“Everything is brutal, now we’re being watched by Google” sang the Leicester based indie rock group Kasabian. It may not necessarily be brutal, but it is watching everything we do, making a record of the websites we visit, what we purchase, collecting our demographic details and sharing that information with others to whom it may be useful. Their existence as the pre-eminent search engine, along with other linked functions such as Gmail, Google Drive, YouTube, Google Meets and Google Maps makes them almost impossible to avoid. When I am in China, the inconvenience of not having immediate access to Google—without a VPN (Virtual Private Network)—is a considerable hindrance.
I can live with all the above because Google and its attendant functions have made themselves almost indispensable. Google has the added incentive of being free to use. I am not involved in any illegal activities, so I don’t really care who knows what about me. I was irked at being suspended once for making a comment in a podcast about ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine, but I simply disconnected my podcast channel (over 20,000 hits) from YouTube (around 1000 hits) and told them in a message to ‘get stuffed’. Strangely, they did not suspend me for that.
However, things have taken a sinister twist at Google whereby, for users of Google Docs (yet another of its invaluable functions, of which I am one) they will monitor our writing and make more politically correct, ‘inclusive language’ suggestions for us to use. Described as ‘the woke feature’ this new tool, let’s call it ‘Google Woke’ will come down like a ton of bricks on gender specific language. In fact, ‘like a ton of bricks’ is unlikely not to trigger a suggestion as it might offend someone who has actually been buried under a ton of bricks. Thus ‘mankind’ is out, ‘humankind’ is in. Clearly nobody noticed the ‘man’ in ‘human’ there. ‘Policeman’ is out and, in the very unlikely event that you can find one, you must refer to him/her as a ‘police officer’. Martin Luther King Jr, already having a hell of a time because he advocated we ought not to judge people by the colour of their skin, even comes under the woke hammer. It is recommended that in his “I Have a Dream” speech, where he suggested “the fierce urgency of now” he should have said “the intense urgency of now.” ‘Housewife’ is verboten, instead—acknowledging that some housewives have willies—it is preferable to refer to a ‘stay-at-home spouse’. Lest some nutter is offended by the word ‘crazy’ we are urged to use the word ‘baffling’ instead. And quite how ‘property owner’ is an improvement on ‘proprietor’ beats me.
Foul language is out too so we will have to find other ways of calling someone a ‘sexually active birth canal’ or a total ‘someone whose parent with a penis was not in a legally binding but sexually exploitative relationship with the penis-optional parent’. That example needs some work as I realise two people who have penises or two people who lack them can also, by a miracle of modern legislation, also collectively be described as parents.
We can laugh, but how long before suggestions become compulsory and the linguistic stormtroopers at Google set the system such that you have no choice but to accept this nonsense? For example, they could make it impossible to save or to share documents unless your writing passes the Google Woke test of purity.
You may wonder how I know all this? Of course, I Googled it.
Roger Watson is a retired academic, editor and writer. He is a columnist with Unity News Network and writes regularly for a range of conservative journals including The Salisbury Review and The European Conservative. He has travelled and worked extensively in the Far East and the Middle East. He lives in Kingston upon Hull, UK.
