This isn’t just about the election, though, but also about the changing nature between users — again, the product — and the online services we allow ourselves to be pimped out for. The disparities between the results for Trump and Harris simply highlight how stark the problem is.

Whether it’s Google or Facebook or Instagram, the initial premise of expanding easy access to information and apprising us of stories we might have otherwise missed has been largely destroyed. Google and Meta show us what they want us to see, not what we signed up to see, and it’s starting to turn people off. Maybe that’s a good thing, because most people need to spend more time in the real world. But when we’re trying to find a restaurant or information about voting or see pictures of a friend’s new landscaping or figure out how to get Elmer’s glue off the hardwood floors, burying those things under a mountain of nonsense makes us more likely to tune out.

Which is probably not just a good thing but a great thing — but initially the internet and social media were supposed to be about connecting us, about decreasing barriers to information. It would be nice if our tech overlords could remember what their initial goals were — in Google’s case, it was “to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful” — and return to those ideals instead of pushing us toward full “Idiocracy.”

I’m not holding my breath waiting for that to happen, though, particularly as Google itself deems such queries unworthy of answering.