It's daunting to shuffle everything around, Alphabet is thoroughly entrenched in so many things. Like I recently used a google docs for something, and these are just things you forget about. It's unfortunate because we know that by and large these corporations are literally never going to police themselves, which I guess makes the desperate moonshot option being either that the people seize them, or the government does and also enshrines progressive humanist values somehow, and neither seems to be happening any time soon.
Sorry, I just meant that by the standards of philosophy I'm more a fuzzy-minded impressionist type that often pursues theory for its own sake, which presents sort of a contrast with the more material problems of Marxism, or the more practical problems of history, socialist policy, etc. I thought it was funny to think that my departure from my normal interests is some kind of ill omen. Probably because it might very well be, with how things are going, lol.
Good secondary sources (including videos) are the best. I learned much more from lectures, over all, than I did from my primary textbooks for undergrad. Honestly, a lot of philosophers aren't very good writers, and any time you sit down to read something pretty difficult or removed from you, in its original language, or original translation, you really have to ask how hard you want to come to grips with it, and a lot of the time the honest answer is that I'm not that motivated., lol.
If you're looking for recommendations, Hegel is arguably the most influential philosopher from the modern period and was incredibly influential in cultural critique and historical interpretation or hermeneutics, generally. And from there you could probably leap ahead quite a bit to Heidegger, who again has been really formative in characterizing what we might now recognize as modernity, particularly in how we relate our personal means and ends to a lifeworld (a world that we are ostensibly born into), including making a really strong modern update on existentialism (Sartre's existentialism followed directly on his heels). Though I come more from the tradition of historical philosophy (which is typically 'German'), so take my suggestions as being extremely biased.
