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Comment by clouddrover | Hacker News Reader

Force is only one form of influence. As recently posted on HN, search engines have a strong influence over their users' thinking and decision making.

Article: https://aeon.co/essays/how-the-internet-flips-elections-and-...

HN discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11255633

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Force is the ultimate form of influence against which there is only force to stand against it. I can stop using Google products tomorrow without the need for a gun or explanation.

The article is sowing some serious FUD. Everything is engaged in behavior modification. That's the basic point of products and services. Watch more/better/less/no TV. Exercise more. Eat healthier. Stand up at work. Reward yourself with a candy bar/bottle of wine/vacation.

I don't know. I'm not sold on fearing Google. The government I do fear.

Optimization of consumer behavior through endless A/B testing optimizes behavior in favor of the corporations, not the society or the individual. So one of my bigger worries is that these optimization strategies will lead society into a dead end local maximum where everyone is perfectly conditioned to consume for the good of the corporation, when we could have taken a different path resulting in a more egalitarian outcome.

Another worry is that through subtle manipulation of search result ordering, page load delays, news feed filtering, etc., Facebook, Google, et al. could influence politics and culture in counterproductive ways, even if only by algorithmic accident.

This is discussion that has happened in economics for a long time. I am still utterly inconvinced of the pure power of advertsing. Sure it has a big influence, but its not like google is so good that everybody is just a mindless zombi perfectly conditioned to buy whatever they show me. Even if that were the case, Im not clear why this would lead to less egalitarian outcome.

Your second point is in conflict with the first. If they want me to consume as much as possible, they have to show me what I want. If they want to influence broad culture they have to show me what they want me to see. If it is by algorithmic accident, then its like all cultural devlopment. Its all accidents, nobody planes the evolution of culuture, google, facebook and reddit have already changed culture and will continue to do so.

You points are a small worry, compared to something like the prospect of 1984.

> Force is the ultimate form of influence against which there is only force to stand against it

Gandhi would disagree with you.

The weakness of hard power is that it is expensive, blatant in application, and virtually guaranteed to create opposition. The strength of soft power is that it is indirect while being cheaper and less likely to create resentment. People are best manipulated through suggestion rather than coercion.

Hard power is ugly but at least it's obvious. Soft power can be just as ugly by being insidious.

Gandhi operated in an era before governments and businesses really had the "soft power" thing figured out.

Gandhi was a lucky guy because he was doing his opposition thing against a British Empire. Think for a couple of seconds what would have happened to Gandhi in the USSR. The British Empire had for a long time put itself in a position of bringing freedom and culture and when British trained Indians started to quote there own rhetoric back at them.

Gandhi had the extreme luck that WW1 and WW2 were happening effectively totally changing British culture, British power and so much more.

Soft power can be ugly and insidious but I still vastly prefer to deal with that then with a guy taking a baseball bat to my knie. If the worst problem liberals have to fight is the Google sort algorithm and the amazon recommendation engine then we are in a pretty good position.

Force isn't what keeps the US government in power, established norms do. If those norms were weaker, or if enough people were upset enough to upset the norms, you'd see how much force can do without all the softer stuff around it.

> I can stop using Google products tomorrow without the need for a gun or explanation.

True, but that would not stop Google from tracking you everywhere, via more than a dozen tracking systems.

Also, even if you don't use Gmail, Google may still have about half of your emails, maybe more.... https://mako.cc/copyrighteous/google-has-most-of-my-email-be...

The ones having monopoly on violence are a much stronger force. There is indeed a constant balancing act between them and the masses, but at the end the sooner you accept that that is the real and ultimate power, the world and its inner working, across cultures, will become clear to you.

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