This week I met a woman from Ukraine (Tanya) who totally blew me away with how she reacted when I tried to explain to her why I prefer rational media to irrational media. I didn’t actually refer to them with these terms, because that might have been more confusing (since most “mainstream” portrayals are almost the opposite, insofar as they usually portray irrational media as reliable rather than what they actually are — which is: overflowing with propaganda). At any rate, I myself consider the distinction to be rather simple and straightforward, and I think I presented it quite clearly in “Rational Media” [ https://phlat.design.blog/2024/01/14/rational-media ] (nonetheless: if you beg to differ, please feel free to voice your opinion 🙂 ).
In contrast, Tanya seemed completely baffled and explained that she couldn’t understand what I was saying at all. I think to her it seemed incomprehensible how anyone might consider (just) one source of information reliable — merely on the basis of being based on natural language. I think she mentioned that relying on just one source seemed … well, I already said it: incomprehensible (she was actually expressing herself in the very basic German she has been able to learn in the 2 years she has been in Germany since seeking refuge here from her own war-torn country).
I agree — in school, I was also taught to seek information from a wide variety of sources. Yet no one seeks information from an absurdly wide variety of sources. Let me give you an example. If you want to learn about what weather is predicted for the next day or two, then you would not consult a cookbook (even though cookbooks may very well contain certain atmospheric information, such as a note that the boiling point of water depends on the amount of atmospheric pressure in the environment). Searching for a weather report in a cookbook seems absurd — and yet so called “search engines” are supposed to cast such wide nets across the entire internet (yet note also the “world turned upside down” story I covered last week — see “I Want to Say Goo-Goo-Ga-Joob” 😉 ).
As I mentioned last week, only extremely naive people still do not realize that a search engine (like Google) presents information from a very particular perspective — namely the perspective that is most profitable for Google … now (Google executives seem to have learned something from John Maynard Keynes’ famous quote that “In the long run, we’re all dead”).
The mainstream narrative is that Google (like the Pope, cf. “If Google is the Pope of the Internet, Then Who Are You & I?“) simply tells the truth … and suckers (like “the mass of men, who lead lives of quiet desperation”) simply soak it all up. Suckers are so naive that that they simply believe this mainstream narrative — and therefore, they are ready, willing and more or less able to search for something … and erroneously believe that the results are not Google’s perspective … they seem to be so mesmerized that they actually believe such results to be “facts” (remember, remember: my post from last weekend 😉 )
The illiterate masses are indeed completely lost. Since even most literate people won’t remember, I will remind my readers that most of Europe was also completely lost and in turmoil for centuries after the Reformation brought about by the printing press.
Economists like to refer to such “world-changing” events as shifts. Let me (try to) remind those of my readers who are old enough to remember what situation the world was in when Google took the world by storm at the turn of the millennium. The world (and in particular: the Internet and even more specifically the WWW) was quite different than it is today. Back then, the vast majority of “content” was academic — written by professors with impeccable precision. Today, the vast majority of content is quite different — filled with bells and whistles produced by quacks and charlatans and influencers and journalists and advertisers and even machines and apps and bots that get “turned on” by the cheek of some teenager’s butt. Those two worlds have very little in common. Yet due to a large staff of expert lawyers and marketers (and many other specialists, too) a very large tech company (which might actually be deemed as “too big to fail“) can mesmerize large populations of people with rather limited literacy skills to believe that some hack that worked back then still works today. IT doesn’t — it was abandoned many years ago. It has been replaced by quite sophisticated engines (see the image above) which produce nearly nothing … other than huge profits for shareholders who are obviously quite far beyond “drunk on the koolaid”.
Any person, company, robot or whatever that purports to have no subjectivity — no “point of view”, perspective, opinion, etc. of its own should be considered laughable. Instead, shady characters are much more busy laughing all the way to the bank. Duping a global population of suckers is big business (see also “There’s a sucker born every minute“). The only thing that these tech wizards seem to have left out of the equation is a quip Frank Zappa once pronounced (and which is now preserved forever … — or at least until the cows come home):
“There’s more of us ugly mother-fuckers than you”
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Frank_Zappa#Tinseltown_Rebellion_(1981)
Then again: I have been warning that this giant sucking sound is just around the corner for years (if not decades) — so I guess I should add: “your milage may vary”.
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