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The Google Gulag

Let me Google that for you.

James Damore is an FIDE chess master who studied at Princeton, MIT and Harvard. He had been working as a software engineer at Google for four years.

Danielle Brown is the new Vice President of Diversity at Google. She has an MBA from the University of Michigan and campaigned for Hillary.

She had been working at Google for a few weeks.

James Damore wrote a memo suggesting that Google should pursue ideological diversity, end discriminatory efforts to achieve identity politics diversity and be honest about gender differences. Danielle responded by denouncing his paper. “It’s not a viewpoint that I or this company endorses, promotes or encourages.”

Google has spent hundreds of millions on diversity. It has put thousands of employees through implicit bias training. Leftists at Google are encouraged to accuse each other of hidden biases.

Brown and Google CEO Sundar Pichai made some vague noises about free speech. And fired Damore.

“This has been a very difficult time.” That’s how Pichai began his letter to Google employees. Some might have thought that he was about to discuss a massive data breach, not an employee writing something that he disagreed with.

It was a difficult time because leftists at Google had to confront the horror of an original thinker in their ranks. Some were so traumatized by his intrusion into their safe space that they threatened to quit.

And so Damore was fired for “advancing harmful gender stereotypes”. What were these stereotypes?

That the gender gap in coding could be explained because women are more interested in people and men are more interested in things. Women were more cooperative and he suggested and that the gender gap could be reduced by making “software engineering more people-oriented with pair programming.”

Google could have disagreed with him. And left it at that. Instead it was, “Off with his head.”

Pichai claimed that some Google employees were “hurting”. Social media accounts were full of bizarre claims that leftist employees were “afraid” to come to work. But the only actual casualty was Damore.

It’s never the oppressed leftists crying to friendly media outlets who suffer. Only their targets.

James Damore is what most people think of when they imagine a Google employee. A brilliant original thinker with interests spread across the scientific and technological spectrum. But Danielle Brown is what Google actually is: a Hillary Clinton supporter who handled diversity at Intel and Google.

Google is a search engine monopoly that makes its money from search ads. It began with a revolutionary idea from young engineers much like Damore. Then the engineers became billionaires. And the company that began in a garage hired a Vice President of Diversity to get rid of the brilliant young engineers.

The idea that made Google some twenty years ago was PageRank. It was ahead of its time in utilizing social technology to rate the relevance of a page. The idea has since been cannibalized as Google’s search algorithm favors its own products. And increasingly it also favors its own political views.

As the company swings left, it isn’t interested in the “wisdom of crowds”, only in its own agenda.

Google has embedded partisan attacks on conservatives into its search and news territories under the guise of “fact checks”. It has fundamentally shifted results for terms such as “Jihad” to reflect Islamist propaganda rather than the work of counterterrorism researchers such as Robert Spencer. And it wasn’t the first time. Google had been previously accused of manipulating search results during Brexit.

Censorship has long been a problem on YouTube. And it will now officially be caging “controversial” videos using a method developed by Jigsaw. Formerly Google Ideas, Jigsaw is Google’s left-wing incubator developing social justice tech.

The Southern Poverty Law Center guided Google’s censorship of Islamic search results. But there’s no reason to think that it will stop there until Google has completely cannibalized PageRank and replaced it with ProgRank in which search results will be dominated by left-wing sites in one category after another. First Autocomplete results and then actual search results will be censored and suppressed.

Google’s treatment of conservative users mirrors its internal treatment of conservative employees.

Internally, Google is a toxic environment where conservatives are threatened, blacklisted and even physically assaulted. Damore’s case went public. Countless other conservatives were forced out of Google and blacklisted by left-wing activists without their cases ever receiving public attention.

Once upon a time, James Damore would have represented what was best about Google. But Google doesn’t need brilliant minds. It needs to find more ways to squeeze ad dollars out of its monopoly. The pretense that it’s a hub of innovation is the meaningless default brand for a Bay Area tech company.

Damore was working on Google’s search infrastructure. And there’s little doubt that he was wasted there. Google’s search has grown more useless even as the company’s search revenues have grown. Google’s goal is to streamline and shape search results for a mobile environment by giving users what it thinks they want rather than what they are actually searching for. Google isn’t just politically left-wing, its product mindset has become all about forcing users to do what it thinks they should be doing.

Google’s efforts to get a foothold in social media have repeatedly failed because of this mindset.

Damore, like so many of us, wasn’t thinking the way that Google thought he should be thinking. And so it dealt with the problem by getting rid of him. When users search for results that Google doesn’t like, it guides them to what it thinks they should be looking for. If they persist, then the results vanish. If they upload videos it doesn’t like, they get censored. That’s the totalitarian left-wing Google model in action.

Google is approaching the ecological dead end of its technological niche. There’s not much else to do except make fringe investments that are little more than disguised advertising and build more free apps to feed into its own ad business while driving traffic to them through its search and Android leverage.

If the business model ever fails or the government takes a closer look at its abuses, then it’s all over.

Meanwhile its Google.org philanthropy can fund pro-crime and anti-police causes. Google Ideas, now known as Jigsaw, can try to get involved in the Syrian Civil War. And the herd of leftists it hired can police internal messaging by spamming angry social justice memes and waiting for an actual engineer to contradict them. That’s what happened to James Damore. It’s happened to plenty of others before him.

When Google fired Damore, it sent a very clear message. The message wasn’t tolerance, but intolerance.

It said that its Vice President of Diversity knows more about biology than a researcher who received his biology degree in the top 3% of his class. It announced that there is no room for original thinking, heterodoxy or genius at Google. And it went even without saying, no room for anyone to the right.

When asked at a shareholder meeting whether conservatives would feel welcome at Google, Executive Chairman Eric Schmidt replied, “The company was founded under the principles of freedom of expression, diversity, inclusiveness.” But freedom of expression no longer comes before diversity. It’s breathing in the toxic fumes of fake inclusiveness and watching diversity vanish down the highway.

“Viewpoint diversity is arguably the most important type of diversity,” James Damore had argued.

But that’s not what the left means by diversity. At Google and everywhere else it means a plurality of people from different backgrounds, races, genders and sexual identities who agree with us.

It’s an artificial consensus that displaces the old democratic values of individualism and freedom. Instead it imposes a system of safe spaces that treat any dissent as an act of violence against the oppressed.

The gates of the internet cannot remain in the hands of a corporation intolerant of free speech. Google’s monopoly doesn’t only threaten the free market. It threatens freedom of expression on the internet.

It’s not just about James Damore. It’s about all of us.

(This article originally appeared at Front Page Magazine)

Comments

  1. Anonymous10/8/17

    Another brilliant piece. And scary, since most people equate internet search with "Googling". Talk about a captive audience! Just curious...does anyone know of an effective, non-biased search engine?

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Anonymous13/8/17

      try BING, those who have tested it got better more consistent results.

      Delete
  2. Great essay! Tragically unaware of what it has become, Google's corporate culture exemplifies what Soviet dissident Natan Sharansky calls a fear society." I blogged about it here awhile back: "Fear Societies Heavy & Lite" http://sisu.typepad.com/sisu/2004/12/fear_societies_.html

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  3. I left a comment, but it seems to have disappeared :(

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  4. Just a common 'tater10/8/17

    This was another remarkable expose. I had heard rumblings about google, but not a lot of facts.

    Before I get to google, though, I would like to point out something for anyone that has never worked in a large corporation. There is a thing called corporate culture. It reflects what the top leadership thinks the company and thus all employees should model and represent. You do not last long, no matter how gifted and smart you are if not in sync with the culture. Sometimes that is good, as I have seen. Can you imagine a gifted surgeon that hits on the female staff every opportunity he or she gets, and goes to work dressed inappropriately? Yes, a she surgeon and a he surgeon did this. Ruins the company image and results in nasty lawsuits and sensational press coverage. However, sometimes, as with google, this artificial culture is more important than performance, even if ideal performance, and the person faulted is actually RIGHT.

    Google is now demonstrating what we see infecting the West, despite that fact that this viewpoint was a military and economic disaster for the communist countries: IDEOLOGY supersedes all else.

    Remember Mao's great cultural revolution and myriad failed industrial revolutions? The entire Warsaw pact block failed due to ideology running rampant. Google will bring about its own demise as soon as people wake up and realize that the product only delivers what it wants you to see. I have avoided google with a passion and refuse to use it or Chrome.

    Regarding the diversity issue, clearly there is no scientific basis to support the idea that gender and thus sexual identity is fluid. Never mind, fire the guy for daring to recommend that we work in teams to encourage input from men and women in a manner that utilizes each person's strengths.

    Whenever I meet or hear of a person in charge of diversity I cringe and get far away.

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  5. Anonymous10/8/17

    Great article, totally agree with your assessment and it's the reality of what the so called "Progressive Left" have become.

    There is no room for discourse / debate. It's a Hive Mind...comply or be ousted.

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  6. D.D.Mao10/8/17

    The left doesn't want a debate they want a consensus based on manufactured intelligence which mistakes feelings for actually thinking. Their attempt at conscience laundering makes it so they are wedded, imbedded and indebted to what William F. Buckley referred to as "immanentizing the eschaton" or creating a heaven here on earth.

    Yet within their tolerance they feel free to use subjective opinion when it adapts to their circumstance just as they believe in a living Constitution to adjust to their prevailing views. They feel a freedom to express their views but will play the indignation card and vilify Republicans for any slight they can interpret as racist or any other "ism" in order to discredit them. As with every thing the left touches there is hypocrisy. They call themselves Progressives but they recommend a system which is characterized by rigid observance of routine and resistance. The left claims to be tolerant and call themselves liberals yet are intent upon abolishing liberty, They call themselves Democrats yet yearn for dictatorship. They call themselves revolutionaries but they want to make the government omnipotent. Where Conservatives promise to reform government Progressives promise to reform America.

    This isn't to say they won't advocate violence in order to achieve their means. They have no problem with violence, they have a problem with violence that does not have a progressive source or agenda and is aimed at a group they covet. They reject both individual and national rights in favor of class and group rights and therefore term grievance based violence a reasonable response to intolerable oppression (actual or perceived) by the 1%,the police or white elitism and is understandably the underclass rising up. They see themselves as revolutionaries and therefore they can never be oppressive. They nurture hatred against corporations and Wall Street wealth but never think of neutering the massive monopolistic trust the government has become.

    I'll finish with a quote from Thomas Jefferson 1st inauguration. "Some times it is said that man can not be trusted with governing himself. Can he then be trusted with governing of others?"

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  7. "Google’s monopoly doesn’t only threaten the free market. It threatens freedom of expression on the internet". Google is the search engines giant you can't compare them with others like bing and the rest other. They out for business, and their various research app and software, have assisted the world at large, study and information at A glance without more stress.

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  8. Infidel11/8/17

    The google doodle for today (or whatever it is called) celebrates the 44th anniversary of the birth of Hip Hop. They aren't trying to lift society up, they are trying to tear it down, appealing to the worst aspects of popular culture.

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  9. Here is the article that details how Jihad Watch was not listed as it should have been according to Google's Page Rank system, and that Google, probably via Matt Cutts, the ex-google employee who left to work at the White House under Obama, actually arranged to have the search term, "Jihad" show up under an unknown organization which claimed jihad was a peaceful inner struggle.

    https://freespeechdefense.net/2016/09/how-googles-search-engines-use-faked-results-for-social-engineering/

    ReplyDelete
  10. NastyRigger11/8/17

    That's why I've been using duckduck for many years. You can always prefix your search terms with a !g to pass them to google.

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  11. I stopped using Gaggle's search engine several years ago simply because they were apparently leftists with a Marxist bent, profits aside.

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  12. Anonymous11/8/17

    You do realize that your blog belongs to Google so be careful dude!! By the way Kevin Sorbo and his husband Sam Sorbo love you!!

    ReplyDelete
  13. Duckduckgo.com

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  14. Anonymous11/8/17

    Thank you, Daniel, for your brilliant perspective. I have been keeping up with this and I have read Damore's entire memo. (https://medium.com/@Cernovich/full-james-damore-memo-uncensored-memo-with-charts-and-cites-339f3d2d05f) I have been leaving comments on websites. One article I read said, in a nutshell, that Google only had 2 choices: 1) fire him to placate the Left; or 2) keep him on to placate conservatives. I make the point that there is a 3rd option; namely, keep him employed and counter Damore's points with valid arguments of your own, based on science and using links, charts and graphs like Damore did. I guess that is asking too much because, after all, like you said Daniel, Google is intolerant of free speech.

    BTW: Ben Shapiro has a really good take on this, too. You can check out his podcast, The Ben Shapiro Show. He talked about it for the past 4 days, I believe, and he had Damore himself on Thursday (yesterday), August 10.

    King Western Man

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  15. Type in duckduckgo and never use google again.

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  16. Anonymous12/8/17

    Search results are already being altered by google. Following Muhammad Ali's death I tried to do a google search on Muhammad Ali's well known racist and antisemitic viewpoints but came up with zilch, nada, the big meatball. But when I search on duckduckgo it instantly came up w/results (in particular an article from an Israeli publication).

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  17. Political Correctness, as defined by the Leftists and Liberals who actively promote it, does not offer even one tiny drop of benefit to Jews.

    On the contrary, Political Correctness portrays Jews as villains who are not worthy of even one tiny drop of sympathy or help.

    Jews who support Leftism or Liberalism in year 2017 are like Jews who supported the Nazi party in 1937 – to say that they act contrary to their best interests is a big understatement.
    -----------------------------------
    Please read my true story, where I
    reveal why I quit the Democratic Party:

    http://shilohmusings.blogspot.com/2016/11/guest-post-from-democrat-to-conservative.html

    ReplyDelete
  18. It takes a great deal more effort to lie, obfuscate and continue the madness than it does to be open and honest. Imagine the self loathing liberals have in their hearts. The difficulty for us is not stooping to their level with the hatred they so deserve. I'm glad the guy woke up and forced to Google to excommunicate him. He may become very wealthy with this move, and hopefully now he realizes that you simply cannot work for people like this, no matter how fun or well compensating the job is.

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  19. The Old Sarge14/8/17

    "Once upon a time, James Damore would have represented what was best about Google."

    Actually, he still does.

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  20. Anonymous14/8/17

    Google's predatory behavior towards users and the data GoogleCo acquires from them is a prime reason I've never gone to an android phone. I know Apple disapproves of me and my lifestyle, but I've never worried that they would turn my own usage against me. I don't trust google an inch in that regard.

    ReplyDelete

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