People are focused on an AI aspect of Eric Schmidt’s commencement speech, because it got him repeatedly booed off stage.

While other speakers received cheers and applause, Schmidt’s speech about the impact of modern technology on society struck a nerve.

“We thought that we were adding stones to a cathedral of knowledge that humanity had been constructing for centuries, but the world we built turned out to be more complicated than we anticipated,” Schmidt said, referring to his own contributions to modernization. “The same tools that connect us also isolate us. The same platforms that gave everyone a voice — like you’re using now — degraded the public square.”

Schmidt added, “In the years after I graduated, no one sat down and resolved to build technology that would polarize democracies and unsettle a generation of young people. That was not the plan, but it happened.”

Students’ boos grew louder when he mentioned AI.

There’s something I want to draw your attention to that isn’t his mention of AI. Look at this line:

…no one sat down and resolved to build technology that would polarize democracies…

I call bullshit.

First of all, in 2012 I gave a presentation about exactly this being the risk of “Big Data”. I showed charts of rapid mobile device adoption in different countries and described the threat to governance from Big Tech.

Second, both Russia and the U.S. military analysts at this time were known to be working on “seed set” analysis how to cause polarization in large populations using social media.

Third, come on Eric, do you think nobody remembers Google history? Maybe I’m rare but I’m not the only one. You said no one sat down and resolved to build technology that would polarize democracies. That is a bald-faced lie.

Google built a global system for ranking, recommending, sorting, and advertising to several billion people. Leadership knew all along that the system shaped what users saw and what they believed. They knew it was changing how elections worked, how news spread, how teenagers felt about their own bodies. Google was warned by its own engineers, by outside researchers, and by foreign governments.

They kept going because the system made them rich and powerful. They felt so powerful that by early 2009, when they called me in to help them prevent the deprecation of SSLv3 (I instead engineered for them a smoother upgrade path to TLS), they said they were bigger and becoming more relevant than any nation in the world.

When the system then came under attack from a foreign state, they immediately switched songs and ran to the US government for protection. The Washington Post reported on February 4, 2010 that Google had contacted the NSA immediately after the attack; the Wall Street Journal reported the NSA’s general counsel drafted a cooperative research and development agreement within 24 hours of Google’s public disclosure. EPIC filed a FOIA request the same day as the Post story. NSA issued a Glomar response under Exemption 3 and Section 6 of the NSA Act, and the D.C. Circuit affirmed it. Here we are today sixteen years later and the records remain sealed?

When the US government later wanted help with AI weapons and AI national-security policy, it was Schmidt who personally chaired the commissions that delivered it. He invested in AI startups while authoring the commission recommendations that Congress wrote into federal law.

Am I surprised by the anti-democratic shenanigans of Googlers? No. I studied how American merchants treated naval protection as a tax on innovation until Algerian corsairs captured the Maria and the Dauphin in 1785 and seized eleven more American ships in 1793, after which the same shipowners petitioned Congress to fund the navy that became the institutional core of US power projection. No, I’m not surprised, I’m disappointed that Schmidt and his commencement speech hosts don’t think anyone remembers.

The polarization of democracy was a result of the intentional choices Google’s leaders made and kept making for twenty years, and Schmidt was THE GUY in the room for every one of them. That’s what his stage presence represents.

When he says nobody sat down and resolved to break democracy, he is challenging us to Google who made those actual decisions. And…

He was the chairman. It was him.

You want receipts? October 2010, Schmidt described running Google so hot that it would get “right up to the creepy line and not cross it”. Let me explain. Democratic deliberation runs on individuals deciding what to do. The head of Google was describing how they had been building the intentional opposite and trying to get away with it. The system was being built to know where users were, where they had been, and roughly what they were thinking about, with computers becoming assistants that wandered with people and tracked what they were doing.

If that wasn’t anti-democratic enough, the Silicon Valley ubermensch posture went on the record in 2013. Larry Page complained at Google I/O that regulators impeded them doing things “illegal or not allowed by regulation” and suggested “a part of the world” be set aside “to allow experimentation”. Schmidt did his part by publishing a Digi-Realpolitik book arguing that Big Tech could rise to peer status with states, inviting co-sovereign status of corporations to replace democracy (migrating citizens to just “user” status, without representation).

The 2026 disavowal has to contend with the 2010-to-present design program in which Schmidt personally declared Google’s policy was to test the limits of rights removal, co-authored the manual for a sovereignty system replacing democracy, chaired the federal commission that wrote AI into national security law, invested in the companies the commission’s recommendations would enrich, and founded a successor body to extend that toxic agenda after the commission expired.

“No one planned this” requires forgetting that he landed a New York Times bestseller in which he and a former State Department official planned it.

The Arizona stadium saw a man who spent two decades arguing in print and in policy that the citizen-state relationship should be replaced. His ask that he not be held accountable for it all, while he profited so directly from it, is disgusting and disrespectful to his audience.