That’s Google Pride

It’s Pride Sunday and I’ve got a complaint. It’s the equivalent of someone parking in my driveway and so not very exciting, but it’s a complaint nevertheless. Apparently, Google has seen fit to put a rainbow outline on my email icon. It hasn’t been there before and, I assume, will be removed once the trash has been swept away from the parades and work resumes Monday morning. I think it’s for gay pride. I could be wrong. It might be there because I am an organ donor (O neg). Or maybe somebody at Google has decided my photo needs more color.

But that’s not the point. What is the point? I don’t want anyone deciding things for me, not even a rainbow outline, no matter how I feel about gay pride. Or how Google feels about it. This is even more important when we’re talking about a corporate megalodon with an agenda. That Google is directly involved in progressive political issues is a problem. That they have involved me is unacceptable.

Google knows it can get away with it, because they are the new Borg. They fancy themselves the moral voice of a new generation, except they aren’t. Ask James Damore, the engineer who wrote a balanced if not perfect critique of the company’s policies and was fired for it. He took a risk, which is what they claimed they wanted, and was slapped down and humiliated for it. File that under “Hypocrisy: Lessons Learned.”

This is Google, a company involved in the manipulation of data and searches, censorship, surveillance, privacy violations, tax avoidance, and the dehumanization of the workforce. There’s a reason campuses are self-contained. Entire cities are next. Guess who’s contained? Free oil changes and lattes do not compensate for indentured servitude. Is there really a difference between being a cog in a wheel and a transistor on a chip? I think not.

This raises the larger and more interesting question of ideology and business. Ideology is a set of ideas, beliefs, and worldviews whose adherents insist ought to be the norm for everyone. They usually do everything they can to ensure that their ideology prevails, including violence (e.g., Leninism). Thus, ideologues are boorish at best, genocidal at worst, and murderous on average. Robespierre was one, which should tell you something.

When you combine ideology with business, you end up with corporate fascism, which is what existed throughout the twenties and thirties in Italy. The state controls political and economic power through and with business. So today you get the CIA and NSA meeting with Google to arrange data collection and mass surveillance of Americans and Obamacare acting as corporate welfare for the pharmaceutical industry. All of this is done under the guise of national security or progressive social issues. China, with its state-sponsored capitalism, arrives at the same point but from the other end.

I am reminded of the piece of propaganda that T-Mobile aired during Super Bowl 2018 that was all about “equality,” “equal pay,” and equal love. It’s manipulative, tugging at the heart by taking advantage of a group of babies. You might wonder what this had to do with cellphones. I did. The answer is nothing. But that wasn’t its purpose. Its purpose was to advance an agenda that, in the end, is not about equal pay or love. And this may be the hardest thing to convince people of, since bias has become so infectious as to warrant its own vaccine. Except some people wouldn’t take it.

The agenda is about establishing a corporate totalitarian order with no international borders, the unrestricted flow of capital and ideas, a single currency, two or three geopolitical blocks, a caste of managerial experts, and a socially engineered workforce, some of whom will be professional and continue to have their oil changed (batteries charged) and drink free lattes. Most, however, will be transistors on the chip.

Gay pride is a useful part of this, since it helps unify segments of the population around a highly-charged social issue with legal, cultural, and economic ramifications, not to mention its impact on families and children. It is also a rejection of past cultural and religious institutions. This is the new piece that has been added since Mussolini’s days. Sexuality is now at the service of the state. That’s an enormous force. That’s Google pride.

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Feature photo by Ghost Presenter; top photo by Brett Sayles; bottom photo by Jesse Yelin. All photos from Pexels. Like fiction? Check out the Mercury “trilogy” (The Gringo, Laura Fedora) here. Also, go to Robert Brancatelli. The Brancatelli Blog is a member of The Free Media Alliance, which promotes “alternatives to software, culture, and hardware monopolies.”