I can't tell whether you're joking, wilfully misinterpreting the GP, or something else.
The past few years have highlighted some of the suboptimal machinations of our society, like collusion between government and media to silence domain experts who don't agree with a dominant political narrative[1].
The ethos of the internet is that it's a place where you can say whatever you want--the corollary is that I should be able to read whatever I want if it's being said. The relationship between me and people speaking is being manipulated, so, in that sense the ethos of free speech and the internet is broken.
The conclusion is that, no, in fact, you can't say whatever you want online. Saying that you can't guarantee an audience (without more context) makes your statement seem pejorative, as though the speaker feels entitled to an audience. The GP alludes to the free exchange of ideas, which your statement seems to ignore.
> The ethos of the internet is that it's a place where you can say whatever you want
According to whom? There are plenty of ways that has never been the case. In historical terms, its precedent was in enabling covert comms across large distances. In cultural terms, arguably its ethos is to facilitate the operation of the economy. In technical terms, its ethos is the segmentation and transmission of data. Insofar as you can even reasonably ascribe an "ethos" to machinery, in what avenue do you see this ethos of extreme freedom of speech? Because it sounds like you're saying a promise was broken that was never made.
> Lamont added that the badge data viewed by company leaders is aggregate data and not individualized.
Most Googlers are not consciously aware how accessible this information is; go/creepy from your Corp machine.
> The crackdown comes as the company is in the middle of an artificial intelligence arms race by which it has at times called all hands on deck to rapidly position itself against rivals like Microsoft and OpenAI, whose success has grown in recent months.
Like anything else, Google is it's own worst enemy. It morphed from a startup to a hedge fund plus some real estate investments (Data Centers). The company's sliding position in the industry today is a direct result of decisions made years ago around taming the "wild west" culture, as Ruth Porat described it--the culture that gave Google it's leadership position probably looked like a threat to a technocrat like Ruth. This translated into the implementation of bureaucratic, high friction procedures to do simple things like research and product development. Bureaucracy brought bureaucrats to enforce the processes. Everything became hard, so enough ridiculously smart, creative, and competent people left.
The relative proportion of those people to meh people changed just enough to point the company's nose toward the ground. Add to that changing hiring practices from focusing on raw competence to hiring for other "visible" characteristics, and you have the perfect storm. I'm unaware of enough people left in Research or in the Product teams that has a clue what they're doing.
From my perspective, the pairing of Ruth and Sundar was a principal factor in killing the company's competitiveness. If Google corrected today, we wouldn't see the impact for another 5-10 years; they're not far enough through the tunnel to see light yet.
That said, there are other valid and non-exclusive ways to explain all of this too.
I like that you're thinking about the second order effects of this phrase. That said, I might be wrong, but it seems to me that your argument depends on taking the phrase at face value rather than core value.
I might describe the core value differently: know your audience and focus on their needs, not yours (showmanship, looking busy, ego, etc.). By showing respect for your audience/user, you're helping them be better and more effective. Reduced to a phrase, it means that the audience/user shows up knowing what they want (even if they think they don't), so don't make them suffer for it.
The advice is about interface design, which is principally transactional. It's not social policy so, you know, it works.
When it comes to Google, I think it's important to distinguish the Larry/Sergey/Eric era from the Sundar/Ruth Era.* Old Google was decidedly not evil. One might dislike some of their choices, but they weren't evil.
* Having been there during both, I find it hard to reconcile them as a single company. Changes that started in 2015 only became obvious to many Googlers in the past year or two. It's the late afternoon for them and the morning's hangover is wearing off.
Could you say more about why you think that this is a terrible take? It's not clear to me from your comment. If you're being sarcastic: forgive me; bravo, well-played. Otherwise...
My attempt at a generous reading would summarize your point as "kids go to Stanford to finish their inculcation before we let them start taking responsibility for things. The idea of controlling potentiality destructive behavior is crucial for social control and stability."
The position I described strikes me as mechanistic in the extreme. I'll skip over my disagreement with "the enture purpose..." and focus on the big issue. Wouldn't it be better for everyone concerned to allow kids to make mistakes that affect just a few people, and be forced to learn how to navigate and resolve those errors-- that is, to build practical wisdom--before putting them in a position where their mistakes (due to a lack of perspective and emotional immaturity borne by living in tightly controlled conditions), affect many people?
It appears that you've taken an ideological stance, and interpreted all of human activity through the lens of your ideology. Hamlet et al are about a lot of things, but most of all, they're about the vast richness of human experience, how to read it, how to respond to it, how to navigate it.
To say that these things are about class struggle is to apply an impoverished, univariate analysis to a complex system; that approach is bound to end in error. And, having read broadly the literature in this field (primary and secondary), I can tell you that the errors are legion.
Don't try the "everything is read through an ideological lens" move, either. That's part of your ideological lens, it's not intrinsic to the system.
When the parent complains of politicization, they might mean that interpreting every stimulus through the lens of some perceived grievance (Marxism, Feminism, etc.) is very much a recent phenomenon, unproductive, divisive, extremely selective about facts, counter to the public good, immature and generally unwelcome.
You're welcome to complain, in private, but if you've read the texts that you complain about you should understand that society moves forward when people set aside their preciousness, show up and do the hard work--the sacrificial work of trying to make things better for anyone, not just their pets--not by tilting at windmills.
It seems as though you've conflated the management of perception with the practice of ethical research.
Google is very rich and that enables them to control resources and build things that make them richer. They're in positive feedback loop, and their job is to protect their advantage. Yep, sometimes capitalism gets out of hand.
It's the government's job (on behalf of their citizens) to apply the brakes, and Google has become pretty skilled at managing perceptions to avoid the brakes and maintain their advantage. This document is one part of their strategy.
So, apologizing for Google on the grounds of "they'd get bad press if they shared their toys" rings a bit hollow. They've dressed up self interest as social responsibility, and exploited this weird, radical left wing moment of ours to their advantage.
The past few years have highlighted some of the suboptimal machinations of our society, like collusion between government and media to silence domain experts who don't agree with a dominant political narrative[1].
The ethos of the internet is that it's a place where you can say whatever you want--the corollary is that I should be able to read whatever I want if it's being said. The relationship between me and people speaking is being manipulated, so, in that sense the ethos of free speech and the internet is broken.
The conclusion is that, no, in fact, you can't say whatever you want online. Saying that you can't guarantee an audience (without more context) makes your statement seem pejorative, as though the speaker feels entitled to an audience. The GP alludes to the free exchange of ideas, which your statement seems to ignore.
1: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twitter_Files