The Evil Empire of the Internet must be broken up.

Posted by Pointman on August 18, 2017 · 23 Comments 

At the start of this year, I said that I was getting out of the climate wars because in my opinion we’d won and the election of Trump would finish it off. I knew as a no-nonsense businessman who recognised a scam when he saw one, he’d cut directly through the oxygen line of government money that kept it alive and eviscerate the government bureaucracy that’d grown up around it like a cancerous lump, which is exactly what he did. Other countries may be lagging behind that curve, but the writing’s still on the wall.

I wanted to repurpose this blog towards protecting freedom of speech on the internet. As an ambition to aim at, I’ve no doubt it’ll get approving nods all around the table but the problem with highlighting the loss of internet liberty is that it’s not being snatched off us in big power grabs. There’s no one big incident that makes it obvious to all what’s happening.

Instead, it’s slowly being encroached on millimeter by millimeter in such an almost imperceptible fashion, that it looks like an overreaction to point accusingly at any one of those tiny incremental losses which in themselves look entirely innocent. And yet, that’s exactly what’s been happening over several years.

Drip, drip, drip. That’s how we’ll lose our internet freedom, not with a bang followed by a big grab, but one little drip at a time.

Pretty much everything you do on a computer, and that very definitely includes your mobile phone, gets fed back to some corporation who collate it, data enrich it and then sell it on for a handsome profit to people wishing to know every detail of your life in order to better sell you something. You are not in the permissions loop in any of that activity – nobody is.

Fair enough you might say, that’s commerce, but don’t forget the flow of information is two-way. Not only are you giving them information about yourself, they’re supplying you with information, and that’s where it all starts to get very creepy and disturbing.

Increasingly and quite deliberately, the information being returned to you is being filtered and selected to only present a worldview that the information provider approves of. That world view is overwhelmingly left-wing, intolerant of any dissent, anti-western, anti-Christian and totally prepared to deceive you in pursuit of its own political ideology because secure in its arrogance, it knows it’s doing what’s best for you.

It actually goes further beyond that, they actually don’t give a damn what you think, because they’re ramming what they think down your throat. It’s a complete infringement on your human rights, never mind your privacy. Someone, somewhere is going to have to frame a digital rights charter or we’re lost.

Unless that happens, freedom of expression will retire to the dark webs, where no control can be exercise over it by anyone, leaving the surface web to the lotus eaters and the sort of slow spiritual decay akin to couch potatoes watching daytime TV and becoming potatoes themselves. As in Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 novel, the more independent personalities will abandon the mass media madness for the underground life, where you can at least put your hand on the porosity of a genuinely held opinion.

With the summary dismissal last week of the google software engineer James Damore for expressing quite politely what he actually thought, the big event finally arrived that ripped away the curtain of niceness behind which the grab for digital dominance was revealed in all its ugliness, and it was big time ugly.

A corporate environment of fear where diversity of thought would be rewarded with immediate dismissal, where it was permissible for the righteous to physically attack a dissenter from the true path, where free expression of one’s thoughts had long ago died on the altar of diversity, where ability no longer mattered but whatever minority you belonged to was desperately important, where honesty with and trust in colleagues became a thing of the past, because they’d betray you in an instant to Big Brother over one misplaced pronoun.

To any young person working for google I’d say get the hell out of there. These are your best and most inventive years. If you’re ever going to have a truly world smashing idea, you’ll never have it working in the Peoples’ Democratic Republic of Goolagistan. Totalitarianism stifles inventiveness every time, believe you me. Get the fuck out, even if it does involve taking a big drop in salary.

Working there seems like some God awful horrific version of an Orwellian 1984 Truman show where everyone is happy happy, with more than half the workforce living in terror of both the company and their co-workers, lest they get denounced for not truly believing or be added to the pretending to be happy happy spreadsheet by one of their beady-eyed colleagues who’re always on the lookout for filthy revanchists.

What a bloody nightmare of a place to work.

A working environment like that inside a company cannot help but be reflected in the product that’s being offered to its customers. That narrow set of approved attitudes and forbidden ones that govern the lives of employees in the Goolag archipelago is naturally reflected in the cherry picked search results returned.

I’m not going to do a massive list of what I know are areas which are heavily massaged by the google search engine before the results of a query are returned to a user, but just run a few simple queries that graphically illustrate data pollution, which is a fancy name for bending the query results being returned to you so they conform to google’s agenda.

Run the query “black couples” in google images and you get the result you’d naturally expect. Loving black couples, smiling cuddling and not a white face in sight. After all, it’s a simple query.

Now run “white couples” and see if you can spot something amiss. You’ve got it Sherlock, nearly a third of the pictures are of mixed race couples with even one picture of a black couple holding a white infant. I don’t give a damn what mixture of colour a loving couple are, but I do care a lot about having someone else’s social agenda bending over backwards to shoehorn itself into what is a straight forward query.

Since I’m sure the last observation raised the hackles of the racially hypersensitive, you might as well have the other barrel. Despite the racial tokenism that’s de rigueur on every television program on the box, of all the racial types a white woman might choose to marry, a black man is statistically the least likely, which is why that set of search results is doubly misleading.

Run the query “homosexual” in google images and you get pages of images of gay couples embracing, gay parades and pretty much lots of happy gayness. Notice that images of embracing lesbians have been shoe horned in as an added extra. I wouldn’t called them homosexuals, would you?

Now run “heterosexual” and see if you can spot whats wrong with that page of results. Jesus H fucking Christ on a chariot! Not one couple, dark violent images and even a picture of the moors murderer Myra Hindley, who with her partner Ian Brady kidnapped, sexually tortured and killed children.

My God, you don’t have to think too deeply about the mindset that produced that slant of results on the sexuality practised by the vast majority of people around the world. I really do object to being propagandised so blatantly. It’s an insult to anyone’s intelligence.

Sticking with google image search, try “american inventors” and see what you get. I know a lot more about science and its history than I care to bring to this blog whose main thrust is political, but I’ve never heard of two-thirds of the people pictured. Apart from them being black with a token woman or two being thrown in, I’ve never heard of them. I’m amazed a few white faces actually made it into that set of query results.

Do a straight google query “what party was abraham lincoln?” and it tells you he was in the National Unity Party. True, he was, at one time, but what’s being concealed here is that he ended up in the Republican party, a fact that most liberals find unbelievable, never mind highly unpalatable. As an early shaper of that party’s ethos, he set its tone to this day.

He switched parties because the new Republican party was the only anti-slavery party left after the political schisms over slavery, whereas the Democrats were pro-slavery. The Dems have fought emancipation and all civil rights legislation since 1865 right through to the 1960s and in the opinion of many still support slavery, though it’s now been rebranded as welfare dependency.

It’s not as if any of those queries are anything more than simple, and yet the results being returned have patently been manipulated to align with somebody’s idea of what a loving black couple looked like and their hatred of the stereotypical white couple, which must be assuaged by returning pictures of mixed couples. Pretty much the same obvious observation can be made about the sexual orientation query.

All those search queries were basic stuff and google lied to me with the set of results they returned. I don’t care why they lied, I don’t care about them somehow sacrificing truth in furtherance of some higher ideal. They lied to me. Most people I initially give the benefit of the doubt to and assume they aren’t liars or cheats. If I find they lying, I never trust them afterwards. That’s the experience I had with google several years ago.

I suppose after that largely graphic demonstration of how dishonest the results returned by google are, there’ll be a long line of people shouting me down as a racist or homophobic or whatever, but the nice thing about writing is that it doesn’t matter how loudly you shout or how many of you are doing it all at the same time, you can’t drown out the written word. In the end, all you can do to suppress it is burn it, and as the German poet Heinrich Heine remarked with a terrible prescience about the fate that would befall his beloved fatherland – first you burn books, and next you burn people.

Book burning – not too far down the road behind pulling down statues – that too is coming at you America. Where you go from there will be decided by those few leadership individuals of moral courage who’re prepared to face down the madding crowd. If you can’t bring yourself to read books by people you’ve decided to fight, how else can you learn the way to defeat them?

If you’ve followed this blog for a few years, you’ll know I’m all too familiar with being on the receiving end of racism and I don’t give a damn about what consenting adults get up to behind closed doors or which bits of themselves they choose to insert in whatever orifices of their partner. That’s their particular sexual pleasure and nobody else’s business, including mine.

I’ve known and loved too many people in that grand spectrum of humanity to be so foolish about such things.

In the past decade, google has spent in the region of $24B buying other companies. Some, like Motorola, they only bought for their patents and having stripped them out, sold the shell companies on. Most of them you might not recognise the name, but they’ve a significant market presence in their own area of business on the internet; DoubleClick, AdMob, NestLabs and Waze amongst others.

In total google owns more that 200 other companies outright and has a significant interest in many more than that, most of which you’ve probably never heard of. But some of the companies they own and control you’ll certainly know the name of. As an investor, it strikes me as a stark admission that in an industry sector where innovation is king, they’ve done nothing but tried to buy it in.

If your local postal service opened every letter you sent or received, photocopied the contents and then sent it on its way, you’d be outraged. That’s exactly what happens with every email that’s sent or received using Gmail. If you use Gmail chat, every conversation is recorded. Whatever you store using the Gmail cloud facility is accessible to them unless encoded.

Google owns Gmail.

People used to make a living on YouTube by creating their own content and uploading it to effectively create small alternative TV channels. YouTube has recently demonetised nearly all the videos produced by right-wing commentators. Before that, they just made them inaccessible on the grounds that they were offending the sensibilities of various parties.

It was actually google’s sensibilities that were offended, so now they censor all right-wing video makers savagely. There is no appeal against such high-handed decisions which doesn’t look and function exactly like a kangaroo court. Hundreds of hours of work of a person’s livelihood are gone just like that because whatever it was offended google’s politics.

Google owns YouTube

Hangouts is a popular mobile app that allows you to chat, share pictures and videos, make phone calls to each other and basically keep in touch with others. Everything on it is snooped on, recorded and added to your profile to be sold on to marketing companies who’ll repackage it for onward sales to the retailers who’re most likely to sell you something. Again, you’re not in the permissions loop for any of that.

Google owns Hangouts.

If your smart phone isn’t an iPhone, then it’s overwhelmingly likely it’s running the Android operating system. The vast majority of mobile phones in the world are now android phones. How much of what you’re doing on that phone is being eavesdropped on? How much of your private life ends up in a corporate data bank every time you use it? How much of it is sold on to third parties?

That rather natty voice recognition capability that works so well when you speak into a google search works both ways, it can take dictation of everything you say. In the end you have to ask the obvious question – just how long will it be until your phone starts deciding who you may contact or be contacted by?

Google owns Android.

One company owning and controlling that much of the internet is simply too much. One company patently abusing such a position of market dominance is intolerable. One company actively trying to impose its freakish attitudes and intolerant politics on the rest of the world can’t be allowed to continue. Google has grown to become the Evil Empire of the Internet.

It must be broken up.

It’s Friday and I’m up early to see the dawn because I can’t sleep and think it’s a quiet opportunity to put some finishing polish on this piece, but my tailored newsfeed has two stories that are not a good start to the day.

The first one is that the march against google has been postponed by its organisers because of threats by the fascist left known as antifa to attack any such demonstrations. The intent of the marches was to protest the summary dismissal of James Damore by google, but the pro-antifa media led by quislings such as CNN have denounced it as some kind of Nazi thing. Ordinary people exercising their democratic right to protest against an injustice have been intimidated off the streets by thugs.

The second one is the announcement by google that Gab will no longer be available from its google Play Store, apparently because of hate speech. Such a wonderfully versatile excuse to censor free speech. Given the bad week they’d just had, you’d think they’d pull in their horns, but the arrogance of the move in the current environment tells you all you need to know about them. They’re the boss. They don’t give a shit.

Gab is the uncensored version of Twitter and is full of ordinary people, mostly former Twitter users, sick to death of Twitter’s creeping censorship. Twitter is bleeding users to the point where it’s losing $45M a month and its fledgling competitor Gab has just raised $1M this month, totally from donations by its growing user base, who’re glad to have an alternative to the oppressive Twitter thought police.

Google, by removing it from play store, is trying to kill it.

Again, it’s pure market abuse of their monopoly position as both the owner of Android and the almost exclusive conduit of apps to people running it on their mobile phone.

If you type in “pointmans” into google, you’ll find I’m number one with a bullet, as we used to say when we were all stylish young dudes with lotsa attitude. I’m the first entry on the first page, but after this article, don’t be surprised if I magically teleport to page 50 of google’s results, as happens with so many viewpoints they don’t happen to approve of.

Gowon, do it google, and fuck you too, I don’t use you anyway.

Ronald Reagan once described America as “a shining city upon a hill whose beacon light guides freedom-loving people everywhere.” It’s an oblique reference to the Sermon on the Mount, Matthew 5:14 “You are the light of the world. A city that is set on a hill cannot be hidden.”

For me, the internet is that city on the hill, and now I fear the shining light from that city is in mortal danger of being extinguished.

©Pointman

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Filed under Article · Tagged with Censorship, Fascism, Google, NotAGW