Google Antigravity TOS: 3rd party usage can get Google account suspended (twitter.com)

With which states?

I'm I'm a citizen of two and live in the third, potentially having eSIM of the fourth?

But who is the 'we' in that 'we'? If you defer to a politician, you simply centralize more power into a body of government constrained by only cultural norms and donor interests. Making a change requires the shifting of the overtone window of acceptability. At that point, it executes on it own regardless of mechanism.

The cultural norms are the prime mover.

A more realistic approach is legislation that either forbids providers from suspending or otherwise limiting access to any government integrated system or simply forbidding these types of integrations altogether.

It's still about framing, though. It's not a fight. The gatekeepers, like governments, laws, and money are social constructs - shared fictions. They are not physical things but made agreements by society. We can't fight them anymore than we can fight ourselves. And they stop working the moment we stop believing in them.

The only way to fight a social construct is to create a new shared fiction that is more desirable and works better.

The machine created by the current social fiction is composed of people who would all be better off with a better narrative. We just don't have the imagination right now to see it. But it is there waiting for us somewhere. Like all the best ideas that transformed us for the better throughout history.

1. I think sometimes the shape of a technology pushes a shape of society. But there's a feedback loop here. The like 15 years of tech were dominated by ad-tech which lead to algorithmic feeds that made engagement the game. This had an accidental effect of enraging people against eachother. This all started because of how much money google started raking in money on ads - people were aware, and we copy. Tech's focus on ads was an accident of history which could have gone other ways.

Maybe this seems intuitively wrong. Like there is some evolution about how these things must go. But there are a lot of examples in my experience that people see something successful and copy it and then it turns into a cottage industry of whatever that community was.

The best way forward here is to build and be successful while still following good values. The tech moment right now is ripe for it. There's a lot of reasons why open source, local first, and catering to the end user (and not making them the product) is a great way to be successful starting a company right now. Being successful in this way and talking about it breeds more likewise.

2. From what I can tell, pessimism is actively harmful. I've spent a lot of time with Russian communities (most who left due to the war) in these past years. That got me very interested in Russian history.

The weird thing about the arc of it is how similar it has been in every government they've transformed into. The same basic values hold which leads to the same problems: centralized authority, low value for human life, and general oppression. This is true in czarist times, or soviet times, or post-soviet times. Government change doesn't change cultural norms.

That's not to say I think that they are forever doomed. But it is the general zeitgeist of society that leads to the same place. And for it to ever change, their cultural values need to change.

There's a parallel universe out there where Russia is the richest country in the world that enriches and benefits the rest of world as a partner. This is obvious given its natural resources and geographic location at the nexus between great markets, and its history of producing terrific scientists and engineers.

It is the pessimism that kills all of that ultimately leading to autocrats that live to hold on to power at the very high cost of the rest of the country. The assumption that the world will just continue to be shit is what causes this cycle of abuse. It's a very hard cycle to break out collectively once entrenched. As all collective action problems are. But my, now longwinded point, is that it is not government that is the mover of change but philosophical attitude.

Zero-sum thinking, tribalism, and low appreciation for individual self-determination turns us all into a raging bucket of crabs. There will be a king crab but his life will suck too.

I've been meaning to get back to tinkering with a Immich on a docker container, as a Google Photos competitor I can self-host.

“”” Ask us to restore your account

If you own the account, you can request access to it again.

- Sign in to your Google Account on a browser, like Chrome. - Select Start Appeal. - Follow the instructions. “””

C’mon Google, if I could do step 1 then I wouldn’t be on this page.

I will absolutely post a guide if we can figure out a way out of this mess.

Appreciate you trying to help. I’ll do a bit more digging on that page and see if I can find anything.

What you do is send Google your own correspondence, certified mail, giving them a heads up that you've contacted the attorney general. That usually gets an even quicker response than from a personal lawyer :)

It also gives the attorney general office a heads up if they need to be scrutinizing a company like Google more carefully if they're getting a lot of complaints.

Situations like this are exactly what they're here for.

https://www.naag.org/find-my-ag/

Total bans are convenient for the big platform providers, but they are big enough to be regulated such that people don't lose access to everything, and that there are timely and responsive ways to challenge their decisions.

If the industry can't do that on its own, it's a job for the regulators.