Hey, Pichai! Here's My Advice for Google
If I were Sundar Pichai, CEO of Google, I’d be worrying that I was batting on a bit of a sticky wicket. As a native of the greatest cricketing nation in the world, I’m sure he understands. Even if he feels offended by the racist sexist homophobic Trumpist hounds baying for Google’s blood. The Horror!
And yet. Google employee after Google employee is offering himself up as Sacrificial Hero. First there was James Damore who proposed the utterly anodyne notion that, according to science, women aren’t necessarily as interested in tech as men. Off with his head! Then there was Greg Coppola. Now there is Zachary Vorhies with a list of all the dangerous right-wing URLs that Google downrates or won’t list in its search results. Then “someone” sent the cops to arrest Vorhies on a mental health check.
Actually I get where Google is coming from. Google is no longer a rough tough startup. It’s a great big lumbering corporation where all the good little boys and good little girls from the educated class want to work. And all these good little boys and good little girls have been carefully taught the pieties and the responses of the current ruling class state religion -- and they believe them! These utterly foolish youngsters have been carefully taught, from year to year, the catechism of the ruling class’s activism culture. And so when they get to Google, great big fat Google, there’s no need to actually, like, work, whatever. No! It’s amazing when you read about the lefty activism at Google. You’d think nobody did any real work there!
Whatabout trans activist Liz Fong-Jones, the “transgender Google engineer [who] fights prejudice with empathy?” Hey Liz, why don’t you give your activism a break and work instead on making Google Cloud better than Amazon’s AWS?
Okay, I admit it. I’m pissed off at Google. All of a sudden on April 2, my usgovernmentspending.com search traffic dropped by 50%. Golly, Pichai, I wonder why? Is it because I’m just a nobody with a website, instead of a serious deep-state nonprofit that has accumulated the right number of swampie points to be considered a serious source of unbiased facts? Right, Pichai?
Hey, here’s an idea, Pichai. When I get in my car most mornings and crank up Android Auto on the screen, my Google Maps always suggests “LA Fitness” as a destination. Which is where I always go. Then, after the gym, it sometimes proposes “Home” and sometimes “Safeway,” where I often go for groceries on the way back home.
Golly. It’s lucky I don’t have a mistress. Otherwise Google Maps would be proposing my mistress’s house as a destination whenever I was out driving after 7 p.m. It might even be proposing a side-trip to Trader Joes for one of their cheap potted orchids. Right, Pichai?
But here’s a funny thing. The Google Now app on my Android phone -- powered by Google Fi -- always comes up with some stupid article from the lefty Brit Guardian. Which I always swipe. If it’s not the Guardian, Google Now is pushing a CNN piece.
Now, Pichai, I’m sure that, if Google knows that I go to LA Fitness most mornings, Google also knows that I am a racist sexist homophobe who consumes a breakfast of white supremacist extremism every morning. Of course you do, because if I ctl-H my Chromium browser I get a complete history of all the eevil raciss right-wing sites I have visited that day.
So why, Pichai, doesn’t Google Now push up good, safe, middle-of-the-road Fox News or Drudge links on my phone? Because I am sure that you and your trans engineer activists at Google Now all know that the way to gradually tempt a right-wing terrorist like me away from outright white supremacy and toxic masculinity is to dangle something just slightly to the left of what I would normally go for.
I mean, Pichai, in the immortal words of Lina Lamont, are you dumb or something? Because Google Now pushing the Guardian gets me really pissed off. It softens me up for a Trumpian anti-trust case against Google.
See what I mean, Pichai? It may seem to you to be a no-brainer to cuddle up to the Democrats and the activist community and the LGBT folks and figure that they will always be there to protect you from the Neanderthals and the bigots.
But I’d advise you to hedge your bets, like any sensible big corporation CEO. If you persist in shacking up with the Dems, you may wake up one day to find you made a terrible mistake. You may wake up some day singing “Stormy Weather” when your Dem man and you ain’t together. Because he don’t need you anymore.
Oh don’t mention it, Pichai. I’m here to help. Hey, I was born in India too.
Christopher Chantrill @chrischantrill runs the go-to site on US government finances, usgovernmentspending.com. Also get his American Manifesto and his Road to the Middle Class.