The New Mind Control – The internet has spawned subtle forms of influence

Read the original PageRank paper. Page and Brin themselves acknowledge that (while they were still academics):

[L]ess blatant bias are likely to be tolerated by the market. For example, a search engine could add a small factor to search results from "friendly" companies, and subtract a factor from results from competitors. This type of bias is very difficult to detect but could still have a significant effect on the market. Furthermore, advertising income often provides an incentive to provide poor quality search results. For example, we noticed a major search engine would not return a large airline’s homepage when the airline’s name was given as a query. It so happened that the airline had placed an expensive ad, linked to the query that was its name. A better search engine would not have required this ad, and possibly resulted in the loss of the revenue from the airline to the search engine. In general, it could be argued from the consumer point of view that the better the search engine is, the fewer advertisements will be needed for the consumer to find what they want. This of course erodes the advertising supported business model of the existing search engines. However, there will always be money from advertisers who want a customer to switch products, or have something that is genuinely new. But we believe the issue of advertising causes enough mixed incentives that it is crucial to have a competitive search engine that is transparent and in the academic realm.

It's looking like our only hope left is the recently declassified WMF search engine. I get that people didn't like Lila doing all of that grant in secret, but I find myself not really opposed to to Wikimedia taking on Google. In the long term, someone is going to have to do it.

I remember the '90s, when the Internet as we know it was just a baby... The enthusiasm we all shared for it. Of a better future. Of true democracy in the world. Of free people, free minds. The Internet will be the cure for all the social ills that humanity has experienced in the past. People will trade and talk with each other and that's how we can have peace on Earth!

We will be able to discuss, collaborate, create. We would be able to watch any film, listen to any song.

Some people called us "geeks", we liked to call ourselves "hackers".

We are not just hacking code, we're hacking a new world.

--

A quarter of a century later and most of those things are now reality. But somehow these great things have brought with them some hidden things. Things which we ignored or brushed off easily back in the day..

Like the fact that the Internet is now populated by the same demographic as the real world, not just hackers and dreamers. Now everyone is online.

We thought it would free us from oppression, but it is becoming the ultimate tool for oppression.

We thought it would give us true democracy, but it is becoming the ultimate moderation system for "foreign" though suppression and group think generator.

We though it will serve our needs, but it is becoming the thing that is telling us what to need. We thought it will satisfy our tastes, but our tastes are now being programed into us by it.

Of course we're still high from all the positive aspects and it's not in our nature to be scared of things, but that will soon wear off .. And when we wake up what will we find there ?

Either way, it is unstoppable and nobody can turn it off. So we only have to wait and see what it will ultimately turn into.

What will it be 25 years from now ? Will we still be able to discuss about this freely ?

I made it up as a way of rephrasing the parent comment from a different point of view.

I don't believe I've said anything about why I dislike for-profit enterprise controlling the world's most valuable institution, so I'm unsure how you could correctly infer my reasons for feeling that way. As far as capitalism, my statement was factually correct and I made no attempt to fully describe the institution. In fact I disagree that capitalism equates to the monetary exchange economy, as the latter has existed far longer than the former. I've made no recommendations for what the alternatives might be, only mocked the idea that, since the parent can't think of anything, we shouldn't ask the question. In fact your assumption that I am for centralized State Capitalism (to use Richard Wolff's definition of Capitalism) and top-down planning is again false. I subscribe to Marx's suggestion that workers should own the means of production, and do a reasonable amount of reading to support that belief.

In short, most of what you've assumed is incorrect.