I Wave the Flag [UPDATE]

What's the appropriate theme for Independence Day, 2011???  How about, equity?

Equity has never been much promoted as a reason to be American.  In fact, through convenient fiction (e.g. Horatio Alger, et al) the Right Wingnuts have been able to convince the stupid class that America is the fount of generational progress; that anyone can become completely better (in terms of the size of your purse) than everyone else.  Not that this is true, of course.  See this study.  There are lots more.

I watched some TV yesterday, and saw an interview with Eli Pariser (C-SPAN2), who's written "The Filter Bubble", and bits of episodes of "The Revolution" (one of the History channels).  Both were about, although I suspect neither of the creators knew it, equity.

Pariser's book, and the substance of his interview, was that the controllers of the InterTubes seek to sell ads.  Period.  (I wasn't sure that he quite got the point of his thesis.  He may be more clear in his book.)  Now, that's been my assertion for quite some time.  Google isn't in the search business, or the cloud apps business, or anything else.  They are a mammoth ad agency, pure and simple.  Their profits come from providing a "superior" ad to those willing to buy ads.  They used ads as a way to monetize search services, and thus support providing search results.  I'll concede that Google might have been motivated as a search company very, very early on before they figured out that they had to find a way to fund Google without direct user payment.  But quite soon, the true business of the business became apparent.

Today's Google, and Facebook, and Yahoo!, etc. are ad agencies.  They use various MacGuffins to entice entry, but the point is to get users to buy somebody else's stuff.  (I'll add, out of necessity, that AdBlock Plus is effective in removing ads, and has the side benefit of speeding InterTube use by not downloading all that ad crap.  You should get it.)  Google, the powers that be at least, have been aware for sometime that the cash nipple is fragile.  To my knowledge, they've never said so explicitly.  But their behaviour has been crystal clear.  Google gets taken down, not by a better search engine, but by a better ad delivery system.  Now, that could be search, but it would be a waste of effort to make such a direct assault.  Google stumbled (I'm convinced it was not on purpose) on its money engine.

Any activity which depends on ads is fragile.  The activity isn't selling its wares for fee.  It's selling ads to producers.  *Any* vehicle which sells more of the producers' stuff destroys the titular business.  Google should know this by now.  The enemy is everywhere, and nowhere.  By the time Google finds out who the enemy is, it will be too late.  Just as it was for newspapers.

If search and cloud apps and such were the product being purveyed, they'd do so in a way which maximizes coverage; much like a newspaper.  The shotgun approach, so to speak.  In an email I sent to Mr. Pariser, upbraiding him for being a naive' twinky (I didn't use those words, but that's what I meant), I allowed as how Google is implementing "narrowcasting", and that I'd run across the term decades ago.  I wrote that extemporaneously, but, after typing, took a moment with WikiPedia to see if I were right.  I was.

Google, et al, are in the business of divide and conquer.  So far, at least, this has been for commercial purposes.  But fascism isn't necessarily the result of expressed political motivation, as did Mussolini (he invented the word).  It can creep in on little cat's paws (look it up).  There have been reports of the Feds using private snooping when it was not convenient to get authorization.  For Google, they seek to divide the users into ever more homogeneous clusters, down to the individual, in order to offer advertisers a more potent target.  If you want to sell assault rifles, people who search for Greenpeace aren't likely buyers.  People who search for Tea Party, but not Tea Bagger, likely are.

Having divided, Google conquers through more "effective" ads.  We lose privacy and autonomy in the result.  The younger generation doesn't care.  Both corporate and political fascists have found the ultimate wet dream.  But it's real, not a dream.  BushII brayed about No Child Left Behind, but his agenda *depends* upon people having no higher order thinking.  The dumber they are, the better.  And Americans are getting dumber.

Which brings me to the History channels.  Years ago, the shows were mostly about history.  Today, they're mostly about stupid Americans doing 18th century tasks ("Swamp People" is my favorite title), mostly in the South.  It's quite reactionary.  Roger Ailes defeats Durant (not Kevin).  There is a series about history, entitled "The Revolution".  There being nothing else more interesting, I caught a bit of two episodes.  I learned something (or re-learned, I don't remember).  Turns out that the ignition point of the revolt, The Stamp Acts, weren't exactly what common wisdom says.  While the colonists brayed about taxation and representation, the Brits had a different view.  It turns out that the Brits had spent 60 million pounds defending us from the French and their Indian allies (I learned it as The French and Indian War, but it's also called The Seven Years War) in the preceding years.  The Brits thought, rightly so, that the colonists should pay up.  We remained free of the French thanks to the Brits after all.

If that sounds kind of familiar, think Iraq and Al Qaeda.  Or Afghanistan and Taliban.  Or Cuba and Russia.  And so forth.  The Brits merely wanted equity.  Their men and munitions had protected us, so we should do our part.  Equity.  Those self absorbed colonists didn't see it that way.  This was all ours, for the taking.  Remember that until the end of the 19th century, the USofA was still stealing land from Indians and Mexicans, so the notion of going somewhere else if you didn't like the way things were, was still possible.  What made the USofA great wasn't some better notion of politics or American spirit or any other jinogistic pablum.  What made America great was access to the richest bounty of natural resources the world had ever seen.  Most of it is gone now, of course, squandered.  Like it or not, we're becoming more like Europe, resource constrained.  We either live like they do, or perish.  But I digress.

Google seeks to remove equity.  Google seeks to take for itself all data which permits it to sell more ads for more money.  Google's problem, of course, is that search is only the last big thing to attract masses of humans.  Newspapers and magazines preceded, and were defeated by Google and Craig's List.  The point is, Google/newspapers/magazines aren't about selling a product to the titular buyers (the users), but about selling a service to advertisers.  That there is a "Chinese Wall" between editorial and ads in print media is an artifact of old fashioned morals.  There is no law, and all of MurdochWorld makes this clear, mandating that corporate ad interests may not pollute the editorial product.

Will Google and the rest explicitly get into bed with Murdoch and the Tea Baggers?  That is, will Google and the rest admit that what they're about is making as much money, but not about making society a better place?  That's the $64 question.  Here's the conundrum:  in order for Google to make lots o money, it needs to sell lots o ads.  Will smart people use AdBlock, and similar, to avoid ads?  Likely.  Will Dumbshit Rednecks?  Not so likely.

So, then, who's the target of Google's ads?  Dumbshit Rednecks, of course.  If it were only a case of Google putting 10 times as many assault rifle ads as those for pinot noir, I couldn't care less; it wouldn't make a dime's worth of difference to the country.  But the problem is:  Google *shapes the world view* presented to its users, to conform to the prejudices of those users.  To some extent, I get lefty news (from where anymore?).  The Dumbshit Rednecks get Dumbshit News.  This is not surprising.  The mechanism of advertising is *to reinforce prejudice*; it isn't to convince people to do a 180, or even consider that their worldview might be a tad askew.  It's a very old book, but folks should (re)read Vance Packard's "The Hidden Persuaders", an outing of the ad industry.

Google has shown no interest, and has none, in getting into bed with MoveOn or other left leaning organization; not enough bodies.  The problem is, there are more right wing numbnuts out there than left wing elitists.  To the extent that numbnuts can earn more than the highly educated, is the extent to which the USofA is up Shit's Creek without a paddle.  Inverting reward leads to an inversion of society.  The mob, sort of, wins.  The fascists who end up really running the place will suck in evermore of national income; the 1%-ers absorb evermore of national income.  When the numbnuts finally begin to notice that their lives haven't improved under The Great Leader, they'll demand that the bad people who did this to them be punished.  At that point, we'll see a Mao-ist destruction of the intelligentia.  How will Murdoch and his friends explain why it is that they're following in the footsteps of Mao, that awful Communist?  They won't have to.  Thanks to No Child Left Behind, the numbnuts won't even know who Mao was or what he did.