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Google’s Selfish Ledger is an unsettling vision of Silicon Valley social engineering

Posted on May 18, 2018June 25, 2025 by Dissent

If Google intended a 2016 video on total data collection to be a disturbing thought experiment, it may have succeeded.  Vlad Savov of the The Verge reports:

The video was made in late 2016 by Nick Foster, the head of design at X (formerly Google X) and a co-founder of the Near Future Laboratory. The video, shared internally within Google, imagines a future of total data collection, where Google helps nudge users into alignment with their goals, custom-prints personalized devices to collect more data, and even guides the behavior of entire populations to solve global problems like poverty and disease.

But before everyone starts running around making posters to protest or new memes, consider this statement to The Verge:

“We understand if this is disturbing — it is designed to be. This is a thought-experiment by the Design team from years ago that uses a technique known as ‘speculative design’ to explore uncomfortable ideas and concepts in order to provoke discussion and debate. It’s not related to any current or future products.”

Read more on The Verge.

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