Dismantling Google is a terrible idea
economist.com
economist.com
The company's primary purpose was search results and ads, and these have all but become useless compared to 10 or 20 years ago. Today, you can't find what you are looking for beyond surface level topics.
Google collates data on you in into dossiers on everything you do and then sell it to the highest bidder without full disclosure to the end user, in cooperation with other tech companies (Facebook et al; "signals").
They have been caught red-handed wiretapping millions of people while only getting a slap on the wrist (i.e. that Google Maps case with WiFi AP mapping from their streetview cars, and roving sensor networks). Each count there is a felony, they paid a measly fine of a few million while raking in billions from the sale of derived data.
They manipulate elections, leak AI secrets to China, and adopt algorithms that align closely with CCP rhetoric and practice (shadowbanning posts for or against certain topics).
We are getting close to entering a war footing with China, and Google is a strategic company with national security implications.
Any country in similar situations can't allow traitors of strategic importance to remain in privileged positions. Its a national security issue, and doing nothing is the worst possible outcome.
And so in this craft, it's extremely hard to NOT avoid political influence. Is someone trying to cheese your algorithm /AI ? Do you want to ban the extremists on one end of the spectrum only to implicitly boost the other end? Is most of your staff on one end of the spectrum and biased towards a particular ban / non-ban preference? And companies like google, facebook, and twitter.. they control the AIs that feed this messaging to most americans. Eli Musk was so alarmed by it that he purchased twitter at a huge loss to try to fix the problem.
Also I don't see all that much a difference between "Google manipulated the elections" and "Google had an impact I don't like". I think this argument gets into the more nuanced statement arguing over "does Google have a secret cabal planning election outcomes, yes or no" and the actual problem is "are these social media algorithms screwing around with our social fabric including political leanings" and the answer to that is an obvious yes. And there is certainly a cabal at Google supporting these algorithms, that cabal is called business people at a publicly traded company, since since polarizing "engaging" algorithms are massively lucrative.
For the most part you have this right, but the true scope is at a level that is unthinkable to most people. As bad as you think it might be, it is far far worse, and the breadth and depth of the darkness there can no longer be effectively communicated.
People don't want to know just how bad it is, even when knowing allows them some measure of defense. Knowing the objective reality of the techniques, how susceptible everyone is, where they come from, etc, it is all nightmare fuel breeding demoralized hopelessness for the future.
If you want an example of what Google has said they are doing, take a look at the selfish ledger, it was leaked a few years back.
At first it seems like an altruistic thing, but be aware, there are a number of false assumptions made in that leaked video, as well as apples to oranges comparison that are easily refuted by counter example.
If you know how the mechanics involved actually work, its quite simple to come to the end result of the claims in that video.
Slavery and then death, but the type of slavery where you don't know you are a slave and have no agency or recognition of reality enough to self-direct. Seems like Sci-fi, but this is entirely possible (given the current state of the art in this subject matter). Its been thoroughly studied back during WW2 where it was called menticide, there were laws against some of the primitives for these things (subliminal advertising, now repealed).
Nothing good can come of it, and what they say in that video is just an extension through technology of subject matter developed under Maoist torture for thought reform (1950s), where they made this work and broke perception. [Robert Lifton, Thought Reform and the Psychology of Totalism]
Its been a long winding progression from WW2 forward, where advances in science during that time included this dark subject matter.
Imagine this simple application to dating apps. You only see people who are not compatible with you. You go on dates, but never find a partner you are compatible with. You spend a lot of money, but as a result you don't have children.
You wonder where all the good men and women have gone when in reality they just stopped showing anyone that's compatible. They don't lose customers, and you don't have children, but you weren't given that choice.
This is how you can solve your global overpopulation problem in 20 years (through eugenics) by making it impossible for men and women to find compatible matches within the narrow time of their biological clock, powered by big data.
Increased interference in gender relations until it stops happening. Men go their own way. Women go their own way.
What can possibly go wrong when a company applies the biases which caused these changes to the perceptions of men and women interactions to the point where they stop and are incapable of having kids (the psychology pre-requisites aren't matched).
Then they find out after they've done it to everyone that its too late and that these changes like anything psychological are sticky and persist, and everyone thinks its their own idea. Will a fine cut it?
Imagine self-inflicted sterilization of your own race as a result of short-term profit and hubris... its almost biblical and psychotic but entirely possible.
This is the same basic pattern as what the USDA currently uses to eradicate a parasite called the screw worm, but this would have global reach.
Who can stop them when they don't advertise that they do these things and the capabilities aren't commonly known (and people don't want to know). The company only cares for short-term profit, but what about replacement birthrate.
Is the birth rate low? People just aren't choosing to have kids.... Food for thought.
Any species that is unable to adapt to their sometimes disadvantageous environments goes extinct. These tools being used, are basically mind viruses, cultural contagions that take advantage of blindspots we all have and it happens beneath perception.
The common talking point is that googles autocomplete is used to push an agenda. Censoring certain results and terms while making others more prominent.
Without getting too technical, the video link below covers the surface but this is just the tip of the iceberg.
Perception was broken back in the 50s, and there are many sophisticated ways today to manipulate perception. There is a lot of money in this.
They captured raw OTA radio traffic from all of their streetview cars, extracted information from the management frames (trilateration). Management frames were not protected at the time, and they made this collected information freely accessible through their map API publicly (for a time).
The gist being it met the legal requirements for wiretapping, they were fined and told to destroy the data. They may have done something similar with cell signals as well (though its unclear).
You can read more about it in the public records of the case.
I'm writing this as a subscriber of The Economist for over 15 years, someone who mostly admire their writing and reporting, even if I don't always agree with them.
The Economist ran a comprehensive review of their own coverage of climate change and renewable energy and last year, and admitted that they were completely wrong on the subject in the 70s and 80s. I wonder if a future Economist editor in 2060s would reach a similar conclusion about their current coverage of Big Tech.
But Google is also bad for the world in many other ways. They control our information. Through the curation of search results, censorship or demonetization policies on YouTube, policies on their ad network, and even seemingly harmless things like fact check labels on content, they control and shape our ideas. If you take their huge reach, control over the information we consume, and recognize the massive bias present in their employee population, it’s obvious that their existence is also a risk to our political process.
I haven’t even touched on the privacy issues, but they’re there.
But let’s set all of this aside, because I feel like we can waste a lot of time debating details and avoid taking action. Their size is a problem in many number of ways, and the specifics don’t matter. Companies that are too big corrupt our economy, our politics, and more. Let’s fight for better laws that make it very simple to break up companies that are too big.
We should split other similar mega-corporations as well, like amazon, Microsoft and apple.
The websites claim they have an independent editor chosen by committee, but corruption occurs in any centralized/hierarchical organization and corruption by dependency is one of the oldest forms of coercion that won't leave much in terms of obvious breadcrumbs. The objective quality and subject matter of the writing has degraded considerably.
About two decades ago they were pretty well respected, but not anymore. As you say, a sizable puck of salt is needed.
Otherwise, spot on. The Economist has become garbage.
It should go without saying, extreme leftists don't always identify themselves if their goal is to sneak into other groups for subversion and sabotage. They would have no real platform if they could not create the problems their counterparts need to generate a political base and platform following classic shock doctrine. This is how the Fabian's operated, and many other groups since then.
These types can be at either side of the extremes, and they'll have their planned global non-market socialism by 2030 without a dramatic course correction which seems increasingly unlikely.
Yes, they know it fails which is why China is trying to establish BRICS. If you don't see how they might do that, it goes back to a mix of core requirements or dependencies for economies (who decides by leaving, consumers or producers, when do they leave?(A. Smith)), money (3 components, when 2 fail...), money printing (ponzi stages of failure), and the natural mechanics of inflation where the interplay causes the market to shrink until state-dependent(controlled) apparatus are the only businesses able to produce (via preferential loans from the printer indirectly).
Failed systems of production lead to shortage, famine, and ecological overshoot reversion (Malthus). Economic calculation/exchange becomes impossible because even market Socialism fails without economic calculation (a real market is required). It ends up being a parasitic relationship where the parasite kills the host and itself at the same time.
I'm not going to provide any specifics, because frankly it adds no value to the current conversation and only opens the door for malevolent or uneducated individuals to try to create a struggle session through squelching/silencing my post from view.
Arguments about it serves no productive purpose when dealing with these types because they aren't rational, and often they seek to induce a response then discredit and manipulate through a variety of toxic forms.
Forms which would be the very next thing someone typically engages in with regards to requests of the nature you just made; if I was fool enough to provide this.
Under normal civil/social conditions, conversations like this could occur, but the moment someone can silence others using a system granted power (multiple accounts+downvote), there's no point; and if there is a difference of opinion where no communication can occur it inevitably falls back to natural law (social contract theory) where violence of one sort or another is inflicted; and I have no interest in participating or volunteering for that.
If you can't see the views in the writing, then the opinion doesn't really matter, if you can then its pretty obvious. In either case its an opinion and people are entitled to their opinions without some external malign influence being inflicted on them.
I'm not saying you would engage in such, just that these are the times we live in, these groups do exist, and they have dictated by their actions that only violence is acceptable. I strongly disagree. [see WHO WRHV for the appropriate defn]
If you are unfamiliar with the subject matter, you may find the ebook available at the USMC Press website of interest. The title is Political Warfare.
Link: https://www.usmcu.edu/Outreach/Marine-Corps-University-Press...
*sigh*
Its a simple opinion, I gave my reasoning why I won't respond.
It is not that important (opinion) and this is just a natural consequence of all the virtual lynchings going on.
So long as lynchings continue this will become more common behavior, and rather than intelligent conversation pulling people up to a higher level of thought, the opposite will happen as intelligent people withdraw, along with other detrimental chilling effects.
I'd rather not have it be this way, but I'm not the one doing the lynchings.
Asia is on a separate, parallel railway and they are getting awaaaaaaaaaaay.