The Return of Darth Vader

One of the most recognizable villains from the big screen is Darth Vader, the iconic character in the Star Wars saga. Known for his imposing presence and ruthless nature, the scoundrel has a complex backstory. He wasn’t always the rancorous character that stalks the Star Wars galaxy. As a young man, Vader—who was originally known as Anakin Skywalker—displayed remarkable talent as a trained Jedi. Many believed he was the prophesied Chosen One who would bring balance to the galaxy.

However, as depicted in the tale, young Anakin struggles with his emotions and is often rash and arrogant. His desire for power haunts and consumes him, making him vulnerable to the dark side. Unable to tame his personal demons, Anakin transforms into Darth Vader. He turns against the Jedi Order, orchestrates the fall of the Jedi, and promotes the rise of the Galactic Empire, becoming the Emperor’s enforcer. Feared across the galaxy, Vader spearheads the Empire’s efforts to crush the Rebel Alliance, led by his son, Luke Skywalker. Over the course of numerous battles, Vader’s relationship with his son becomes a source of internal conflict, ultimately culminating in Vader’s redemption when he chooses to sacrifice his own life to save his son. This act of self-sacrifice restores balance to the galaxy, fulfilling the prophecy that was once believed to be young Anakin’s destiny.

The story of Darth Vader is fascinating because it encompasses the complexities of the human condition that are the fabric of redemption tales. Born with so much promise and the capacity to make a difference, the struggle to live up to that promise in the face of conflicting emotions leads to the protagonist’s fall from grace. Over time, the key player encounters circumstances that cause him to see the error of his ways and seek redemption, which often entails some element of self-sacrifice. The redemption is the event that transforms promise lost into virtue gained.

Today this tale is happening in a different realm. It’s not the story of an individual but rather a company that once held so much promise but has gone over to the dark side to become a corporate form of Darth Vader. That company is Google. Like Anakin Skywalker, Google was remarkably talented and gave most of us our first experience of the highest form of human intelligence: our collective intelligence. And for a while, Google opened us up to new horizons, thanks to the insight of two innovator entrepreneurs, Sergey Brin and Larry Page, who discovered a better way to build a search engine.

Before Google, intelligence was considered an individual attribute. The smartest people were geniuses like Newton, Einstein, Galileo, da Vinci, and Tesla. If we wanted to tap into the best of human intelligence, we turned to individual experts. This may explain why the first attempts at constructing internet search engines, such as Yahoo, relied upon the intelligence of individual experts. At the beginning of 1998,  most observers expected that Yahoo would become the dominant search engine because it had assembled an impressive group of editorial experts to guide the ranking of the rapidly growing volume of web pages.

However, despite its horde of the best and the brightest, Yahoo faltered because Google’s co-founders came up with a brilliant idea that would not require the use of experts. They created an algorithm that relied on the collective intelligence of all the internet users to rank the pages. The algorithm let users decide which pages were most relevant to a search based on the number of links and visits to a particular site. By tracking user search patterns and trends, Google’s collective intelligence platform did a better job of cataloging pages than Yahoo’s editorial experts. It wasn’t long before Google’s wisdom of crowds  easily supplanted Yahoo’s elite experts in the race for search engine dominance. Google’s success was definitive proof that a longstanding axiom was empirically true: Nobody is smarter than everybody.

In addition to its meteoric rise as the search engine of choice, Google endeared itself to the public because it was a very different kind of company.as reflected in the “Letter from the Founders” that was part of Google’s IPO. Page and Brin wrote “Google is not a conventional company. We do not intend to become one.” With primary colors defining its brand and the motto “Don’t be evil” guiding its mission, Google earned the trust of an adoring public grateful for the powerful tool that gave most of us our first practical experience of the incredible power of collective intelligence. And this trust was reinforced for almost two decades because Google, in turn, continued to trust us and our collective wisdom.

However, that mutual bond of trust was broken when, in the early 2020’s, an unexpected pandemic became a transformational event that would poison social discourse, catapult an emerging new and intolerant religion known as Wokeism, and result in a massive censorship campaign that would silence the voices of those who challenged the federal government’s embrace of this new religion and its pseudoscientific narrative. Under immense pressure from government agencies, Google abandoned collective intelligence, amplified the voices of dictatorial elites, and actively censored the contrarian voices of highly educated professionals. Like Darth Vader, Google turned against its founding principles, deserted its stewardship of the wisdom of crowds, and promoted the rise of the government’s censorship regime, becoming the federal empire’s most valued enforcer. In short, Google became the digital personification of evil.

What is most disturbing is that, in abandoning collective intelligence, Google chose to embrace and reinforce groupthink ignorance on a scale never seen before. It’s important to remember that collective wisdom and groupthink are not the same. In fact, they are polar opposites. The difference between them is in how they view diversity of thought. In his book, The Wisdom of Crowds, James Surowiecki points out that one of the essential prerequisites for tapping into human collective intelligence is diversity of opinion. Without different points of view and the freedom to express those differences, accessing our highest form of human thinking is not possible. Groupthink, on the other hand, abhors diversity of opinion and will do everything possible to silence the voices of those who challenge the voices of authority, even when the establishment voices get it wrong.

One of the great ironies of the recent Covid episode is how much the official voices got wrong and how much the silenced voices got right. Throughout the pandemic, the public health medical experts insisted the following information was true:

·      Lockdowns are an effective way to diminish the spread of the virus.

·      Face masks are effective tools to prevent the acquisition and the transmission of the virus.

·      Schools need to be closed to protect children from the hazards of the virus.

·      A novel experimental vaccine that uses mRNA technology to engineer human cells to produce replicas of the virus spike protein is safe.

·      If people receive this experimental vaccine, they will not get or transmit the virus.

·      Mass vaccination of populations is the most effective way to eradicate the proliferation of the virus.

·      Natural immunity is not an effective substitute for the vaccine.

While this information was amplified by public health agencies, the pharmaceutical industry, mainstream media, and Big Tech oligarchs, a number of reputable scientists and clinical doctors saw things very differently. Based upon their professional experience and analytical research, they came to a different set of conclusions, which were labelled by the established authorities as misinformation and proactively censored in a now well-documented partnership between government agencies and social media platforms:

·      A focused protection approach, which had been the standard practice for managing pandemics for centuries, is the most effective way to diminish the spread of the virus.

·      Because the virus spreads by inhaling aerosols rather than droplets, masks do not prevent the acquisition and the spread of the virus.

·      Except for those with pre-existing health conditions, children are not at risk for adverse effects from the virus.

·      The experimental mRNA vaccines are not safe for two reasons: first, the short-term adverse reactions are significantly higher than all other vaccines combined over the past three decades, and second, the long-term risks are unknown and may not be known for years.

·      The experimental vaccines do not stop the acquisition and the spread of the virus.

·      Mass vaccination during a pandemic will provide an evolutionary advantage for the virus to morph into a multitude of variants.

·      As known for centuries, natural immunity is the most effective protection against the virus.

If Google had stayed true to its original mission to not be evil, the search engine could have made a powerful contribution to humanity by aggregating the collective wisdom of all professionals battling this novel disease. Instead, Google discarded the essence of the innovation that made them the market leader and, much like Darth Vader, went over to the dark side to become one of the most censorious editors the world has ever seen. Perhaps the greatest tragedy of this tale so far is that everything in the list above that the public experts told us was true turned out to be false, and everything in the list of censored observations above turned out to be true. In the end, it wasn’t the dissenting scientists who were disseminating misinformation, it was the official experts who actually propagated patently false information. By becoming the bureaucrat’s enforcer in silencing those who were actually telling us the truth, Google had indeed become evil, and like Darth Vader, realized an incredible fall from grace.

However, this fall from grace need not be permanent. The most compelling episode of the Darth Vader saga is his redemption and the ultimate actualization of his destiny. This too could be the future of Google, although it need not result in the tech company’s death, but rather its transformation. The most important step in a return to its lost promise is to rededicate itself to its original mission of rapidly aggregating the collective intelligence of its users to rank and present information. This means that the leaders of the company would need to stand up to their own staff—who are hardly exemplars of openness or diversity of thought—and it means welcoming and embracing people who think differently, not because you agree with them but because it is true that nobody is smarter than everybody. It also means standing up to the evil empire created by a corps of unelected bureaucrats who seek to control the national and global conversation by censoring anything that challenges the rule of the administrative state. This will take courage, because evil empires are formidable. If Google can once again be the aggregator of our collective intelligence, it has the opportunity to make a large contribution to the mending of a broken and polarized world by fostering the common ground that brings out the best in all of us.  Perhaps they may even bring balance back to the galaxy. It’s not too late. But time is short.

And read also:

The Emergence of a New Religion and the Looming Risk of Another Dark Age

Raids on the Unspeakable

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