Whatever Happened to “Don’t Be Evil”?

Over the past few years, there have been concerns about the management of content on social media sites, with some arguing there is too much misinformation that doesn’t belong in the public square and others who protest that there is partisan censorship of legitimate commentary. Until recently, these concerns have been mostly limited to political content. Although the quarrelling parties may find the behavior of tech companies bothersome, there is ample opportunity in our day-to-day discourse for the dissemination of various perspectives to correct for the concerns about political misinformation and political censorship. That’s because democratic societies—where people get to elect their leaders—tend to be both inherently pluralistic and inherently political.

Recently, however, the dualling concerns around misinformation and censorship have entered a new arena where the general public is less inherently informed and the opportunity for successful manipulative management is far greater. That arena is science, specifically the science around the Covid-19 pandemic, its origins, preventive measures, treatments, and vaccines. This is troublesome because while democratic societies may be inherently political, they are not inherently scientific.

Scientific differences, unlike political differences, are not subjective and philosophical. Scientific differences tend to revolve around contradictory hypotheses that can be objectively resolved through robust debate, experimentation, and data analysis. This objective process is an open inquiry that respects all voices in developing a deep understanding of the workings of nature. In resolving differences, true science values the evidence of data over the opinions of experts. Thus, one big distinction between politics and science is that, while usual work of politics is about the pursuit of power, the essential work of science is about the pursuit of truth.

One of the unfortunate consequences of the recent pandemic is that the lines between the arenas of science and politics have become blurred, which means the interests of truth and power have become comingled, with power seemingly having the upper hand, at least at this point. Principal protagonists in this state of affairs are Twitter and Google, which have been actively censoring the commentary of noted and highly educated scientists whose views differ from those promulgated by governmental scientific bureaucracies. This is alarming because there is no place for censorship in the pursuit of scientific truth. Censorship is toxic to scientific inquiry because it promotes bias at the expense of understanding and the status quo at the expense of innovation.

Twitter and Google’s role in the promotion of censorship is troublesome and disappointing because there was a time when both of these tech companies were leaders in innovation. In the the first decade of the new century, many business observers believed that these two enterprises would make the world a better place by cultivating human connections. Instead, they have been catalysts for dividing societies into fractious tribes. Rather than remaining neutral, they have taken sides in the ideological warfare that they have fueled. Rather than promoting the free speech and the free flow of information that is the life blood of functional democracies, these once promising companies have devolved into self-appointed Orwellian truth ministries, unilaterally deciding what information we can and cannot see. In the midst of these troubling developments, there is hope as the possibility for new leadership at Twitter promises to once again welcome open dialogue and diversity of opinion in the digital town square.

“Don’t Be Evil”

On the other hand, there are no such signs of hope on the horizon for Google, a company that once held so much promise for making a positive difference in the world. Once famous for its informal motto, “Don’t be evil,” Google was well known for being a great place to work. For eleven consecutive years, between 2007 and 2017, Google made Fortune’s list of The 100 Best Companies to Work For, impressively ranking as #1 for eight of those years.  The reputation for the tech company’s ability to innovate was so high that business author Ken Auletta would proclaim in the title of his 2009 book that Google would “end the world as we know it.”

The foundation for Google’s innovation was its discovery of the underappreciated phenomenon of collective intelligence.  In 1998, when Google entered the search market, Yahoo’s web directory appeared poised to break away from a crowded field of upstarts as the dominant choice for searching the Internet. Using a horde of expert editors, Yahoo had organized the myriad of web pages into an impressive practical catalogue. If you wanted to find information on the Web, most people were finding their way to Yahoo because their cataloging experts were better than their competitors.

However, cataloging takes time, and by 1998 the popularity of the Internet had begun to explode. The prodigious effort to keep up with the ever-growing number of web pages was becoming a challenge for even the best of editorial experts. It was at this time that Google’s founders, Sergey Brin and Larry Page, came up with the idea for a more effective way to catalog web pages that would not require the use of experts. By tracking user search patterns and trends using an algorithm the founders called PageRank, Google did a far better job of quickly finding the right pages than Yahoo’s editors. It wasn’t very long before Google easily supplanted Yahoo as the search engine of choice.

Succumbing to Monopoly Power

Google’s success was compelling proof of the long-held adage that “nobody is smarter than everybody.” Google gave the world its first mainstream practical application of collective intelligence and leveraged this application to become one of the world’s most powerful companies. However, as Google has cemented its powerful market position, something happened along the way that seems to be compelling proof of another adage made famous by the British Lord Acton: “Power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely.”

Over time, especially recently, the basis for Google’s search algorithms has shifted away from the collective intelligence of the users and increasingly reflects the preferences of an emergent group of editorial experts. As the company has abandoned its defining innovation and, ironically, morphed into the search model it displaced, it is increasingly using its solidified monopoly power to shape the thinking of its users to align with its chosen ideology rather than aggregating the thinking of the users to achieve the best results.

Today, rather than being a model of an innovative company, Google appears to be regressing into one of the most authoritarian companies the world has ever seen. Rather than ending the world as we have known it, Google seems to have succumbed to the temptation of centralized power and embraced the worst aspects of bureaucratic behavior. In its regression, the company has left behind its once famous motto as it engages in one of the most evil acts that humans can inflict upon each other: the censorship of the voices of those who think differently.

The Wisdom of Crowds

There is no place for censorship in the collation of collective intelligence. In his seminal book The Wisdom of Crowds, James Surowiecki identified the four essential conditions for accessing collective intelligence: diversity of opinion without censorship, independent thinking without fear of retaliation, local knowledge from those who have direct contact with a problem or subject, and an aggregation mechanism that can effectively integrate various perspectives. If any of the four conditions is missing, the ability to gather collective intelligence is seriously diminished, if not impossible.

The reason that Google’s original search engine was so powerful and why, despite being a late entrant into the market, it rapidly became the market leader is because it was the only search engine that met all four conditions. In the beginning, all user preferences were valued equally, no user’s voice was censored, the sheer volume of links guaranteed the inclusion of local knowledge, and the PageRank algorithm was an effective aggregation mechanism.

In building their search engine, Google provided the world with a powerful example of a new form of social organization: the distributed peer-to-peer network. This innovative organizational model is a radical departure from the centralized top-down hierarchical model that has shaped both corporate and governmental bureaucracies.

The chief distinction between the two models is in how they approach intelligence. Bureaucracies are built on the assumption that the most intelligent organizations are the ones who give power to the smartest individuals, while networks assume that the most intelligent organizations are those that can effectively leverage their collective intelligence. The meteoric success of the original Google search engine convincingly demonstrated which of the two models is more intelligent.

Missed Opportunities

If Google had remained true to its original search model and had cemented collective intelligence as the foundation for its future, the tech company might have fulfilled the promise of ending the world as we have known it by making the world a much more collaborative place. It had the opportunity to become the world’s most innovative company by extending the capacity for leveraging collective intelligence to more meaningful applications than Internet search or traffic navigation.

Image the good that could be realized if advanced collective intelligence tools were applied to scientific endeavors such as the management of a worldwide pandemic. If the divergent thinking of government scientists, pharmaceutical researchers, front line doctors, seasoned actuaries, and academic experts was encouraged and all voices were welcome on Google’s platforms, the convergence of their collective intelligence could have accelerated our understanding of a complex pathogen and could have opened up new opportunities for innovation in both treatment and prevention of the novel virus. Advanced collective intelligence tools might have transformed how scientists do science much the way they initially transformed how to best search the Internet.

Instead, Google and its affiliate You Tube are censoring front line doctors who are seeing clear evidence of effective treatments from repurposed and proven safe drugs that are affordable because they have been around long enough to be off patent. Without providing any semblance of reasonable due process, You Tube has removed or demonetized podcasts by or with highly credentialed scientists or medical professionals who have raised concerns about the long-term safety of emergency use vaccines. And it appears the algorithms in the Google search engine have been manipulated to suppress any information or data that does not support the official policies of governmental scientific bureaucracies. This is not the behavior of an entity engaged in science; it’s the behavior of a corporate bureaucracy overly invested in the party line and using all means of coercion to keep people in line.

It is sad to see how one of the early proponents of the mantra that information should be free has morphed into one of the most onerous censors of free speech. In the early 2000’s, who would have thought that Google’s approach to managing information would have more in common with the closed system of the Chinese Communist Party than the open principles of classically liberal democracies? Who would have thought that Google would align with the interests of the pursuit of power over the proponents of the pursuit of truth?

The work of science is always about open inquiry in pursuit of deeper understanding. As such, science is rarely settled, especially in the face of a new natural phenomenon. There is no such thing as “the science.” And there’s certainly no one individual or single group who can hold themselves up as the oracles of science. Whatever answers science arrives at, especially in the organic realm, are usually best knowledge and rarely absolute knowledge because there are always “unknown unknowns” in complex adaptive systems. There is usually more to learn, and it often the differing or dissenting voices who raise the questions that help us uncover the unknown. Questions are the essential ingredient in the pursuit of truth. When those who raise questions are censored, the pursuit is no longer about truth; it’s about power.