Never Forget How Eagerly Apple And Google Coddled Fascism

Earlier this week I wrote about the tech press' hagiography of outgoing Apple CEO Tim Cook, and the media's uncanny ability to downplay or ignore his legacy of boring products and enthusiastic coddling of violent global autocrats.

Offhandedly I threw out the question of whether Apple's new CEO John Ternus would demonstrate something more concretely resembling a backbone when it comes to authoritarian appeasement.

Yeah, well, about that.

Last week you may have seen (good for you if you didn't!) that our mad combover king tried to rename Lake Ontario "Lake America" as part of his pointless and chaotic trade war with Canada. It's pretty typical Trump: thoughtless, chaotic trolling unconcerned with any real world impact to actual human beings.

Americans overwhelmingly (64%) think renaming the lake is stupid. Even many of the Republicans who live on the lake shore and have to deal with the real-world impact think it's stupid, offensive (the lake name has ancient Iroquoian roots), and pointlessly divisive:

“My hope is that, rather than allowing this decision to become another wedge that further divides people,” [Sodus Point, NY Republican Mayor Pat] Nolan wrote in an email, “it can encourage a broader discussion about the history of this great body of water, the Indigenous people who first gave it its name and the generations of communities that have grown along its shores.”

The name change is easily dismissable as something stupid (because it is profoundly stupid), but it's having a very real impact on small communities and tribes on both sides of the border struggling from the US descent into kakistocracy. Tourism is down, prices are up, bigotry is rampant; Trumpism sucks.

Google and Apple, the two most prominent modern map app companies, immediately threw their support behind making the President's offensive incoherence real, changing their mapping apps (at least on the US side) to reflect the change (just as they did with their "Gulf of America" capitulation).

Google (and its defenders) initially tried to pretend that they were just helplessly and clinically adhering to US Geographic Names Information System (GNIS) data. Something journalists later found out was a lie, because Google adopted the name change before the government could get its act together and implement it:

Google began rolling out this change for US users on Saturday. The company posted a brief update on its Google Maps blog, noting that it follows the US Geographic Names Information System (GNIS) for its maps, so the company implies it had no choice but to rename Lake Ontario in Google Maps, which is the most popular mapping platform in the US by a wide margin.

However, Google was even quicker to switch over to Lake America than the US government. While the GNIS database acknowledges the name change in a summary report, the base map layer still reflects the internationally recognized name of Lake Ontario. A message across the top of the USGS-operated website notes that the change to official maps is still pending.

Apple quickly followed suit, despite the fact literally nobody at the company outside of top-level executives actually supported the idea:

So courageous! Very innovative!

A few smaller companies, like TomTom and MapQuest, decided to ignore the change and leverage "having a backbone" as a branding market differentiator (Mapquest quickly became the most downloaded mapping app as a result, suggesting that even just hinting at being ethical can be good business).

It's yet another example where Trump's pointless and impetuous torpidity was avoidably enabled by a bunch of rich assholes with absolutely no meaningful interest in defending the public interest, keeping the peace, avoiding unnecessary division, defending geographical accuracy, or combating democratic decay.

It might lightly-imperil quarterly returns, you see. It would be a failure of their fiduciary responsibility to their shareholders to even try to protect the public at large from the madness of historically-unpopular race-baiting zealots. It might threaten regulatory approval for harmful, anticompetitive mergers. Having ethics and morality just doesn't make any financial sense. Surely you understand.

Both Apple and Google have no shortage of "fuck you" money, and could easily have taken a stand simply in defense of accuracy and product quality if they didn't want to wade into the ethical soup. Compliance was purely a self-serving financial decision by the kind of men who have a gaping sucking sound where any sort of courage or integrity might otherwise reside.

There's countless other examples where both companies have demonstrated they're actively, enthusiastically complicit with the horrors this administration has on offer, whether it's sanewashing Trump policy, helping Trump's masked gestapo indiscriminately monitor, capture and murder minority Americans, or censoring tools Americans use to try and protect their communities from racist autocrats.

And that's before you even get to their problematic coddling of violent authoritarianism internationally.

Huge swaths of Silicon Valley have either openly embraced fascism and racism or have demonstrated they have zero foundational ethics. It's equal parts dire and embarrassing, and should we manage to stumble back toward something vaguely resembling sanity, we're well served by refusing to forget the active, eager complicity of U.S. tech industry leadership when it actually mattered.

All of the promises of innovation and technological advancement in the world mean absolutely nothing if they reside in a moral and ethical vacuum, exclusively steered by the foppish whims of men who proudly celebrate their own lack of ethical introspection; genuinely surprised when the plebs then aren't appropriately aroused by advancements in automation software and shiny new data centers.

The end of Trump won't be the end of Trumpism and America's flirtation with authoritarianism. Future younger and smarter variants will seek to perfect the formula, and if our media and business leaders can't even confront the rank buffoonery of Donald J. Trump when he's arguably at his weakest, it's a very bad omen for the terrible beasts awaiting us just over the horizon.