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

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

#81

Post by mirimir »

hellbanner wrote: post #34
md224 wrote: post #9

I have made this case before, but I will make it again. The Internet is the largest information system in the world, and Google is the primary portal into that information system. Google's "organic" results are accompanied by AdWords results, which are based on a mixture of bid price and relevance. These ads are marked with a small "Ad" label that many people miss, and even those who know they're ads can't really "un…

Personally I've found Google to be frustratingly difficult to search in recent years. I can't find articles & essays that I remember fondly because the namespace is so polluted with Great SEO.

Google is getting worse. I find that restricting date range in search tools can provide more useful results. But I'm not sure why.

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

#82

Post by api »

justsaysmthng wrote: post #65

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.…

The big error of the 90s digital utopians was over-estimating how much the Internet would change society and under-estimating how much society would change the Internet.

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

#83

Post by x5n1 »

tdaltonc wrote: post #79
x5n1 wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How do you think the media mughals made their billions. They made them doing exactly this.

So you think some one paying twitter to get those tweets to show up? And not through the "sponsored" system?

Dunno. Hard to say. Could be, or could be their algo saying you would like it. They will always claim the latter.

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

#84

Post by __jal »

daodedickinson wrote: post #75
hellbanner wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Personally I've found Google to be frustratingly difficult to search in recent years. I can't find articles & essays that I remember fondly because the namespace is so polluted with Great SEO.

Have you fond a better search engine? I keep failing to find what I need on DuckDuckGo or it's kin and having to go onto Google, where I find what I was looking for. Of course, one can always suggest that I am just better attuned to Google (I have Google Fu from long experience with Google and wrongfully expect DuckDuckGo Fu to be the same skill and have not developed DuckDuckGo Fu).

I'd suggest spending some time learning DDG. It is a very good engine once you get used to it.

Another trick I use with Google, especially when I'm searching things that are outside of my usual interests, is clearing my cookies. Best I can tell, this makes it skip the statistical model of me that, say, suggests 'logging' is more about daemon output than about killing trees.

Now if only all the engines didn't have such a bias towards "new" material. My major search-related frustration over the last while has been how buried things become over time, especially if they share identifying lexemes with things in the news.

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

#85

Post by vezzy-fnord »

TaylorAlexander wrote: post #69
vezzy-fnord wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your highlighting of "for-profit enterprise" takes me back to old Catholic anti-usury biases. They are rather juvenile. I'm also unsure of how you managed to reduce "capitalism" to the mere monetary exchange economy, which completely evaporates all substance out of the already butchered term. I also hope your idea of "ethical alternatives" doesn't involve what amounts to state corporatism, which all the progressives…

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 existe…

The Bakunin critique of Marx is then relevant, since the dictatorship of the proletariat is trivially hijacked by vanguardist interests. Moreover, Marx's diagnosis of capitalist breakdown in Vol. III of Capital has failed the test. The scenario of rising organic composition of capital (ratio of constant capital to variable capital) triggering a falling rate of profit and a growing reserve army of labor has not played out. Marxists scrambled to revise the thesis. Lenin and Luxemburg proposed imperialism. Rudolf Hilferding spoke of "finance capital". Ernest Mandel himself identified a stage of "late capitalism" borrowing in turn from Sweezy and Baran's "monopoly capital". Prebisch and Furtado developed the dependency theory model of international trade. The interpretations of capitalism are so numerous that Marxism has become incoherent in explaining it, aside from the problems of historical materialism as a method of historiography with its overt bias to economic determinism.

Ideal scenarios of worker cooperatives and revolutionary syndicalism haven't at all materialized. Instead, it has led to platformist organizations that are the laughing stock of anarchism. Don't forget that Georges Sorel's idea of national syndicalism developed from his Marxist revisionism ended up giving us Spanish and Italian fascism.

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

#86

Post by tdaltonc »

erikpukinskis wrote: post #53

Google could send people to places that are contrary to the user's interest, but that's essentially deliberately decreasing the quality of one of their products so I'm not that worried about it. If they do it's a (big) market opportunity for someone else. I would go even farther: I'm not particularly worried about individual interests at all, on any subject. The Internet is very good at exposing them. I am much more…

It's not trivial to ascertain what a users "interests" are. And I think that's the debate here. Google optimization algorithms are an embodiment of a value system, and maybe I don't agree with it.

McDonalds also gives people what they want, but only in a very narrow sense of 'want'.

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

#87

Post by waterlesscloud »

api wrote: post #82
justsaysmthng wrote: post #65

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.…

The big error of the 90s digital utopians was over-estimating how much the Internet would change society and under-estimating how much society would change the Internet.

There was a fair amount of resistance to society changing the internet from that crowd in the 90s. They've turned out to have been pretty much right, they just lost the fight.

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

#88

Post by tbabb »

md224 wrote: post #22
pcmaffey wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The library is a catalog of books produced by publishers for the sake of making money. Your example doesn't hold weight, as there is no "purity of information". Even your own insights are filtered through the perspective of your personal influence, your wants, your desires, your history, etc. Google is no different. The organic search results are largely from commercial, or at a minimum, self-interested sources. That…

I'm just saying I wish we could have only organic results. Why should people with more money have more of a presence online? Money shouldn't be able to buy speech. The Internet should not be a place where those with more money get to cut the line in front of those with less. Let PageRank sort it out. Also, what's this about my example not holding weight because "information purity" doesn't exist? It's not about the i…

I don't think sponsored results are a big deal, as long as it's transparent, and "pure" results are easily accessible too (and they are).

We live in a society where advertising exists. I'm not saying I like advertising, but it is a basic skill to be able to differentiate advertising from content. If some people can't tell the difference, I don't think that's a very strong argument for saying the practice should be banned.

Having some cruft around my search results is a small price to pay for a free service that basically powers modern society.

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

#89

Post by l33tbro »

md224 wrote: post #9

I have made this case before, but I will make it again. The Internet is the largest information system in the world, and Google is the primary portal into that information system. Google's "organic" results are accompanied by AdWords results, which are based on a mixture of bid price and relevance. These ads are marked with a small "Ad" label that many people miss, and even those who know they're ads can't really "un…

Maybe because libraries are not private compaines? I mean, you mention competitors not having the revenue to crawl an increasingly complex web. But how else do you see them being able to facilitate this without a similar advertising strategy to Google?

I just have little patience for complaints about free products like Facebook, Google, Twitter etc. They cost you nothing but time and attention - both of which you have complete control over.

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

#90

Post by erikpukinskis »

tdaltonc wrote: post #86
erikpukinskis wrote: post #53

Google could send people to places that are contrary to the user's interest, but that's essentially deliberately decreasing the quality of one of their products so I'm not that worried about it. If they do it's a (big) market opportunity for someone else. I would go even farther: I'm not particularly worried about individual interests at all, on any subject. The Internet is very good at exposing them. I am much more…

It's not trivial to ascertain what a users "interests" are. And I think that's the debate here. Google optimization algorithms are an embodiment of a value system, and maybe I don't agree with it. McDonalds also gives people what they want, but only in a very narrow sense of 'want'.

It doesn't really matter if it's trivial. It's in Google's interest to do it so it tends to happen.

McDonalds isn't really uniquely bad. Burger King, Jack in the Box, et al are basically the same. They are a perfect example of what I described: a class of actors to whom there is benefit to acting in concert against the best interests of consumers.

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