the road that leads to life, and few find it."

Reeling it back on topic to weigh my Google departure, I get an overwhelming sense that I am the product. It's all, FREE, FREE, FREE, not unlike Agent Smith's "Me, Me, Me" self-replication in the Matrix franchise. Instead of feeling free, as in speech, I feel like I'm a beer being passed around in a virtual bar. I mean, think about it: I freely give away my data which in turn serves up ads curated for me. I'd rather choose whether or not I want to be paid to be data mined on places I visit virtually AND in reality, and THEN pull my wallet out for a SaaS.

...that's basically what I'm proposing. How much cloud-based computing do I really need in my life? Is it worth paying for? Because one way or another, I am.