Trump is bellyaching about how he thinks that Silicon Valley is using their technology to discriminate against Conservatives. Essentially: Google bad. That's not quite true. Why are you more likely to see a liberal viewpoint on Google? Because it's more relevant. To be clear, what I mean to say is that Conservatives are, by definition, more open-minded than liberals, and are thus more likely to seek out opposing opinions.
From my own experience as a Trump Republican, I spent years, previously, watching The Young Turks on Youtube. Only recently did I stop. I live and work in a one-party Democratic city and most of the people that I interact with on a daily basis are Liberals. Deeply Liberal. Most of the books that I read on a yearly basis are written by Liberals. Liberals control the narrative, because they talk about an ideal, of how human nature should be, of how everyone should pay attention to #Mee, of how life should be easier for #Mee.
It's very appealing, almost a sinful pleasure, to entertain the notion that Trump just hates everybody who isn't white, because if we believe that then we don't have to look at the real problem and we can continue in blissful ignorance.
But the real question is that has the potential to be even greater of a burden is: Is Google good? More specifically, is Google too good? Is Google to Google? Tell me if you've ever experienced this. You get off the computer to go to work. On you way to work, you think of something. It could be anything. Something that you haven't thought of in years. It just comes to you and you don't say anything to anybody, you don't write it down, you don't search it in you phone, sky-write it, smoke signals, nothing.
As soon as you get to work you log in to your Youtube account and there are one or more videos in your feed talking about exactly what you were thinking, and you didn't tell anybody. Or at the very least, there's an ad on one of your videos that talks about just what you're thinking. And you never told a soul.
Am I Really That Friggin' Predictable?
The question is not "How does Google do this?" or it corollary, "Whom do I sue?" The question is, what is it in me that caused me to patronize Google in the first place. If you're my age, the answer is probably not what you're thinking.
What is it that attracts me to something that can know my every thought before I think it? True, Google knows our personalities. It has our file. It knows our tendencies, even our histories and pasts. But what doesn't Google know. What is it that we desperately want Google to know about us that it can never learn? Is that what keeps us coming back like a faithful spouse?
It's not "What is Google trying to tell us?" that we should be worried about. It's "What are we trying to tell Google?"
