When talking among themselves, Silicon Valley big shots sometimes say weird things. In an internal presentation in March 2018, Google executives were asked to imagine their company acting as a "good censor", in order to limit the impact of users "behaving badly".

In a 2016 internal video, Google's head of design Nick Foster envisioned a "goal-driven ledger" of all users' data, endowed with its own "volition or purpose", which would nudge us to take decisions (say, about shopping or travel) that would "reflect Google's values as an organisation". If that doesn't strike you as weird - like dialogue from some dystopian science fiction novel - then you need to read more dystopian science fiction.