U.S. President Donald Trump has asked Apple to change the name of Lake Ontario to “Lake America” on its maps app, his administration’s interior chief said Monday, days after signing an executive order over the body of water now in the spotlight amid his escalating trade war with Canada.
Interior Secretary Doug Burgum told Fox’s “Mornings with Maria” program that Trump “reached out to Apple directly.” He said he was confident the “Lake America” name could be seen on its platform soon.
Apple did not immediately comment in response. Only the Lake Ontario name appeared on its platform as of Monday afternoon.
Just over the weekend, competitor Google Maps rolled out the new “Lake America” name for U.S. users looking at the body of water that sits between the state of New York and Canada’s Ontario province. The company cited the recent order by Trump, and its already-established practice of using names assigned by the U.S. Geographic Names Information System, also known as GNIS.
“People using Maps in the U.S. will see ‘Lake America,’ those in Canada will continue to see ‘Lake Ontario,’ and those outside of the U.S. and Canada will see both names,” Google said in a brief statement on Saturday, reiterating that such updates “follow our long-standing policy for bodies of water with names that vary from country to country.”
Trump declared the new “Lake America” name last week — marking one of the latest provocations during his trade war with Canada that is now hiking tariffs on both sides of the border. His executive order on Friday directed the Interior Department to update the lake’s name in the U.S. geographic naming service.
The president cannot force Canada to follow along, however. And America’s northern neighbors quickly panned the idea. The leader of the Seneca Nation in upstate New York also said the move violates a more than 225-year-old treaty and shows a “blatant disrespect” for the Indigenous people who gave Lake Ontario its name in the first place.
I think what I don’t like is this implicit personification of corporations. Behaving as though they’re a single being, like they have a nationality, and they decide things as a single, shitty person. But corporations are not people, they are hiveminds. Google is an American company because they incorporated in America and no other reason, any American pride is held by individuals working at the company, not by any entity called “Google” and certainly not by the executives at the helm who can live anywhere they want on a whim.
People say things like “Google did this because it likes fascism”, but that’s our stupid monkey brain assigning intention to an observed cause and effect. In reality, there is a thoughtless system in place for handling this routine situation. The paperwork came across someone’s desk, they changed the string for a geofenced region like they always do, and then they clocked out and stopped thinking about it.
There is no “American pride” built into the system, and any special treatment of a situation you see isn’t “Google making the right decision”, it’s their PR system doing its job.
And their PR/localization system is fundamentally flawed and causes them to bend the knee to fascism. I wonder why they haven’t changed that process?
This isn’t about personification of Google or Apple. It’s about their systems, leadership, and processes that enable bending the knee.
You say you’re not personifying them, while also invoking the imagery of them as a person kneeling. Do you see my point yet?
A corporation is not a person. It doesn’t “bend its knee”. It is a system of cause and effect without any intentionality other than “maximizing profits”. Saying a corporation is bending the knee is like saying an LLM is apologetic for gas lighting you.
Google didn’t change the name of the lake because “it likes fascism”, it happened because it was profitable.
I don’t think there’s any disagreement on this point, I just want people to keep it in mind, because otherwise the next action Google takes isn’t going to make any sense. It might be something broadly perceived as anti-fascist, and all the commenters are going to say, “well, I guess Google had a change of heart. They must want to be on the right side of history.” And my point is: no, it’s always the same machine with the same goal.
Bend the knee is an expression, and groups and organizations can definitely do so. Just because it’s a group or organization deciding to do practices which are in line with fascism doesn’t mean they aren’t bending the knee. You are semantically taking the expression of “bend the knee” as a literal and not figuratively. Bend the knee is almost never used to describe someone literally bending their knee for someone else.
At multiple points, I have emphasized that people should never forget that Google was on the wrong side of history.
Imagery is figurative by definition. I understand the expression.
It is used to describe intention. A person bends the knee when they intend to serve some other party’s interests.
To continue the LLM comparison: you prompt it a question, it’s response is not accurate, you say “that’s made up”, it says “I’m sorry, you’re right, I made that up”. Did something actually just apologize to you? No, of course not. There is no intention behind the words “I’m sorry”, it’s just an algorithm minimizing an error term, and the characters
[I, m, s, o, r, r, y]were the solution. Importantly, if you ask the same question again, there’s no telling whether it will give the wrong answer or right answer, and either way, it wasn’t because of some intent to be more or less accurate.In the same way, there is no intention behind Google’s actions regarding this renaming other than to maximize a profit term. There is no intention to serve or resist a fascist state. Tomorrow their actions will not be correlated with today’s actions except to the degree that they maximize profit, and they should not be confused for the intentions of some intangible sentient entity called “Google”.