Autocomplete

The UN made posters from Google autocomplete results about women. You know that thing where Google guesses what you’re about to search? They let it finish sentences like women are… and women should… and printed what the internet suggested. All the usual stuff—women are inferior, women can’t be trusted, women should stay home. The real shit people type.

Seeing those posters was strange because they were both completely expected and weirdly unsettling. Of course those searches exist. Of course millions of people have typed them, alone and anonymous, fishing for something to confirm their contempt. But there’s a difference between knowing this happens and having it printed out, arranged into a campaign, made visible. It forces you to reckon with how ordinary this is—how casual the misogyny is, how it just sits there under the surface of everything.

I don’t think it changed anything. The campaign probably didn’t shift many minds. This is still what the internet is—a place where you go to be honest about the uglier parts of yourself, where billions of small cruelties accumulate into something that just feels like normal life. But the campaign was at least direct about it. No framing, no interpretation, just Google showing its face.