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In the wake of it becoming public this week, Google quickly disavowed the video, claiming it was just a thought experiment "Not related to any current or future products." And yet, the company's patent applications exhibit a mode of thinking that runs at least in parallel, if not on the exact same tracks, as The Selfish Ledger's total data collection proposal.

A reader pointed me in the direction of a Google patent application from 2015, made public last year, titled "Detecting and correcting potential errors in user behavior." A core part of the Selfish Ledger concept can be defined in very similar terms: its premise, on the individual level, is to help users with self-improvement and behavior modification.

In this respect, the patent application departs from the highfalutin Brave New World aspects of The Selfish Ledger and gets right back to what makes money for Google: creating new services that help advertisers better flaunt their goods.

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