It looks as if Michael Yon’s story on Google is going to be a lot more explosive than Wired’s, if indeed the latter’s ever runs.
Achtung! Pay attention: tonight I talked for about an hour with a “Google Snowden” who will soon go public. A deep insider.
Fascinating stuff. I cannot say much now other than pay attention to what is coming out starting in a week or so from now.
Source said many interesting things about how Chinese are flooding into tech companies like Google, and some of the incredible techniques they can use to brainwash or at least mislead millions of people.
Take this as an example that I am making up based on our conversation. Again, I am making this up but it is based on our conversation:
A politician tweets saying we must protect our national interests.
Google, or whoever, immediately promotes all stories that translates, “must protect our national interests,” to “nationalism,” and then in almost real time rewrites the meaning of “nationalism” to include traits such as xenophobic, racist, and references Nazis as nationalists.
This happens so quickly and so comprehensively that most people never will notice that in the 30 seconds the curtain was closed, Google (or whoever) rewrote part of the dictionary, and history.To state this more clearly: they can basically rewrite what you say, write, sing, wear, or hand gesture — name it — and they can rewrite that faster than we can make popcorn.
They can do this anonymously saying the algorithm is doing it when in reality they write the rules that make the rules.
Anyway, the insider told me much more. I do not know how much already is public but I do think that if the source is correct, President Trump and a lot of others in powerful positions will be extremely angry with some of the internet players who already have hired half of China.
The amusing thing is that those of us who are dev-savvy already knew this was how it worked. An algorithm is not an excuse, it’s just a series of rules. So, blaming bad behavior on “the algorithm did it” is simply pointing the finger at the programmers of the algorithm.
But an insider putting it in terms that non-developers will understand and demonstrating the intrinsically and intentionally manipulative of the process is essentially translating it from techno-dialectic to techno-rhetoric, which is necessary if people are to be stirred into action.
And the most revealing aspect will be the obvious aims of the manipulators being revealed by the nature of the manipulation.