Self-Education vs Behavior Modification.
An Exploration Of The True Nature Of Some Of The Most Dominant Online Platforms In The World
Google and Wikipedia are some of the most frequently visited websites globally. These online services have become a prominent go to facet of everyday life in the western world when we are curious to learn more about something. The idea of being able to type in a few key words on a smart phone and get access to pages and pages of information on a given topic appears very efficient and convenient at first glance, but I feel it is important that we keep in mind that we live in a time of corporate hyper-consolidation, massive government corruption/conflicts of interest and AI bot systems dominating the internet. Thus, I feel it would be wise for us to strive to exercise a keen sense of discernment when using these services to research and seeking to educate ourselves.
The article below provides some of the many reasons we should take google search results, wikipedia articles (and material from other sources such as facebook/youtube) ‘with a grain of salt’. While in the past these online resources/networks may have (in some cases) been a great way to get access to unbiased studies, network with like minds and tap into citizen scientist info, I have found that there seems to be some sort of dramatic transformation taking place in which search results on google are being custom tailored with the intent of behavior modification, social engineering and the suppression of pertinent scientific data and discoveries being censored (because they do not align with the narrative being pushed by the dominant institutions/corporations). This trend towards censorship and behavior modification is becoming very prevalent in YouTube as well now (with entire channels being taken down simply because the users were sharing data that did not support the dominant big pharma narrative). The so called “fact checkers” on facebook are another such expression of this phenomenon where big tech companies are moving away from facilitating people connecting and more towards intentionally manipulating perspectives, behaviors and access to data to perpetuate the status quo.
Wikipedia is no exception to this emerging pattern of dominant online platforms disseminating corporate propaganda (labelled as “science” or “expert consensus”) and being involved in behavior modification initiatives (intended to perpetuate the status quo). Wikipedia, which Google (Alphabet Corp.) relentlessly promotes, normalizes conflicts of interest by giving the impression that it is an unbiased encyclopedia while taking money, via the Wikipedia Foundation, from drug giants (including Bristol Myers Squibb and Merck), weapons contractors (BAE and Boeing), Big oil (BP, Exxon), Big Tech monopolists (Microsoft and obviously.. Alphabet corp) and banks (Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan). In 2011, donors to the Wikimedia Foundation — -the entity that enables Wikipedia — — included Google co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin. When one uses Google to find out about a particular subject, the Wikipedia entry for the given topic usually ranks within the top three returns, along with a mainstream media article along with the given subject’s website (if one exists and if that website is not on Google’s “blacklist”). This is a powerful echo chamber: A tech giant (Google) directs users away from content its programmers consider “unwholesome” (suppression) and towards approved sites (ranking). Researchers Lee and the team note that “Wikipedia articles are a constituent of 95% of all Google searches. Even poor quality pages in Wikipedia get millions of hits because they benefit from the popularity of the site”. ( https://bit.ly/3tquGzM page 184).
Founded in 2001, the English-language Wikipedia now has over six million entries, or “articles”; as “Wikipedians” call them. Around one-third of them were allegedly written by a single man: Steven Pruitt, a contractor with the US federal government (Customs and Border Protection), whose parents met at the Lackland Air Force Base Defense Language Institute’s Russian Department, San Antonio, Texas. In addition to these ties to the military–industrial complex, it is worth noting Wikipedia’s increasing reliance on automation. Reportedly in his spare time and using AutoWikiBrowser, a semiautonomous tool, Pruitt became Wikipedia’s №1 editor with 2.5 million entries to his (and his robot’s) name. Corporate media promoted Pruitt’s achievements, with Time magazine naming him one of the most influential internet users in 2017.
By that year, Wikipedia’s entries totaled nearly 40 million across 291 languages. Each day, around 860 new articles are added. Edits number 817 million and average over 21 per page. In one month alone (June 2015) over 374 million people visited Wikipedia. If published as books, Wikipedia’s entries would have totaled 15,930 volumes by 2013. The Wikimedia Foundation operates under US law, is directed by a board of trustees and raises money for Wikipedia’s servers and equipment. Between 2006 and 2009, the Foundation morphed from a volunteer-led organization to a global institution with a centralized HQ and paid staff. With early supporters dropping off in protest over the Foundation’s centralization, the Wikimedia Foundation is compared by Professor José van Dijck to the US Corporation for Public Broadcasting and to the Public Broadcasting System/Service (PBS) in terms of its corporate-like structure within the supposed remit of providing a public service. Until 2006, the notion of a massive collective of contributors simply did not apply, with just two percent of editors making over 70 percent of the edits.
Beginning 2006, elite usage declined but hierarchies remained. The lowest in the pecking-order are blocked users, unregistered users, new users and autoconfirmed users. The middle classes are the administrators, bureaucrats, stewards, and bots. It is interesting that bots are higher on van Dijck’s scale than humans. The elite of Wikipedia are the developers and system administrators.
By 2010, 16 per cent of all edits were made by bots. “The most active Wikipedians are in fact bots” writes van Dijck, who compares this power concentration to other user-generated content platforms. By 2010, the system administrators consisted of just ten people. Ten out of 15 million users. Introduced in 2002 to save on administration work, Wikipedia’s editors employ an army of bots (457 in 2008) to make automated edits: 3RRBot, Rambot, SieBot, TxiKiBot, and so on. There are generally two kinds of bots: admin bots and co-authoring bots. Admin bots block spam, fix vandalism, correct spelling, discriminate between new and anonymous users, ban targeted users, and search for copyright issues and plagiarism.
Tools that alert human editors include Huggle, Lupin and Twinkle.
The co-authoring bots began with Derek Ramsey’s Rambot, which pulled content from public databases and fed it into Wikipedia. Between 2002 and 2010, Rambot created 30,000 articles by pulling data from, among other places, the CIA’s World Factbook — another example of Wikipedia’s ties to the military–industrial complex. Compared to proprietary algorithms such as EdgeRank and PageRank, Wikipedia’s licenses are open, yet new editors are welcomed only “tactically”. Within this system is a techno-elite that designs and operates the system that manages the myriad users. This prompted organizational controls, including the distribution of permission levels and the expansion of exclusion and blocking protocols. The growth of hierarchy resulted in rising complaints about what became a cumbersome bureaucracy, with the writer Nicholas Carr denouncing the supposed egalitarian expression of collective intelligence as a “myth”.
Meatbot is a pejorative computer geek term for a human. On Wikipedia, the English-language version contains the WP:MEATBOTS shortcut, which redirects to a subsection of its Bot Policy, which ironically has been edited by at least 38 bots. The policy demands human editors “pay attention to the edits they make” and not sacrifice quality for quantity. The policy holds the given human responsible for the errors of the bot. Coded by Wikipedian programmers known as Pythons, bots have their own anonymity, in some respects. Pythons have developed a bot-building tool known as pywikipediabot (Python Wikipediabot Framework).
Their edits as distinct users in MediaWiki software do not appear. The bots help to dump all language material into a data repository called Wikidata. As noted, bots are charged with a variety of tasks, including having power over human users. R. Stuart Geiger questions the morality of attempting to put a bot on Wikipedia’s Arbitration Committee, which deals with disputes, such as entry content, vandals, and the banning of repeated rule-breakers.
With all that being said, I also acknowledge (and have personally confirmed on occasion) that there are indeed bastions of accurate scientific data presented on platforms like Wikipedia. These ‘Islands of truth in an ocean of misinformation’ are spaces where relevant, accurate, honest and actively updated scientific inquiry and data (which a few dedicated citizen scientists who have managed to become ‘approved editors’ relentlessly and fastidiously protect and correct). I do not discount the value of such spaces for serving as ‘jumping pads’ to launch into specialized areas of research, however, I do caution that we should not allow the little bit of accurate data which is present there give us the impression that such platforms are a safe space to learn and confirm/disprove subject matter.
This trend towards censorship and behavior modification is becoming very prevalent in YouTube as well now (with entire channels being taken down simply because the users were sharing data that did not support the dominant big pharma narrative). The so called “fact checkers” on facebook are another such expression of this phenomenon where big tech companies are moving away from facilitating people connecting and more towards intentionally manipulating perspectives, behaviors and access to data to perpetuate the status quo.
Therefore, I would like to re-iterate the importance of exercising a keen sense of discernment when we use platforms like Google, Wikipedia, Youtube or Facebook for research. If such platforms are our only sources of information we risk create the potential for a situation where empowering truths and scientific discoveries may be obscured from our path, hindering our personal growth, distorting valuable knowledge and potentially crippling our potential to engage in creating the more regenerative future we all want to make a reality.
The reason I share this information and my concerns is not to say that one cannot effectively educate themselves via the internet but rather to say that we should exercise discernment with what online services we use and the data these services are showing to us on our screens. In many cases our ‘search results’ are not representative of just a list of relevant articles based on the words we chose to type in, but rather are a collection of links provided with the explicit purpose of shaping public perception to align with certain politics (and obscure some information if it does not align with perpetuating the status quo).
“Apart from education systems, the second main source of information for many people is the conduits of opinion known as television, movies, magazines, and billboards. The tools of the media establishment mold society`s perspectives, creating value systems that define desires, limit awareness, and craft artificial needs for products or protection. Just as pubic schooling teaches students what to think, the media instructs their audience on what to want and what to avoid. The media shapes the information webs of society, just as bulldozers and chainsaws destroy the ancient mycelial networks of the world.
Just as the mycelial network must defend itself from unhealthy substrates and infections, so must the media critic learn to discern between what is true and what is false in the variety of opinions presented on screens and in print. The analysis begins with recognizing where lies are being perpetrated in the media and spreads out to determine how the media constricts a culture`s knowledge web. Just as fungi relentlessly work to break free of artificial containers, the media critic must look at how the entire media apparatus shapes the world, beyond the topical issues of a singular movie or song”
-Peter McCoy (Author of Radical Mycology)
“In an information war, it is essential to be able to distinguish education from propaganda. Unfortunately, it is not always easy. Today’s citizens are swamped with manipulative information, and often crave truly educational environments that they can trust. In this, the second paper of our series on information warfare, we argue that propaganda can be thought of as the “evil twin” of education. They often look the same, but with some careful examination, their differences become apparent. Exploring the historical dynamics of propaganda and considering its various forms helps us understand the telltale signs of coercive, manipulative, and propagandistic information. Understanding the difference between propaganda and education, and how complicated the distinction can be at times, allows for better situational awareness. Clarity about the difference allows us to protect both ourselves and our communities from being casualties of the information war. This is an essential step toward creating a healthier epistemic commons for everyone.”
- Daniel Schmachtenberger (from an article called “Education, Propaganda, and How to Tell the Difference” https://bit.ly/3KDNx0o )
I choose to see this world through the lens of permaculture. In the spirit of this I would like to conclude by sharing some thoughts that arise when I look at the subject matter described through that lens guided by the patterns of nature and the permaculture ethical compass.
Just as we must be conscious of potential pathogens, parasites and toxins in the soil/environment as we design and care for our gardens, so to must we strive to protect and tend to our “inner garden” (the mind). This involves helping it (the mind) to become resilient and immune to that which is detrimental to it’s well being. Self care or (“Zone Zero”) is an essential part of being an effective agent for regenerative change. In a time when there are malignant aspects of society working tirelessly to re-direct our focus, shape our opinions and manipulate our emotions (with the intended purpose of the consolidation of material power and wealth) being aware of (and thus rendering one’s self immune to) such attempts is of paramount importance. This begins by looking inward to reacquaint ourselves with our intuitive capacities and it means applying our critical thinking capacities and a healthy dose of skepticism when we are researching online. The predatory systems of propaganda described above (and those who perpetrate pushing them onto the world) need not be demonized, we only need see these systems (and their architects) with clarity for what they are, so their efforts can be peacefully rendered inert, and we can move beyond their reach towards building the future of abundance, regeneration, equality, truth, and prosperity that we all want to create.
For those interested in learning more, here are some links to info that pertains to what was described above:
— https://nexusmagazine.com/product/the-new-ministries-of-truth/?v=3e8d115eb4b3
— Investigation finds Google ‘blacklists’ entire sites from search results: https://www.newsbusters.org/blogs/techwatch/corinne-weaver/2019/11/18/investigation-finds-google-blacklists-sites-results
— Google Inexplicably Denies Access To Medical Sites Offering Critical Health Information– Key Cancer Terms Are Blacklisted: https://www.survivornet.com/articles/google-inexplicably-denies-access-to-medical-sites-offering-critical-health-information-key-cancer-terms-are-blacklisted/
— Education, Propaganda, and How to Tell the Difference: https://consilienceproject.org/we-dont-make-propaganda-they-do/
— CEO’s GRILLED over Whistleblower Evidence of De-platforming and Censorship Collusion Between Big Tech: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pOdrPruSnrw&fbclid=IwAR2z2ukjM8dMZUTRKI0g2cQhlThIKnleyhZ-70KHPCcIGR1VktNzGtKyQvs
— https://www.technowize.com/how-google-facebook-turned-into-behavior-modification-empires/
— Shoshana Zuboff on surveillance capitalism “Harvard professor Shoshana Zuboff wrote a monumental book about the new economic order that is alarming. “The Age of Surveillance Capitalism,” reveals how the biggest tech companies deal with our data. How do we regain control of our data? What is surveillance capitalism? “ | VPRO Documentary: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hIXhnWUmMvw
— https://www.ted.com/talks/jaron_lanier_how_we_need_to_remake_the_internet
— Blackrock’s “Aladdin” (the AI program that controls the majority of the economy on Earth): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AWBRldjVzuM&t
— How Facebook’s ‘Fact Check’ Feature Suppresses Truth And Promote Falsehoods: https://childrenshealthdefense.org/defender/facebooks-fact-check-suppresses-truth-promotes-falsehoods-covid/
