Марк Дайс - The Liberal Media Industrial Complex

Then in March 2018 Google announced their “News Initiative” plan promising to give $300 million dollars to various “news” organizations over the next three years, as well as offer them various tools and services in order to help them expand their online presence. 522They have so much money they’re just giving it away, probably to garbage websites like Vox, the Daily Beast, and HuffPost.

The Internet created an even playing field allowing someone on a laptop in their kitchen to create a website (or YouTube channel) which gave them access to the same number of potential readers (or viewers) as brand name newspapers and TV networks, and completely changed the power dynamics in media, since ordinary people could bypass the traditional gatekeepers of editors and producers who decide what gets published on their platforms.

But this power shift has caused a massive backlash and we’re seeing the very tech companies which created the infrastructure that empowered the individual now quietly working to tip the scale back in favor of the massive corporations their technology once disrupted.

Google’s corporate culture is liberal to the core, and one brave conservative employee leaked a video of an internal meeting held just after the 2016 election showing all the senior executives sitting around talking about how disgusted they were with Donald Trump’s victory and that they’re “sure” most people in the company agree. 523

Google is such a “champion” for “diversity” and “social justice” that there are reportedly tampon dispensers in men’s bathrooms because “some men menstruate.” 524In August 2017 Google fired engineer James Damore after he wrote and circulated a memo internally titled “Google’s Ideological Echo Chamber” which was critical of the company’s corporate culture and their diversity policies which were aiming to hire more women.

Damore pointed out that because of the biological differences between men and women, most women tend to be more interested in social activities than engineering (people rather than things). Google soon fired him for “sexism” for daring to point out well-established facts about the differences between men and women. Various psychologists including Geoffrey Miller, a professor at the University of New Mexico; Jordan Peterson, professor of Psychology at the University of Toronto; Lee Jussim, social psychology professor at Rutgers University; and others publicly defended Damore’s memo as being scientifically sound.

Damore then filed a class action lawsuit against Google and is suing them for discrimination against conservatives and white men since their diversity policies are inherently discriminatory because they openly favor women and people of color in the hiring process instead of choosing applicants who are best qualified for the job, regardless of their race or gender. 525

Billionaire tech investor and PayPal co-founder Peter Thiel says the FBI and CIA should investigate Google for possibly committing treason because of their “decision to work with the Chinese military and not with the US military.” 526Google had been secretly working on a special search engine for China that was compatible with their strict censorship rules and would have linked people’s phone numbers to their searches so the Communist government could monitor what everyone was looking up. 527

The project was only revealed after someone leaked documents to The Intercept in August 2018. Google had already been working with the Communist Chinese government since 2006 on their “Google.cn” (Google China) which allowed officials to blacklist certain search terms, but Dragonfly, the codename of the newer system they were working on, was going to be fully compatible with China’s “social credit score” system which tracks and rates citizens based on their personal activities. 528

Senator Josh Hawley called Google “the most dishonest company to appear before Congress” after one of their executives testified before a Senate Intelligence Committee and was evasive in many of his answers. 529

There are also serious privacy issues with Google for those who use it in the U.S. and other countries around the world. Most people don’t think about it too often, but they’re telling Google more than they tell their spouse or their best friend since people sometimes search for answers about relationship or health problems they are keeping to themselves.

Google knows exactly who you are and keeps a log of everything you’ve searched for and what links you’ve clicked on. All of this information is then analyzed and sorted to create detailed profiles of people, their personalities, interests, income, and other data points about them.

When asked about the privacy concerns surrounding Google, then-CEO Eric Schmidt responded, “There is what I call the creepy line. The Google policy on a lot of things is to get right up to the creepy line and not cross it.” 530They are, however, so creepy, that in the future they want to wire the Internet directly into people’s brains. 531

Google engineer Ray Kurzweil is one of the leading proponents of Transhumanism and hopes to one day upload his brain into the Internet so he can become a god-like “immortal” being. 532Such megalomaniacal goals seem like science fiction and have been the plot of various films like The Lawnmower Man (1992) and Transcendence (2014), but Kurzweil is serious and has the backing of one of the world’s wealthiest tech companies.

Google is also a lead developer of artificial intelligence which an increasing number of tech leaders and scientists worry may quickly get out of control and end up exterminating or enslaving the human race. 533Other companies, including Elon Musk’s Neuralink, are developing brain-computer interfaces in hopes of enabling humans to merge with AI by turning us all into cyborgs. 534But these are topics for a whole other book.

Google’s former motto was “Don’t be evil,” a phrase that was also included in their official code of conduct, but in April 2018 they quietly removed all references of it, and sadly it seems more every day that is exactly what they are becoming.

From the creation of the printing press in 1439 to the telegraph in 1837, to radio in 1895 and television in 1927, each new form of media revolutionized society, but the development of the Internet far surpassed all previous communication technologies, especially since it’s now fully mobile and in our pocket wherever we go. It’s changed almost everything from how we interact with our friends to how we get our news and entertainment, and people gauge what topics and events are the “most popular” because they’re “trending” on social media.

As futurist George Gilder noted, “Computer networks give every hacker the creative potential of a factory tycoon of the industrial era and the communications power of a TV magnate of the broadcasting era.” 535That’s the capability of what’s been dubbed Internet 2.0, or the two-way communication networks the Internet now enables, instead of just static websites.

Comedian Dane Cook was one of the first comics to use social media to promote himself in the early 2000s through MySpace, and many of his early critics called him a better marketer than a comic because they didn’t see his humor as all that funny but couldn’t deny his popularity. “I remember getting ready to play Madison Square Garden,” he recalled to the Hollywood Reporter . “I posted once on MySpace and without spending a dime on any promotion or advertising, we sold out.” 536