They celebrated it’s potential. They cheered it’s architectural structure and open source inclusivity. They said information would be liberated and a new era of enlightenment was upon us if we could just get the world connected. The quicker the better. The promise of the Internet to corral all of humankind into a portal of limitless possibilities died a long time ago and we are now reaping the multitude of consequences resulting from its hijacking by greedy, malicious, powerful forces – a combination of corporate and state colluders.
At the core of this information hijacking is the ultimate technocratic weapon in Google Search, an abstract tool with intentionally obscure engineering, where billions of people are deliberately herded daily for reinforced manipulation and control. It is such a powerful tool of deception on a global scale, nothing has ever come close to the level of damage it can wield against humanity in the wrong hands, rendering entire populations walking, swiping “truth machines” and “reality affirmers” in its service.
Information Prison
A few months ago somewhere deep in an episode of the Joe Rogan Podcast, Jaimie, the host’s trusted assistant and idiot savant of hyper mouse clicking for all corporate-state approved information began one of his pointless digital hunts through the mind numbing inverse panopticon of official sources provided by Google search. For years it’s been his go-to wellspring for informing Rogan’s viewers about those stubborn little ‘facts’ that Joe prides himself on providing for them. The assumption being that if everything is “fact checked” through Google on the screen for the audience, the conversation is approved to continue on toward the path of truth and enlightenment and Joe can insulate himself from his critics, most of whom are not interested in facts at all and would eagerly smear him for any reasons, real or fabricated, and all of them political.
In that episode of a few months ago, for the first time Joe conveyed the futility of Jamie’s actions many of us have felt for years, “Would you get off Google and use duckduckgo please?” he impatiently asked. In an instant 20 million impressionable minds were planted with a necessary seed of doubt about Google and how we’ve been conditioned to pursue information online, the collective false assumption being that it’s an efficient digital path toward facts and maybe even truth.
It’s vital that we all care again about both, but doing so requires we destroy our presuppositions about this heralded tool used to manipulate and deceive the world for years. The search for anything important in our quest for truth requires a dedicated effort of out-smarting those would seek to inhibit this noble aim.
At a pub gathering of graduate students some years ago for a Friday night “social” the topic came up of sources and citations, which was a first clue if ever you needed one that there was going to be no party there that night. The conversation meandered between various databases used by social scientists before it arrived at Google scholar and Google search. I remained silent until one person chimed in about contemporary events that haven’t been sufficiently researched. They all agreed Google search’s Artificial Intelligence and superior up-to-the-nanosecond link-scanning network-crawler capacities were the only option for the astute scholar now days.
“You will not find the truth using Google,” I finally spoke. The incredulous looks I got made me realize academia might not be for me after all. Silence hung over the table with an expectation that I continue. “It is designed to keep you as far away from the truth as possible.”
Now, as a postgrad at the time I was still naïve about the world of academia, and it never occurred to me that they weren’t interested in the truth. The average academic is concerned with publication points that can be awarded through submitting articles to various Journals that are edited by ideologues who have a very clear agenda and decide what gets approved for peer-review and what gets completely ignored. The more points a “scholar” earns, the quicker they might be eligible for full professorships and tenure track promotions. But I continued under the assumption they did care about truth.
“The same goes for Wikipedia and all other official sources. A handful of corporations control all the information in the world, at least they try to and that includes Google. They want you misinformed and ignorant so they can control you, distract you and deceive you into believing their version of history, their contrived narratives about current events and by extension the future. You know, ‘who controls the past controls the future’.”
Myself excluded, they were all specially chosen researchers from a pool of scholarship applicants across all EU nations. The promising future scholars of social science research on the old continent.
“Orwell?” I asked.
Liberty is not a very popular concept among European youths west of the Elbe and southwest of the Danube. They were not reared with Polish or Czech grandmothers to constantly remind them of a dank miserable life in its absence. There has always been bread on their tables and never someone accompanying that bread to tell them what life is like with no bread on the table. They were not taught in German, French or Italian schools the reasons why they should value liberty in life above all else, particularly the feelings of strangers or the dictates of bureaucrats. And now that they are on the brink of losing whatever crumbs of it they may have enjoyed with permission from their rulers in Brussels, it may be too late. Polish and Hungarian youth will simply say, “we told you so” and be called upon to liberate the careless half of the continent when things get much darker than they already appear to be. Will they do it, or will they build a wall to keep the millions of enslaved Germans and French from rushing east toward freedom? We cannot blame them if they choose the wall.
Republished with permission. To read the rest of the story, visit The Good Citizen.