"Remote material cooperation with evil" at best, which implicates virtually all human action. There is nothing immoral here. It's direct or formal cooperation that you need to worry about.
I don't disagree with the gist of their argument, but the fact that they try to whitewash an actual genocide [1] with "politics" is absurd.
1 - if anyone is confused, the UN convention on genocide explicitly lists taking children of an ethnic group to give them to another in the definition of genocide. Russia is quite openly and blatantly doing this.
My tax dollars are already funding genocide, so for like 10 cents to go towards Yandex a month, of which some fraction goes towards Russia's quixotic war effort (which is an international crime but not a genocide in intent or effect), is not something that's gonna keep me up at night. Almost every other purchase I make comes with harm roughly commensurate with that of Kagi. The damage to the environment Perplexity and Google (and Kagi) cause with unnecessary AI usage is a much bigger concern to me personally.
> which is an international crime but not a genocide in intent or effect)
Why not? Russia has kidnapped hundreds of thousands of children, gives them for adoption to Russians, and claims that Ukrainians are just confused Russians.
If it smells like a genocide, fits the definition of genocide... it's a genocide.
> The damage to the environment Perplexity and Google (and Kagi) cause with unnecessary AI usage is a much bigger concern to me personally.
Historically interesting note: Nazi Germany kidnapped thousands and thousands of Polish children and handed them to German parents to be raised as Germans. Their decedents usually don't even know about this.
Back to the topic at hand: you have to distinguish between material and formal cooperation with evil. I don't know the Kagi situation (if they're just indexing images for Yandex to improve search results, then I don't see how you have a real case here; even calling this remote cooperation with evil -- something that is generally impossible to avoid -- seems like a stretch). But let's say a company is doing something like making financial contributions to some organization doing something immoral. While you can boycott a company for that reason, you are not generally morally obligated to do so. And in practice, it usually has no effect. It's also unjust to saddle people with a burden of guilt they do not actually have. This is called rigorism.
Sorry, but this is not really enough of a concern to care about 2% of a $5 monthly fee going towards a company (Yandex) whose involvement with Russia's war seems iffy (Russia themselves fined the company for refusing to give user data to its state intelligence).
>Multiple things can be damaging at once.
Yes, but the point is that if I can tolerate some of the money Google or Amazon gets from me going to fund concentration camps abroad, in which camp residents receive a quarter of the calories per day (~250) that victims of Nazi concentration camps did, then I can tolerate this. Everyone has to draw a line somewhere, and I see no reason to draw it at Kagi but not Google/AWS/Microsoft/Apple/etc.
https://kagi.com/