The Real Roots of the Internet and Social Media

[anthony]

1 hour ago, Brant Gaede said:

 Maybe It's they all got into bed together way back then and liked it so much they're still there.

--Brant

The combination theory makes the most sense for me. Not all one, not all the other - the false alternative. It's an interesting exercise, probably pointless, trying to imagine what things would be like without Big Government always on hand (for so long), the individual and group's chosen actions, made and not made, which would certainly have brought about a very different world as we know it. Maybe, in a few respects not "better" - but all of it freely made, organically, ground up, releasing millions of initiatives and interactions which would have been totally unaffected by Big G 'watching' (regulating, influencing, subsidizing, decreeing, moralizing, etc.) Ultimately then, much "better" , opening up many more achievements and the freedoms for more to come.

[tmj]

And /or , It is what it is , just what the fuck is it.

[Michael Stuart Kelly]

The video below has little to do directly with social media, but lookee what Corbett uncovered. (I like posting his stuff if I know it will piss off people who constantly mock conspiracy theories.  )

Don't forget, most of these gems were produced before social media.

So if the insiders in the government were spending money on that crap to propagandize their own staffs, what makes anyone believe they would not lick their chops at the prospect of funding social media for surveillance and propaganda in general?

Michael

 

[merjet]

1 hour ago, Michael Stuart Kelly said:

So if the insiders in the government were spending money on that crap to propagandize their own staffs, what makes anyone believe they would not lick their chops at the prospect of funding social media for surveillance and propaganda in general? 

Heh. It seems that MSK lacks some perspective.

Grover Norquist's organization Americans for Tax Reform reports:

"The federal government spends $1.5 billion annually on public relations -- $1 billion on PR and advertising contracts, and another $500 million on salaries for 5,000 federal PR employees, according to a report by the Government Accountability Office (GAO)" (link).

Facebook's 2018 revenue was $55.8 billion!
Alphabet's (Google's) 2018 revenue was $136.8 billion!
Like I said earlier, near 90% of their revenues are from advertising.

When money talks, does MSK listen?

 

[Michael Stuart Kelly]

Merlin is a poo-poo head, he's wrong, and I'm better than him.

   

(Everything from Merlin always goes there, doesn't it? Poor guy, I don't think he can help himself...  )

Michael

[merjet]

"For Google ordains that, at least within the realm under its direct control, there shall be no prices at all. With a few small (but significant) exceptions, everything Google offers to its “customers” is free. Internet searches are free. Email is free. The vast resources of the data centers, costing Google an estimated thirty billion dollars to build, are provided essentially for free" (Gilder, Life After Google, p.22)

Google has two different kinds of customers. One kind Gilder overlooks here is the advertisers. "In sales, commerce and economics, a customer (sometimes known as a client, buyer, or purchaser) is the recipient of a goods, service, product or an idea - obtained from a seller, vendor, or supplier via a financial transaction or exchange for money or some other valuable consideration." Wikipedia.  What does Google sell? Space.
 

 

[Michael Stuart Kelly]

Looks like things are starting to get real for the cronies.

Rubio asks White House to delay $10B Pentagon contract over Amazon concerns

I love it when insider crap starts going kaboom!

Michael

[Michael Stuart Kelly]

11 minutes ago, merjet said:

What does Google sell? Space.

Not exactly.

Google sells targeted access to its user base without their consent through a bait and switch.

It also sells that targeted access to governments in addition to massive massaged data reports and databases. In return, it gets sweetheart surveillance privileges using government resources and sweetheart crony market protections.

Michael

[Peter]

2 hours ago, Michael Stuart Kelly said:

Not exactly.

Google sells targeted access to its user base without their consent through a bait and switch.

It also sells that targeted access to governments in addition to massive massaged data reports and databases. In return, it gets sweetheart surveillance privileges using government resources and sweetheart crony market protections.

Michael

Google is private property but darn if they aren't acting like the Chinese government's bloodhounds.  

[merjet]

I'm reading Gilder's book, Life After Google.

His not regarding advertisers as customers of Google, Facebook, etc. weakens his analysis in several places and resulted in a falsified prediction. Following is one example on page 182. Regardless, he has a good grasp of the current situation with help from Brave, the browser that I mainly use now.

"When I wrote Life After Television, I expected that the inefficiencies of an interactive Internet would lead to a more targeted and effective advertising system that would deliver only the ads the viewer wanted. I thought the balance of power would shift from the advertisers to customers."

"Brave's compendiously cogent and scrupulously documented white paper from March 2017 details this crisis of Internet advertising. The situation is winner-take-all. Ninety-nine percent of the growth goes to Google and Facebook. Publishers – whether of websites, books, games, or music – are left with the final 1%. It is fraught with fraud. In 2016, fake ad demand generated by Internet bots cost advertisers some $7.2 billion, with ad malware to trick users rising 132 percent since 2015.

The advertising catastrophe is most acute in the fastest-growing and most inviting market in the industry – smartphones. Customers increasingly are paying their bandwidth suppliers not for the content they seek but for the noise of ad delivery overhead. At popular publisher's sites, as much as 79% of the mobile data are ads. On average, smartphone users pay twenty-three dollars per month for ads, trackers, scripts, and other diversionary chaff that bears malware, slows load-times, piles on data-plan costs, depletes battery life, and tramples privacy and property rights."

Like I said before, money talks. There is a difference between paying customers and window-shoppers. 

To support the above a little I did a test to get some numbers using Google Chrome. I went to some sites with Adblock Plus on, which tells how many ads are blocked. NY Times – 16. finance.yahoo.com – 24. Wall Street Journal home page – 59. Objectivist Living – 3.

 

[Michael Stuart Kelly]

56 minutes ago, merjet said:

His not regarding advertisers as customers of Google, Facebook, etc. weakens his analysis in several places...

Merlin,

I think this use of terminology does not come from Gilder, but from Google itself.

Google even refers to the services that it provides to users, both for free (search, email, docs, etc.) and for a fee (G Suite, Cloud, etc.), as "products." As for its ad network, I've only done things on AdWords, but I've only seen "advertisers" and potential advertisers referred to as "advertisers." Ditto for the Facebook ads network.

I don't recall either company ever referring to advertisers as customers.

Technically, if one decides to discard Google's meanings (or consider them wrong), you are correct, advertisers are customers of a sort. And there are those who use this meaning. For example, if you look around, you will find "exposé" kind of articles all over the place saying that you--the user--are the product Google sells to advertisers (i.e., eyeballs, those belonging to potential buyers of advertiser products). They emphasize that you--the user--are not really Google's customers even though Google calls you that. But I've never seen Google use these meanings. (Maybe it has. I just haven't seen it.)

So if Gilder is writing a book on Google, it seems reasonable he will use Google's jargon and meanings for words. Especially since he hobnobs with the Google brass all the time. Even then, it's been a while since I've read the book. But I bet if I look, I will be able to find passages where Gilder makes the same point as the exposé material.

I didn't understand your "falsified prediction" stuff. Split testing, not falsifiability, is Google's preferred method of user research (anyone who has tried to run Adwords knows they teach split testing for how to do ads, and they constantly tweak their algorithms with split testing, not falsifiabiliyt). I can see them using falsifiability in their technical non-human elements like electronics, but not in predicting human behavior. Frankly, I don't know anyone who uses strict falsiability as a standard in human behavior research.

Michael

[merjet]

13 hours ago, Michael Stuart Kelly said:

Merlin,

I think this use of terminology does not come from Gilder, but from Google itself.

Google even refers to the services that it provides to users, both for free (search, email, docs, etc.) and for a fee (G Suite, Cloud, etc.), as "products." As for its ad network, I've only done things on AdWords, but I've only seen "advertisers" and potential advertisers referred to as "advertisers." Ditto for the Facebook ads network.

I don't recall either company ever referring to advertisers as customers.

[snip]

I didn't understand your "falsified prediction" stuff.  [snip]

Does that mean Gilder is obligated to use it? Not to me.

Advertisers are customers per the common usage definition I cited earlier. "In sales, commerce and economics, a customer (sometimes known as a client, buyer, or purchaser) is the recipient of a goods, service, product or an idea - obtained from a seller, vendor, or supplier via a financial transaction or exchange for money or some other valuable consideration." From a finance and accounting perspective, the justification for calling Google’s advertisers “customers” is even stronger – they provide Google with revenues.

The falsified prediction I referred to was in the first paragraph of Gilder’s that I quoted. He expected that the balance of power would shift from advertisers to customers (users). That has not happened. In fact, the opposite has.

[Michael Stuart Kelly]

1 hour ago, merjet said:

Does that mean Gilder is obligated to use it? Not to me.

Merlin,

There is no obligation because there is no rule maker that must be obeyed, and, apparently Gilder forgot to consult you before writing his book...

The point is, you can either try to understand what he is saying, or you can congratulate yourself for getting him got good down and dirty by attributing meanings to his words that he doesn't use, then debunking your own meanings.

It's a choice.

In my world, I seek to identify correctly before I judge. Identifying incorrectly does not allow one to provide good judgments.

But, as long as you are at it, you might want to debunk all of Google for not using your meanings, too. That should make you really feel good.

 

Michael

[merjet]

1 hour ago, Michael Stuart Kelly said:

Merlin,

There is no obligation because there is no rule maker that must be obeyed, and, apparently Gilder forgot to consult you before writing his book...

The point is, you can either try to understand what he is saying, or you can congratulate yourself for getting him got good down and dirty by attributing meanings to his words that he doesn't use, then debunking your own meanings.

It's a choice.

In my world, I seek to identify correctly before I judge. Identifying incorrectly does not allow one to provide good judgments.

But, as long as you are at it, you might want to debunk all of Google for not using your meanings, too. That should make you really feel good.

 

Michael

  What evidence do you have that I am not trying to understand what Gilder says?

On the other hand, there is you calling me a shill for Big Brother, making inuendos about government surveillance, Google and Facebook wanting to "rule the world" and "conspiring with government", despite the government starting to investigate Big Tech for anti-trust violations. In addition, you used Gilder's book to try to justify your inuendos, despite Gilder's book providing no support for you.  

 

[Michael Stuart Kelly]

1 hour ago, merjet said:

What evidence do you have that I am not trying to understand what Gilder says?

Merlin,

Your own words.

(sigh...)

I tried to discuss the ideas, but you're just too smart for me...

My problem is my limited capacity to understand the grandeur of intellectual heights you achieve...

Michael

[Michael Stuart Kelly]

The following is for the reader, not for Merlin (he's too busy trying to win imaginary competitions to worry about things like this).

I was interested in the falsified prediction thing. I had skimmed the passage before and at first blush, nothing in the falsification universe jumped out at me. Although the idea was novel and unexpected, it didn't make any sense to me based on what I had skimmed. So I said I didn't understand it.

I just now looked with a critical eye to see what I missed, and I began to wonder why I am wasting time on this.

Here is the passage in question (Merlin quoting Gilder):

18 hours ago, merjet said:

"When I wrote Life After Television, I expected that the inefficiencies of an interactive Internet would lead to a more targeted and effective advertising system that would deliver only the ads the viewer wanted. I thought the balance of power would shift from the advertisers to customers."

And here is the allegedly falsified prediction spelled out.

3 hours ago, merjet said:

The falsified prediction I referred to was in the first paragraph of Gilder’s that I quoted. He expected that the balance of power would shift from advertisers to customers (users). That has not happened. In fact, the opposite has.

I learned a long time ago that meanings are to be gleaned from context, not in parsing words in such a manner as to attribute wrong meanings to them or wrong intentions to their authors. In writing, a good indication of context is in what precedes a statement.

Here's an example of a wrong meaning attributed to a word, but by mistake and not design. There's a famous story from Ira Gershwin (a lyrics writer and brother of George). He once wrote a song that included the the line, "I have loved you for years." During a rehearsal for a musical that featured this song, the singer stopped and asked why she loved the dude four years and not for five years or three years or any other number.

 

The reason this is funny is not just the pun. It's because this is a love song dealing with a universal emotion, love. That's the context. It's not a song about a calendar or timeline even though it is true that the ear hears "for" as "four" and vice-versa.  

Now let's look at the passage in question. What does "power" mean in that context? This is the main word since it is the thing being shifted or not.

So first question. Power of whom?

Gilder himself says: "advertising system." He means, of course, the advertising system on the Internet. (Google did not exist at the time he speculated on how the Internet would impact advertising systems.)

Next question. Power to do what?

Gilder says: "deliver only the ads the viewer wanted."

So Gilder says he thought the power to make that decision and effect it would shift from advertisers to customers and, from the tone (using the structure: back then he thought X, implying that now he thinks Y) , he makes it clear he thinks differently now.

Somehow this is supposed to be a falsified prediction because Gilder does not call advertisers customers and damned if I still can't see how falsification even applies.

Like I said, it's probably because I'm stupid.

 

Just to be clear, Gilder based his previous speculation by focusing only on elements of the Internet while ignoring critical elements of human nature. And now, decades later, he is writing from a deeper perspective of including those elements, which is why he changed his mind. But that has nothing to do with disproving anything by a falsification procedure to test propositions.

Gilder's main epistemological approach is not reductive (or deductive). And falsification is purely a deductive process. Gilder's process is mostly inductive when he speculates on large scale trends.

Anyway, I hope you--the reader--get something out of this. Granted, the issue is a bit obscure. I mean, after all, who gives a crap that Gilder used to think one thing and now thinks another? Or that Gilder's meanings are not the ones someone else approves of? Or even, if you use the perspective of most readers where their interest is Ayn Rand, who gives a crap about Gilder?  

The important idea, at least for me, is how the Internet works and how users are being manipulated by large organizations that use the Internet--specifically, private (or semi-private) organizations that are in bed with the government like Google, Facebook, etc.--who claim they are doing the opposite.

From a Randian perspective, the idea is that crony corporatism is bad.

In other words, I would like this kind of discussion to lead to thinking about ideas, not about someone constantly and indiscriminately crowing: I win and you lose, bwahahahahaha!

And if you--the reader--get no value at all from this, "Tough titty," said the kitty, "But the milk's still fine."

 

Michael

[Jon Letendre]

The continuing existence of these toxic and illigitimate products of crony statism is immoral and intolerable.

“The new antitrust inquiry is the strongest signal yet of Attorney General William Barr’s deep interest in the tech sector, and it could ratchet up the already considerable regulatory pressures facing the top U.S. tech firms. The review is designed to go above and beyond recent plans for scrutinizing the tech sector that were crafted by the department and the Federal Trade Commission.

The two agencies, which share antitrust enforcement authority, in recent months worked out which one of them would take the lead on exploring different issues involving the big-four tech giants. Thoseturf agreements caused a stir in the tech industry and rattled investors. Now, the new Justice Department review could amplify the risk, because some of those companies could face antitrust claims from both the Justice Department and the FTC.”

https://www.wsj.com/articles/justice-department-to-open-broad-new-antitrust-review-of-big-tech-companies-11563914235

[Jon Letendre]

Just like in Communist China.

Tell me again that Google is a decent, rights-bearing private company, Statist.

Google, FBI, bomb squad airing anti-Red Flag laws advertisement ...

https://truepundit.com/video-police-bomb-squad-there-were-snipers-on-the-rooftops/

“San Francisco Police, its bomb squad and the FBI surrounded the residence of Google whistleblower Zach Vorhies, just hours before he was scheduled to provide evidence to the Justice Department detailing how the tech giant has been manipulating its algorithms to promote an anti-Trump agenda and censor Conservatives on Google and YouTube.”

[Jon Letendre]

 

 

Democrats haven’t behaved this desperately since the first Republican President took their slaves away.

CIA’s Google is now openly intent on destroying knowledge and history.

Google, every employee, are the enemies of humanity. They shouldn’t be safe out in public.

 

 

 

https://mobile.twitter.com/DineshDSouza

 

Want to see for yourself how @Google lies? Or how progressives have faked the history of the civil war era? Google “Abraham Lincoln which party” and see what comes up. This!

 

 

 

1:46 PM · Nov 26, 2019

[Brant Gaede]

Using a truth to hide the truth makes a lie.

--Brant