Google search in service of life
Prototyping 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.
