While Google says “digital wellness” is now part of the company’s ethos, not once during the Google I/O keynote did anyone mention “privacy.”
The shift of data ownership from the private to the public sector may well succeed in reducing the economic power of Silicon Valley, but what it would also do is reinforce and indeed institutionalize Silicon Valley’s computationalist ideology, with its foundational, Taylorist belief that, at a personal and collective level, humanity can and should be optimized through better programming.
Nicholas Carr reflects on the metaphors that we use and demonstrates some of the flaws, particularly when they are used against us inadvertently. This is something brought to the for with Google’s effort to support wellbeing. As Arielle Pardes explains: