When Google was formed in 1998, it adopted the slogan “Don’t Be Evil.”
Already we should have worried. It’s a bit strange, isn’t it? Let’s say there is a donut shop in town with the slogan “We Won’t Poison You.”
You might wonder: why is this donut shop thinking about poison? Why are they denying something about which no one else is even talking? Did someone higher up suggest poisoning people and then someone else said no, let’s not?
It might even be stranger if the place suddenly took down the slogan. Perhaps that would be the moment when you start worrying about donut poisoning.
Well, Google removed the public-facing slogan in 2015 when the company created the umbrella corporation Alphabet. Sure enough, it must have been about that time that the company decided just to embrace evil.
The problems have grown since then of course. Search results have been ever more skewed. After Donald Trump was elected, a corporate watch party featured wailing and gnashing of teeth. No one needed any instructions. The entire company flew into full-scale Trump Derangement Syndrome. And not only that: the company set itself against its own users and advertisers, cooperating closely with deep-state interests to use every tool to throttle the rise of populism here and abroad.
I gave up on the company years ago but even now it dominates the search market. With 96 percent of the market under its control, competitors can barely get a leg up. My favorite is DuckDuckGo but it hovers around 1 percent. Brave is another that is getting going but it is far behind. Meanwhile, Google shelled out $26.3 billion in 2021 to Apple and Samsung to be the default on those companies’ devices. It’s close to having a monopoly.
I keep waiting for the event that would cause a conscious decision by consumers to give this company the Bud Light treatment. But it had not really come along... until today.
Here’s what happened. Google released its version of Artificial Intelligence (AI), which it (uncreatively) called Gemini. As part of that, it featured an image creator. After just one day in release, users discovered something very strange. The AI engine simply would not create an image of white people. That’s right, the woke programming had gone so far as to make it nearly impossible to show a white person at all!
Users began to try tricks. Show a black man: done. Show a black woman: done. Show a white man: cannot do plus here’s a lecture on diversity and inclusion. Show a white woman: cannot do plus here’s a lecture about diversity and inclusion. It was so extreme that it applied to all historical figures too. Show Founding Father of America: a strange assembly of non-whites. Show some popes: women and black men. Show Vikings: various natives of color. It was truly next-level crazy.
Not even sports wholly dominated by white males such as the National Hockey League could generate anything accurate.
Google was so dedicated to inclusion that it excluded all white people from its AI engine.
This is beyond Orwell. This is deliberate mind reconstruction using ham-handed ideological techniques to hate on 70 percent of Americans. This is not about privileging white people over others here; this is simply about acknowledging their very existence! We are talking about some next-level bonkers stuff here.
It seems like Google overreach. It showed its hand, to use a poker metaphor. It revealed the true character of the company. In short, the donut shop served poison after all.
If it would do this with images, its entire AI system is broken. Its search is broken. Its analytics and ads pushes are broken. It is doing evil.
I’m going to take a rare step into advocacy here, and this is unlike me because there is nothing worse than a hortatory columnist. Still I’m going to say it: DO NOT USE GOOGLE FOR ANYTHING IF YOU CAN HELP IT!
The average technology user is incredibly deferential to presets on apps. I’m guessing that fewer than 1 percent of people go to their preferences and examine what is going on under the hood. They trust what their technology gives them regardless.
Countless times I’ve seen people checking their phones for pop-ups and when I ask what is going on, they will tell me it is a news item from CNN. I point out that they can turn this off and quickly do it when I explain how. Truly most people do not know.
It’s the same with your search preferences. Open the preferences on the app and look at the item search and simply choose a different search system. Brave is not listed but DuckDuckGo is. It’s a small step but it is something. If enough people do this, Google could lose millions of users and billions in ad revenue.
Don’t forget that Google owns YouTube. That is one heavily censored video service. They delete anything that runs contrary to media narratives. We have perfectly great alternatives with Rumble. It’s time to move. Now.
True, I’m one to talk, because I still use Gmail. However, Proton Mail is a wonderful other choice and I’m getting there on that one too. I still cannot find a good alternative to Google Docs. That is a beast of a great suite of services that is far better than Word. But it too is dangerous. This has never happened to me but I have friends who had their documents disappeared by Google if their writing strays too far toward the truth.
I surely wish some company would come up with a much better alternative. And yet, as I think about it, probably such a company would be litigating for the right immediately, which is truly tragic. Google was allowed to get too much power and too much market dominance from its inception to the present, thanks mostly to its connections to the intelligence community.
Don’t forget that Google was started with a grant from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA). There was a time when I didn’t think that mattered. But it does. I see this now. This is why they adopted the slogan “Don’t Be Evil”: they knew from the beginning that the time would come and maybe they had every intention to resist early on.
Those days are long gone. We are where we are. Now we must act on that information.
