"But it happened." - Casey Muratori's comment on Eric Schmidt's commencement speech

### TL;DR Casey Muratori criticizes former Google CEO Eric Schmidt for using passive voice to evade responsibility in his commencement speech — he personally oversaw the dark patterns of internet commerce, yet tells the next generation "it happened" and urges them to participate enthusiastically in AI decision-making. ## Background: The overlooked first half of the speech Last week, excerpts from Eric Schmidt's commencement speech at the University of Arizona circulated online. News focused on students booing him for his remarks on AI, but Muratori watched the full version and found the first half far more worthy of scrutiny. Schmidt said: "We believed that connecting every human being on earth to each other and giving everyone access to all the world's information would be a pure good. We thought we were adding to the great cathedral of knowledge. But the world we built turned out to be far more complicated than we imagined. The tools that connected us also isolated us; the platforms that gave everyone a voice... debased public space, rewarded anger, and amplified our worst instincts. We did not set out to build a technology that would divide democracy and unsettle an entire generation of young people. That wasn't our plan, **but it happened**." ## The passive voice and its shifting of blame Muratori points out that Schmidt uses active voice to talk about the good parts of the internet ("we believed," "we thought"), but switches to pure passive voice for the negative consequences: "it happened." If those words came from Steve Wozniak, people would understand — he wasn't involved in Apple's closed ecosystem decisions. But Schmidt served as Google's CEO and executive from 2001 to 2017, **exactly the period** when Google pioneered all the dark business models: ad tracking, data collection, A/B testing to manipulate user behavior. "For him to come out and play the Woz — basically like Tim Robinson in a hot dog costume, looking around saying 'I'm still looking for the guy who did this' — for him to say those things makes absolutely no sense." Muratori believes Schmidt may have genuinely compartmentalized responsibility: he only sees himself building the "search engine" tool, and the side effects are just unfortunate byproducts of a noble endeavor, not something he personally made. ## Second half of the speech: Hypocritical persuasion There's a reason students booed the AI section. In that part, Schmidt said: "I hope you will choose, no matter what, to participate, to be in the rooms where those decisions are made... Technology itself is just a tool. It only optimizes what we tell it to optimize. Someone has to make the decisions. Bring the values that first make us human." Muratori's rebuttal hits the mark: "Why didn't Eric Schmidt do any of those things himself? He just said in the first part of his speech that all these bad things happened on his watch, and he was in those rooms the whole time. He either didn't, couldn't, or wouldn't stop any of it." If he wanted to offer something valuable, it should have been introspection — admitting what went wrong, why he agreed to build all that crap on top of the tool. But he gave nothing except the passive "it happened." ## Deeper meaning Today's students have only experienced the dark-pattern version of technology: data tracked and sold, behavior manipulated, owning nothing. And now Schmidt, one of the chief architects, calmly tells them to be enthusiastic about the next wave. "They saw what Eric Schmidt and his generation of Silicon Valley decision-makers did the last time they were given a new technology... Now they're afraid AI will go down exactly the same path." Muratori urges us to acknowledge that these bad parts were **built by people**, not something that "just happened." Only by facing responsibility and failure can we avoid repeating the internet's fate with AI. **Source:** https://youtu.be/tlQ7EoJDTQY