Google and Mass Formation Psychosis

Google and Mass Formation Psychosis
The Google logo adorns the outside of its NYC office building in New York on June 3, 2019. (Drew Angerer/Getty Images)
Roger L. Simon
4/29/2022
Updated:
5/1/2022
Commentary

An argument could be made that Google is as or more dangerous than the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), although obviously they aren’t committing genocide or doing forced organ transplants like the CCP.

However, the company that began with the now-erased slogan “Don’t be evil” has done a lot of it and is doing more. It has more reach than anybody, any nation, any leader, anything, especially on that most important of all organs—the human mind.

Some statistics—Population of China: 1.4 billion. Facebook users: 2.9 billion. Google users: 4.3 billion.

The Google number is based on “4.72 billion internet users worldwide and a market share of 92.24%,” as of May 2021. For reference, the population of Earth is roughly 7.75 billion.

Clearly, Google is far more influential than anything else on this planet—outside of God, of course. So what is the company up to?

Frankly, I don’t know—and most likely, neither do you, even if you work for the company. So much goes on behind its hidden algorithms that, at this point, no mere mortal could understand even a small percentage of it.

But here are a couple of things that popped up in the past couple of days. First, from Yahoo:

“Republicans are filing a complaint alleging that Google’s email platform unfairly censored GOP fundraising emails by filtering messages to users’ spam folders at a far higher rate than it did Democratic fundraising pleas.

“The complaint, dated April 26, was filed with the Federal Election Commission (FEC) as part of a joint effort by the Republican National Committee (RNC), National Republican Senatorial Committee (NRSC), and National Republican Congressional Committee (NRCC).

“The complaint cites a study from researchers at North Carolina State University that found that, throughout the 2020 election cycle, Gmail allowed the vast majority of emails from Democrats into users’ inboxes, while more than two-thirds of emails from Republicans were filtered into spam folders.”

Liberals and progressives caught with their thumbs on the scale again?

That’s pretty bad, if true, for obvious reasons. And I’d bet my proverbial house it is. One reason is that, as of 2020, Google had 132,121 employees, the overwhelming majority of whom, we know from various polls and whistleblowers, are liberals. No doubt they had numerous workers eager to write the requisite code. It can’t be all that difficult.

But another recent Google development is more insidious. In fact, to me as a writer, it’s the most evil of thought crimes. Snejana Farberov at the New York Post explains:

“Google has rolled out a new ‘inclusive language’ function that is intended to steer its users away from what it deems to be politically incorrect words, like ‘landlord’ and ’mankind.’

“Google Docs introduced the ‘woke’ feature this month that shows pop-up warnings to people typing in words or phrases considered to be non-inclusive, such as ‘policeman,’ ‘fireman’ or ‘housewife.’
“The online word processor’s algorithm will alert them that their chosen terms ‘may not be inclusive to all readers’ and then goes a step further by suggesting alternative, more inclusive words to use.

“For example, it might suggest ‘humankind’ instead of the gendered ‘mankind,’ or ‘police officer’ instead of ‘policeman.’

“The new AI-powered language feature, called ‘assistive writing,’ has been widely panned by critics, who have accused the search engine of being both intrusive and preachy.”

That’s an understatement. This is a head-on attack on the English language, one of the great monuments of Western civilization. To me, as a writer, this is equivalent to rape.

Farberov tells us what this new “assistive writing” did to Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech, turning the evocative “the fierce urgency of now” into the mild, less offensive “the intense urgency of now.”

It’s not hard to imagine what this would do to all the monuments of literature, from Aeschylus to Dickens. The next step would be to take some notes out of Beethoven’s symphonies to make them more “inclusive.”

Meanwhile, again from the NY Post article, “a transcription of an interview with former Ku Klux Klan leader David Duke, where he uses the n-word and says a host of other reprehensible things about black people, raised no red flags.”

I’m sure one of their busy bees is now off fixing this.

What’s frightening in just these two is that they are just the tip of the Google iceberg. Who knows what other games, many more subtle, they are playing with our minds?

If you’re looking where most of the much-talked-about Mass Formation Psychosis is coming from, look no further. It’s Google.

Views expressed in this article are opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.
Roger L. Simon is an award-winning novelist, Oscar-nominated screenwriter, co-founder of PJMedia, and now, columnist for The Epoch Times. His latest book “American Refugees” can be ordered on Amazon. “Roger Simon is among the many refugees fleeing blue state neoliberalism, and he’s written the best account of our generation’s greatest migration.”—Tucker Carlson.
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