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Do you think Google's attempts at ideological sculpting are effective, neutral, or counter-productive? Why are they doing this?
Search for any social topic or event that a conservative cares about, and Google will list progressive news sources and fact checkers denying its validity or, if this is impossible, condemning political weaponization of the facts. Google's information sculpting seemed to reached its apex mid-2022, when PM of Hungary Viktor Orban made a speech with inflammatory takes on European history and EU policy, and Google would not give a link to the speech. Trying all sorts of keywords, one could find page after page of thinkpieces with two-word scare quotes about what a horrible Nazi speech Orban had made, but it was impossible to read what he actually said. (Yandex gave an English transcript as the second result.)
Putting aside the morality or fairness of this: Do you think Google's efforts prevent people from being radicalized? Do they increase political capital for the establishment left? The recent Gemini AI debacle shows a hilarious tin ear for the company; no one could fail to see the tight ideological corset around the image generation squeezing the AI's intestines out its throat. And personally — though I am not normal — the information sculpting I get from search results doesn't make me accept the sources as presented; it just makes me angry.
The three broad explanations I see for Google's approach are:
Is there a way to tell which of these is true?
Google doesn't exist.
It's just a bunch of people, sending messages to other people, with its components arranged in a particular way that has created self-sustaining income streams (largely based upon luck and having stumbled on ads and executing on them effectively before anyone else). Even if Google did have some deep ideological principles, it would be unable to translate them into some kind of transformative cultural force.
From that, principal agent problems dominate. There's no way for individuals' actions to cohere enough for any collective Google agent to arise. Google doesn't want a woke fascist state, or to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful, or even to make a profit. It's just a bunch of bureaucratic fiefdoms posturing to other fiefdoms to get a bigger cut of ad revenue. So an individual can get an edge in getting a bigger cut of ads revenue by leveraging woke arguments: who's going to say "well, it's stupid to ban Gemini from generating white people"? Because it certainly won't actually help them in getting their own bigger cut.
This kind of falls under your 2), though calling it stupid assumes a bit too much an entity that uses its agency in an obviously counterproductive way. How to distinguish each possibility? In isolation, the Gemini debacle doesn't give too much evidence (although it weakly indicates against 3; if demoralization was the goal, Google wouldn't have walked back the image generation). But if you place it in the broader constellation of issues that plague Google, 2 is the simplest and most consistent explanation.
Is this to imply that the corporation is effectively headless, unable to focus on anything as the left hand is unaware of what the right hand does?
While I don't know that much about how Google works on the inside (that is, that I haven't learned from here and the broader ratsphere, plus from YouTube drama), if it is the case that the corporation's divisions are locked in competition with each other, then you may want to amend your first statement to "Google probably won't exist in the future." To my mind, such an operation will either have to succumb to one set of execs unifying the corporation around one mission and focus, regardless of the pain that causes, or Google will just simply go the way of RCA.
Yep. Sundar's leadership right now is saying AI as many times as he can per minute, and this is the best he's ever done.
Google will exist in some form a decade from now, but, yeah, it will fail. The issue isn't lack of talent, money, or market position: Gemini is a solid response to ChatGPT, and Google should be able to leverage its existing weight to win. It won't be able to, because of institutional dysfunction.
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