“I don’t need to Google myself.” Nicki Minaj
Our dear friends at the International Monetary Fund recently published a blog post about the need to “uproot finance as we know it” in the name of (drumroll please) “financial inclusion.”
They tell us with alarm that over one billion people on the planet remain “unbanked.” God forbid these poor wretches don’t have a bank account or a Visa card at 30% interest, let alone a lengthy credit history! Something must be done to get them profitably integrated into the financial system.
The answer?
Fintech [financial technology] resolves the dilemma by tapping various nonfinancial data: the type of browser and hardware used to access the internet, the history of online searches and purchases. Recent research documents that, once powered by artificial intelligence and machine learning, these alternative data sources are often superior than [sic] traditional credit assessment methods, and can advance financial inclusion, by, for example, enabling more credit to informal workers and households and firms in rural areas.
It’s all very democratic and inclusive, you see. It allows financial businesses to have a more “intimate relationship” with you, the customer. The underlying process is simple. Make it impossible to function in modern society without being on the grid, then weaponize and monetize everyone’s virtual history.
And that means that Google is at the heart of the imagined new Fintech utopia.
KIM KARDASHIAN, COVID, JESUS, CLIMATE CHANGE & EATING GOOGLE
It is helpful to think of Google as the hub of a globe spanning virtual wheel. All of the spokes lead back and connect to the hub.
In 2021 and 2023, I published articles exploring this new Google-centric social credit scoring and surveillance system that is already a de facto reality worldwide. Both articles have held up well and are linked below with excerpts.
EXCERPT 1 – Kim Kardashian vs. Covid, Jesus and Climate Change: A day in the life of a fun loving Google algorithm
After two years of Covid-mania, neither the biggest celebrities and pop stars nor lurid tabloid-style homicide trials can compete with the search term “Covid-19.” It produced 3.75 billion results on Dec. 2, 2021.
With only 556 million Dec. 2nd results, “Jesus Christ” wasn’t even a distant second, and “Mohammed” only produced 361 million hits, even though there are 2.38 billion Christians and 1.91 billion Muslims in the world.
In spite of Covid’s seeming dominance as a search term in the algorithmic world of Google and electronic news media, by the end of Dec. 2nd, it nonetheless came in far behind a Google search for the word “porn,” which generated 4.16 billion results.
What does this mean beyond diversion or geeky technical analysis?
Read part 2, “Eating Google”
EXCERPT 2 – Eating Google
China is not the only nation implementing a national social credit regime. A 2019 article in Fast Company titled “Uh-oh: Silicon Valley is building a Chinese-style social credit system,” detailed the many ways that US tech companies are already using social credit scores “outside the law” to rate, punish, reward or ban users.
Google stands out not only because of its enormous impact on the daily lives of billions of people worldwide, but because of its evolution from a 2000 company code of conduct centered on the phrase “don’t be evil” to the replacement of this statement with “do the right thing” in 2018.
Google reinstated “don’t be evil” in a diminished role after employees and users revolted, but in 2021, a group of former employees filed a still pending lawsuit alleging that the company was actively engaged in evil actions through its close association with the Pentagon and US Customs and Border Control.
Google also worked with China in 2017-’18 on Project Dragonfly to design a search engine that would “filter websites and search terms that are blacklisted by the Chinese government” until a group of 1,400 Google employees signed a letter demanding “ethical assessments of Google projects.” In August 2018, a group of 14 human rights organizations also issued an open letter to Google CEO Sundar Pichai calling the company’s work on Dragonfly “an alarming capitulation by Google on human rights.”
During Senate testimony in 2019, Google’s vice president of public policy, Karan Bhatia, refused to “explicitly rule out working on tools for China in the future.”
In response to yet another employee protest in 2018, Google also dropped a contract with the Pentagon for Project Maven, which used the company’s artificial intelligence (AI) capabilities to analyze drone surveillance footage.
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