I'm not quite sure how Google's announcement that Drive is now subject to censorship comes as a shock to anyone. Google already heavily censors their search results and I am concerned that no one is talking about it in relation to this. As bad as the voilation of privacy and dictatorial intentions that now apply to Drive are, I believe that search result augmentation is far worse. In absolute terms, now that "to Google" is synonymous to every possible form of "to search", "to know", or to "to discover" it as an organization
is actively crushing independent thinking. Throughout many conversations with younger folks and even hapless adults, I have discovered the prevailing attitude toward the act of thinking to have diverged outside of the notion of self. When something is to be discovered, it is to be searched for. There is no critical thinking involved in this process. Due to the immediacy of seemingly correct or cogent information, people have ceased relying on any other metric in the evaluation of information besides a measurement of consensus. The problem is that they directly associate this measurement with the rank of a result in a search engine. The thinking goes that because it is ranked towards the top it must be more true.
But what happens when truthiness is only measured through consensus and commonness? The most dire and direct consequence is that the rate of convergence toward true diversity of thought is absolutely flattened. This artifact is one of the main causes in the existential division in the U.S. The real crisis is that the ranking of the truthiness of an opinion on important social issues that are presented through Google's search results is treated and evaluated like objective fact. When presented with only opinion and information about social issues that one strongly agrees with, the disciplined and liberal thinker might imagine themselves on the other side of the situation and consider what to do when faced with only
information that he or she disagrees with. What then?
As an example, try searching Google for the phrase "Systemic racism is not real". The only results that appear are in opposition to the assertion. The searcher is then faced with a quandary about whether to question the reality that all opposing points of view are absent. But as I've pointed out, the new default to laziness and consensus acceptance guarantees that the searcher's true belief about this complex issue will default to what is offered. The noble cause of the searcher, to believe in an America where Good and Honest people are free to seek others who wish to treat other humans based on their character rather than a pitifully shallow discriminant as melanin level, to learn about the noble spirit of their own country, and who hate to be told that they must be complicit in some sort of hellish oppression of others are faced with nothing but a brutal emptiness. No wonder everyone thinks America is damned and doomed! No wonder we all feel so alone. We sit in our apartments and stare at the consensus feed. We let it alter our emotions and perceptions without thinking for ourselves. We live in vast cities of millions of individuals who want nothing more than to be fed the consensus and forget our neighbors. By censoring and skewing social issues like this we are forced to abandon the liberal notions that are the foundation of Western thought. What free thinker is brave enough to fight the shallow consensus of millions of lazy thinkers who are being spoon fed perspectives of a select few far left technocrats? This is the modern book burning. The Arbiter of the zeitgeist sits behind an innocent text box and it grows ever more powerful.
I challenge the reader to be truly disciplined in their analysis, set aside their political leanings, and objectively consider the perspective of a right winger who just saw Twitter silence their leader and watched Amazon boot the only social network where they could speak their mind, Parler, out of existence. We discuss these companies
as if they are just organizations who are just private companies out to make money but any rational person can look at these actions and evaluate them to be political forces that are heavily biased and who are asserting their control. We circle endlessly around discussions about whether they are publishers or platforms and it is obvious that they are both. Google has intentionally steered the very nature of the internet into their control. The only way to be known is to advertise on their platform and you
must pay them to do that. They protect this modality at all costs and offer the free services that we are discussing as an indirection away from their intent. Make no mistake: Google wants to become the internet. But the horrible reality is that they already have and no one has noticed. Google and Amazon alone control an almost
absolute majority of servers that host the entire internet. They could turn it off if they so chose. Companies are willingly giving control of the critical parts of their business to these companies. If Amazon and Google go down every business that hosts on their servers is doomed.
Microsoft is just as bad. They are actively trying to take away the control of user's computers by hosting Windows in the cloud. What happens when they only make it available in the cloud on their servers? Worse still, we developers are giving up all of our control to them by hosting everything on Github. What did they do when we made all of our code and expertise avialable to them for free? They trained an AI on it with the intention of centralizing the very skill we gave them and are going to try to sell it back to us in the form of Copilot. What happens when your employer only trusts you to verify Copilot's output and not write anything for yourself? What happens to the next generation of programmers who don't even know how to write code without their help? Microsoft's seemingly benevolent attitude towards developers is just another example of the damage centralization is causing.
This announcement is just another assertion of totalitarian control. The ruthless centralization these companies are seeking is an existential danger to everyone. The threat is critical! We are in mortal danger. We have given them complete control and are doing nothing about it.
The only option that can save us is to build an alternative and compete with them.