I have to say though some of their examples are weird.
You should be scared and deeply angered that Google is attempting to force changes to language which are mainly based on some radical political ideology.
I am absolutely concerned about some of their actions, like their paused "inclusive suggestions" [1]. There's a big difference between providing a guide and highlighting words in an email that are marked as 'wrong' purely for perceived cultural reasons.
Google's suggestion to change "landlord" for example, which has very specific cultural baggage and, more importantly, legal definitions, to something else is definitely wrong and worrying. I think it takes a certain arrogance that maybe only a Silicon Valley tech company can have to try to change how billions of people speak.
I'm not sure how much of an ideology it is though. Like the writers guide above, once the reasonable suggestions have been made, the authors seem to overreach to find more things to "fix". If a persons job depends on finding "problems" they will simply create new ones once the run out of legitimate ones. I think that's true whether it's planning officers for property development or politicians.
I don't believe I said that is the case. A situation with poor or unintended incentives is not hard to imagine.
1) A team is tasked with providing suggestions to improve emails
2) "Inclusive language" or avoiding potentially insulting language is added as a feature by higher ups
3) The more entries in the "Inclusive language" feature the better the outcome looks to management or it helps meet some arbitrary employee metric (velocity or x issues resolved or similar)
4) More and more entries get added because it is easy to do
Google's suggestion to change "landlord" for example, which has very specific cultural baggage and, more importantly, legal definitions, to something else is definitely wrong and worrying. I think it takes a certain arrogance that maybe only a Silicon Valley tech company can have to try to change how billions of people speak.
I'm not sure how much of an ideology it is though. Like the writers guide above, once the reasonable suggestions have been made, the authors seem to overreach to find more things to "fix". If a persons job depends on finding "problems" they will simply create new ones once the run out of legitimate ones. I think that's true whether it's planning officers for property development or politicians.
[1] https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2022/apr/25/google-word...