You're not wrong; it just goes way deeper than search engines, and certainly didn't begin with machine learning. As usual, blame the flesh-and-blood humans for using technology to spread their propaganda .
Most of the internet (twitter, google, reddit, and especially advertising) is a bit of a psyop, or rather, it has all become politics 2.0. People are more divided than ever over every hot-button topic you can imagine, and most of their opinions are just regurgitated versions of something they've read on the internet somewhere, even when they'd otherwise not even have a dog in the fight. Mention any of them and you'll literally have verbal warfare in a matter of 5 seconds (we've even seen this happen here like clockwork).
Why? Because it takes a million steps to disable that stupid google news feed on your phone, to make sure your ad-blocking browsers are up to date so you don't get fed a bunch of crap you don't want to see and to stay away from the propaganda machine (this comes from both sides, by the way). We just casually go through life pretending like this isn't psychological black magic, but what else do you want to call it?
Most of these top twitter and reddit political posts are likely bought, sold and orchestrated by their > 80% bot population (FBI's stats, not Musk's post-acquisition 'internal investigation') to make us all feel even more powerless, divided and sick to our stomachs than we already do.
But for those who want to ignore it and go back to sleep, I don't blame them. You literally can't avoid any of this stuff, and if anyone thinks turning off their internet for an evening puts any of it to rest, I admire their optimism. The roots are just a little too thick in our society now, imo, but to each their own.
Very much agree with most of that, although (just my
personal impression of it) it's less conspiratorial than which phrases like psyops bring to my mind.
It's the forces of very powerful entities (group and individual), with common motives (giving the impression of a conspiracy to many, hence easy to fall down
that rabbit hole, with all the manufactured entertaining irrationality to keep you sucked in), causing an increasingly toxic effect on the majorities mentality, almost all of whom are ill equipped and under educated to have a chance of not being manipulated by those controlling the means to transmit the media tailored to the main known social groups (according to their subconscious weaknesses, and how they can be manipulated). There's no one person or group controlling it, most involved consider the others as enemies, but it has common emergent effects such as the oh-so damaging polarisation and increasing extreme opinions and behaviour. Normally, healthy societies have negative feedback mechanisms to bring increasingly out of balance behaviour back into balance. Because of the nature and intended function of these Internet 'forces', and our inability to 'evolve' countermeasures, by dint of the very short timeframe this has been happening over, they've set up a positive feedback system, that is increasing the instability of ourselves as we pertain to our societies. This increasing instabilities massively increases the wealth to be generated (stolen), and this seems to me to be pretty obvious from the evidence, and mirrors similar things in financial markets and other socio-economic systems. And of course, just like in the, say, housing market, false profits are made, but the system becomes ever more unstable, until the inevitable crash (2008 anyone?). Think about what an equivalent crash on the 'net will be like? It won't
just be money at stake! I honestly can't predict that one, beyond the fact that I'm very sure it will be...
... significant!
The addition of more recent factors such as AI will just be the latest natural exponential increase, each getting more profitable, and more unstable, and more dangerous. This will continue the trend of moving more and more resources into fewer and fewer hands. Also, those hands will be less and less controlled by goverments, more and more by private interests. Just this principle alone is enough to guarentee, without this trend changing, a distopian world the like of which we can't come close to imagining (or I hope not, as that's one heck of an awful thing to contemplate!).
The above isn't from anyone else's blog or whatever. It may be wrong, but it's my mistakes, no-one else's.
I've also put decades of (amateur and informal) learning and study, often spending many hours a day, day after day (oh, you all know what I'm speaking of) making an extremely careful study, and come from a science background (20 years working in labs etc), and also am sort of immune to a lot cognitive biases (of certain types) that others aren't, and am good at debunking etc. You take you pinches of salt, and the obvious option I'm just BS'ing, or worse, think I'm not being biased etc.
But I'll try to discuss any details or whatever, that may seem contentious, to explain why I think what I think (as best my brain will allow, some of this is streamed, and I'm unable to remember what I've written without rereading! (that's my get out of course! when i can't answer it'll be - "oh, I just know it cos of how I am, so there!"
)).
