Another great article from 404 Media highlighting the power that the tech giants have amassed over how how we use the internet.
This brings me, I think, to the elephant in the room, which is the fact that Google has its hands on quite literally every aspect of this entire saga as a vertically integrated adtech giant.
This extreme power over the adtech and online advertising ecosystem is one of the subjects of an FTC antitrust suit against Google.
Black and white are English words at least a thousand years old. They’ve taken on numerous positive, negative and neutral connotations over time. But all that heritage and utility doesn’t matter, and must be denied, because in 2023 it doesn’t suit some people’s politics to use ‘black’ in any context besides referring to a black person.
I think that’s a very sad and limiting attitude toward language.
I think calling a block list “black” and an allow list “white” makes no sense.
Allow/block makes sense. White/black makes no sense. Words have meaning, let’s use them properly.
If you’re upset about changing the words to better explain what they do, you’re racist. There’s literally no reason to oppose a word change when it makes it easier to understand.