How Google Killed the New Age

The New Age movement once thrived in the early internet’s open frontier, a vibrant mix of many ideas about health, wealth, and happiness. From meditation to energy healing, from positive thinking to abundance mindsets, it challenged mainstream narratives with bold, personal exploration.

In 1998, Google launched as a neutral search engine, indexing quirky New Age forums alongside academic papers. Search “chakra balancing” in 2004, and you’d find a diverse array of voices. But starting in 2008, Google shifted from open search to curated control, prioritizing corporate narratives through algorithmic changes like the Dewey update, the 2018 Medic Update, as the its “Do no evil” motto began to disappear.

This “curation” crushed the New Age, starving its websites, forums, publications, practitioners, conferences and festivals of those who were actively seeking and wishing to explore alternative ideas and solutions.

AI trained on this curated content now deepens the black hole, erasing alternative models of thought about human well-being across the board whilst society's physical, mental and emotional health statistics show an unfolding catastrophe in action, with no actionable solutions in sight.

2008: The First Wave of Suppression

In 2008, Google’s algorithms began favoring mainstream sources, marking the start of the New Age’s suppression. The 2008 Dewey update caused significant ranking collapses, with webmasters reporting traffic drops of up to 95 percent despite strong SEO and backlinks. Energy-related and holistic health sites were hit hard, as Google prioritized corporate media and academic journals over grassroots content.

The Atlantic noted in 2008 that the internet was shifting toward quick, clickable results, sidelining richer, alternative voices by boosting ad-driven sites, a trend driven by revenue over truth.

Google’s “Do no evil” motto, coined in 2000 to ensure “good things for the world,” started to waver. By 2008, criticism grew over Google’s compliance with China’s censorship, blocking spiritual content. Privacy expert Chris Hoofnagle argued the motto was losing meaning as Google’s ad model became standard. By 2015, Alphabet’s “Do the right thing” replaced it, and by 2018, “Do no evil” was quietly dropped from Google’s code of conduct’s preface.

This shift signaled curation over openness, marginalizing the New Age’s exploratory spirit and effectively excluding it from public discourse and, in the end, public awareness.

The 2018 Medic Update: A Final Blow

The August 2018 Medic Update formalized Google’s curation, targeting health, finance, and medical topics, with a focus on Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness (E-A-T).

Holistic health blogs, energy healing sites, and abundance guides lost 30-90 percent of traffic over night, replaced by WebMD, Mayo Clinic, and corporate finance portals. SEO experts reported even high-quality alternative sites were hit, with a certified fitness trainer’s site wiped out by the core update despite meeting “helpful content” standards. Google’s “Quality Rater Guidelines” favored “reputable sources,” labeling New Age ideas as fringe.

Search “energy healing” post-2018, and you’ll find mainstream wellness articles, not the New Age’s raw curiosity or any level of intelligent exploration on the topic. This is in spite of the reality that nearly 50% of people garner a “Medically unexplained symptoms” (MUS) diagnosis and mainstream health care fails to deal with this enormous problem.

The Actual Killing of the New Age

The practical fallout of this modern version of “shunning” an entire field of enquiry is devastating.

Desperate individuals in search of help beyond the main stream find no answers and are siloed into the existing channels of overmedicalisation and corporate approaches.

Informative, alternative, and complementary websites, once hubs for information about techniques, and the sharing of personal experiences, can't be found, get no visitors, can not be maintained and disappear.

Complementary health practitioners struggle to find clients, unable to compete with corporate giants like WebMD, because those they might help don't even know they exist.

Alternative conferences and festivals, once vibrant spaces for sharing methods, techniques, and mindsets through personal experiences, are vanishing, replaced by mainstream wellness expos or nothing at all.

Is this helping society?

Health statistics show rising chronic diseases, mental well-being plummets with soaring anxiety rates, and happiness indices stagnate. Gallup’s 2024 World Happiness Report shows no global progress. This is not progress. We’re losing the very models and theories the New Age explored, bold ideas for health, wealth, and happiness, that could move us forward.

AI Now Falls Into The Memory Black Hole

AI deepens this loss. Large language models, trained on Google’s curated content, prioritize mainstream sources, WebMD, CNN, Wikipedia, over New Age forums or blogs.

Ask an AI about “human happiness,” and you’ll get psychology jargon, not holistic visions of mind-body balance or spiritual joy. Google’s results are “highly curated tailored to what is considered politically correct,” and AI amplifies this, memory-holing New Age discussions of health, wealth, and happiness.

The Consilience Project highlighted how algorithms favor “emotionally charged” content for engagement, sidelining nuanced ideas. The early internet’s diversity, where alternative ideas thrived, is gone, replaced by a hub-and-spoke system favoring only the biggest corporate players.

Google’s “Do No Evil” Betrayal

The removal of “Do no evil” was a confession. By 2008, Google faced backlash for censoring searches in China, directly blocking spiritual content. Ex-employee Ross LaJeunesse, leaving in 2019, said the motto was no longer Google’s truth, reduced to a marketing tool. Projects like Dragonfly and Maven sparked 20,000 Googler walkouts over ethical lapses. The Guardian called Google a “distorted lens” stifling free thought. By prioritizing profit over its promise to “organize the world’s information” freely, Google succeeded in burying the New Age’s open exploration, and with it, a desperately needed new frontier of exploration into how we can promote human health, wealth and happiness beyond the materialistic reductionist paradigm.

Where Are We Now?

Google’s curation, starting in 2008 with Dewey, cemented by the 2018 Medic Update, and now further perpetuated, solidified and deepened by AI’s memory hole, killed the New Age’s visibility.

Search “spirituality” today, and you’ll get TED Talks, not 2007’s forums documenting lived experience.

Health, wealth, and happiness discussions are sanitized, stripped of the New Age’s bold questions.

AI warns of the dangers of energy healing, whilst at the same time, proclaiming that it doesn't work.

The New Age as we knew it is dead. Yet humans endure, and their quest for making sense of their experiences is more urgent now than it has ever been. Google might have accomplished the memory holing of the exploration in spiritual practices, and has given this legacy to the AIs we are dealing with today.

Perhaps it is time for a new iteration of the quest for spirit, the quest for soul, the quest for love for this time, one that neither those who are programming the machines, or the machines themselves cannot eradicate so easily.

Indeed, perhaps it is.

I think so.

Let's start right here:

The Third Field Manifesto

Silvia Hartmann

PS: It is of the essence that you share what you know with others. Please speak up. Thank you.

You have an amazing physical body.

You have a beautiful mind.

You have a radiant, living energy body.

You are a multi-dimensional being in the Oceans of Energy

- and YOUR HAPPINESS MATTERS!

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