A Google search in service of life

Prototyping the use of Actual Intelligence for sustainable transformation

When a company is so big that it is also an action verb, and one that’s done billions of times each day, influencing what we buy, where we go, how we get there, and what we believe along the way, then this company has an outsized impact on our lives and our commons.

And when the goal of such a company is financial growth, while externalizing or simply ignoring most of its impacts on human and ecological health, it has a devastating impact on our lives and our commons.

Alphabet Inc, aka Google is one such company.

This piece features key insights and supporting data from the first ever Matereality assessment, which I conducted on Google in 2022 — in and for the commons — and recently updated.

A Matereality assessment is an open-source method that uses a company’s own public disclosures to show what they say they’re doing compared to what they’re actually doing, and then compares that with what is required to serve life.

We can think of Matereality as a very special kind of software: Actual Intelligence, something we are all born with and can use for free whenever we like.

The following is a quick “Matereality check” on Google using this methodology. And then, drawing on my decades as a sustainability consultant, I also provide additional insights which were revealed through the Matereality assessment, including an analysis of investor communications and stakeholder perspectives.

Matereality check: says vs does?

What happens when we look at Google through the lens of Matereality? The first question Matereality asks is: what does the company say they do? Google’s answer appears noble: their mission is to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.

We’re concerned with reality here in the Matereal World. To get at this, the second question Matereality poses is: what does the company actually do? The answer to this question is quite different. Google’s core business is advertising, across a range of on-line platforms and services. Their advertising revenues are already huge (earning over $237 billion in 2023), and they plan to do more, faster. Google sells advertising using AI and personal data to fuel consumerism and profit.

That’s what they actually do.

They have several ambitious sustainability goals and initiatives, but these don’t mention — much less pretend to reverse — the fundamental harm of the core business.

What needs to be true instead?

The third and most important question Matereality seeks to answer is: what is required of this company to serve life, to enable people and ecosystems to thrive as a result of its core business? To answer this, Matereality invites perspective from diverse international stakeholders, including human and more-than-human views. The results yield ideas about what is needed—and possible!—instead of what we have today. With that in mind what could life-affirming Google’s mission be?

When we consider an economy that serves life, a different Google emerges, one that creates a healthy commons, practices data symmetry, and incentivizes the wellness of all living systems.

Current real-life Google is nowhere close to that life-affirming mission. The following summary of the Google Matereality assessment explores:

• the company’s origins compared to its current state;

• a nod to the positive work underway;

• three key themes with recommendations for Google to change in service of life;

• bonus round: one very simple reason why AI worries me in this context.

The fine print, inspired by Google, only more symmetrical

This assessment is based on Google’s own public disclosures in their Security and Exchange Commission (SEC) filings, investor earnings calls, and numerous other public disclosures as well as voluntary stakeholder interviews. The assessment summary, interviews recordings, and resource links are available here.

I also share many observations and writings on the subject 100% free and publicly (see links in assessment appendix). Below, I provide more detailed commentary and an audio version of this article, available for subscribers only. Subscription details (including an option to access all content for free) are available here.

My intention is to inform industry decision-making within technology and other global publicly traded firms, to ensure the lens of serving life is put in front of all else. This requires huge transformation, which I believe is both entirely possible and way more fun than the alternative.

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🔲 Comments are welcome, as are corrections.

Let’s get to it.

Once upon a time, Google was awesome

The company’s origins began in a far more commons-oriented place than where they’ve ended up today. Looking at a concept document of Google from 1998, it is heartbreakingly quaint to read the founders’ observation that, “the goals of the advertising business model do not always correspond to providing quality search to users,” followed by their belief that “the issue of advertising causes enough mixed incentives that it is crucial to have a competitive search engine that is transparent and in the academic realm.”

And it’s beyond heart-breaking to see what happened after that. The IPO letter in 2004 from those same founders included an eerie foreshadowing.