It's rare that Stratechery would use such strong wording: quoting 1984 and calling for the exit of key company employees.
Ben actually gave Google lots of credits in a previous article about Gemini's image generation. He attributed the mess to Google's intention to avoid criticism. I think it's the opposite: some Google employees feel that they are so righteous that they ought to "align" everyone else to think in their way -- a pure evil. Or in Ben's words: anti-evil.
People have speculated that Google search was highly biased, but it could never be fully proven. The "Generative" aspects of current AI models mean that bias is extremely easy to spot. Could it be that AI is the ultimate harbinger of truth? If more truth seeking models perform better, which is economically and socially valuable, attempts to censor models will fail in the long run. This could break long held media/propaganda power. What an interesting outcome
