Google is going the same way. Look for something ’contentious’ and it defaults to the mainstream version, often preemptively using AI or a ‘fact checker’ to debunk what it perceives to be your dissenting inquiry.
It happens all the time when I’m researching for my Substack.
I've seen it too. They've been accused of managing narratives for a long time. Wikipedia is not even that bad, but any tinkering means it all becomes suspect.
It’s so blatant. I’m like ‘I’m sure I read some figures that said X’ and then it’s almost impossible to find them. Sometimes you can trick Chat GPT or google gemini by pretending you are researching a counter argument and you want to debunk the figures, then they magically turn up!
Yes. Ive never been convinced by the ‘intelligence’ of the LLM. The danger isnt that it will ‘take all our jobs’ it’s that it will provide a means to police our digital prisons.
That’s what Digital ID is after all. By connecting all the government ‘services’ it will essentially hand the authorities ‘one ring to rule them all’.
The threat of ai isn’t that it will change everything, it’s that it will be used to ensure everything stays the same…..
"That’s what Digital ID is after all. By connecting all the government ‘services’ it will essentially hand the authorities ‘one ring to rule them all’."
Make everyone dependent on digital infrastructure for their day to day needs. Grant yourself the exclusive right to turn stuff off when you feel like it. Now no one dares dissent.
Digital id. CBDC. Smart meters. ‘Money laundering’ laws. Speech laws. All the same thing.
Very much so; garbage in, garbage out. That declines fast when some of the garbage coming in is itself AI slop. Photocopies of photocopies.
Small things amuse small minds. A program making a cool picture from a text prompt is impressive in a sense. Technically so. But that is not what art is. But for those with no appreciation of art then perhaps parlor tricks are impressive.
"A program making a cool picture from a text prompt is impressive in a sense. Technically so. But that is not what art is."
It is not art, but it is entertainment, which has a place in a healthy society. But in our current culture, entertainment has become a replacement for critical thinking, an addiction.
But not all AI programs are for entertainment; some, the important ones, are for science. One example is AlphaFold, which predicts, with incredible accuracy, the folding pattern of a potential protein by analyzing the amino acid structure. There are several other types of scientific AI tools, in physics, cosmology, biology, and others. LLMs are an essential tool in gaining knowledge about the universe we live in. They can analyze enormous amounts of data, sort into categories, and find relationships or patterns in the blink of an eye.
We're back to the holy scripture being written by a selected group, and the 99% not having access to the language used or the sources themselves.
To see what that results in, look at Europe from ca 1066AD to 1517AD. Or the Arabic-Islamic occupied parts of the world from ca 654AD to present. Or Jewish cultures - any and all technological or scientific discoveries or advances they've ever managed have been when they were living either under Babylonian, Egyptian, Hellenic or Roman rule or as diaspora in the lands of Aryan peoples. Which goes double for the Arabic-Islamic areas.
Do we really have to have another period resembling 410AD to 1066AD?
Or can we make a controlled collapse and then rise again?
I think our salvation is the multiplicity of communication mediums we have today. When Substack finally sinks other platforms will be available. And they can't control this, hence the digital IDs etc.
So I think the urge to control information is ancient, but today we have both widespread literacy and many avenues to publish or consume.
Great summary. One important addition though. The woke/leftist editors responsible for the hijacking of Wikipedia are also predominantly Western Whites.
Wikipedia started me on my path to the “far” right. When my son first returned home from abroad after ten years, in 2017, he was talking about The Frankfurt School and how its ideas had influenced everything. He showed me the entry on it on Wikipedia and it was a very good and comprehensive summary of the men and their ideas. A few days later I went to show the entry to my husband. It had disappeared, replaced by a warning that the term was used as part of a far right conspiracy. It was like being radicalized in real time.
As a mother of four sons and grandmother of five boys I have been horrified at the developments since, and I continue to read things like your substack to understand the world they have to struggle through.
Have a very Merry Christmas and thank you for your work.
The Wiki story is indeed a perfect analogy for the slow-motion dissolution of our Western institutions overall, Spiff. Great points. Like yourself, I use it rarely now, and only have ever for uncontentious things like band discographies, general geographical and population statistics etc.
I see that naughty Elon has done a bit of a trolling exercise with his Grokipedia creature. However as this is presumably AI-generated, I am not inclined to engage its services.
On solutions or lack thereof: if you haven't seen it, you might be interested in John Carter's latest (lengthy) piece on the partial seeds of this rot which has taken hold of all of our key institutions. His proposed rectification path is fairly drastic and by necessity systemic, although non-physical I should stress.
His piece focuses on the US, but the problems addressed are replicated across the West, as we are painfully aware.
Although his DEI-focused essay might seem tangential to your piece, I think there is a relationship in some way to the Wiki credibility loss.
Wikipedia is fine for trivia. Anything sensitive is policed. It will destroy itself as a result. Reddit is similar, although a different beast. It is now almost comically biased.
In most cases, the illusion of control. Whole nations destroyed so a handful can play God. The technocrats in particular are lost, blinded by the promise of technology to usher in an era of total surveillance. But I believe none of it will work.
In 2001 some friends with an established, respected NGO contacted me, very excited about this new thing called Wikipedia. Their topics of concern converged on how the public relations industry constructs and drives news (80+% of "news" at that time actually being PR or advertising copy) and opinion, and they assayed to teach people how that industry works. So they were thrilled at the idea of an open source encyclopedia and asked if I'd be interested in being one of the editors for a "Wiki" for their group.
I declined, and explained that I had concerns about the model: what was to stop malicious actors from editing the content to spin it for their own reasons/gain?
Well, they said, if that happened, you just [insert explanation that I forget for how the editing and conflict process worked].
I opined that while the idea was very good, I didn't see it going as they hoped, and I feared that it would in fact open the door to an even more shaped and edited form of centralized/authoritative cultural memory. One dispersed among invisible forces in cyberspace. I noted that I would be happy to write articles on topics for them, gratis, for their Web site or blog, but the idea of wrangling with well remunerated malefactors in a losing model didn't fit with my preferred use of time/energy. I foresaw Wikipedia being a very attractive target for the Culture Pirates.
We parted still friends. A few months later were the Sept. 11 events...and many of us recall watching online information get reshaped and censored, using the PATRIOT Act as justification.
And it happened to them, concomitant with a very well heeled Sorosian/billionaire-Dem type drive to push out the man who was the founder of that organization...and completely change the tone, focus, and purpose of it.
Over the years I have returned to their organization's Wikipedia entry to see how it has been serially revised...to utterly erase some of the most important perspectives, projects, and conclusions of that small, dedicated original group. Today it is a brand, referring to a history and mission that its controllers today had nothing to do with (and were hostile to). Today I see Wikipedia as the perfect tool for stuffing the good old free-and-open internet into a dry cleaner bag to smother it to death.
It is the perfect tool to rewrite history. The masses view it as a miracle and give no thought to the "open" model and its shortcomings. It merely reflects what we are up against.
"Westerners have an unusual capacity to build complex things without the need for coercion. It accounts for a lot of Western dominance in recent centuries."
Excellent and accurate observation.
"Our great institutions built on trust and decency are easy targets for similar reasons. The police, the justice system, the great charities, media, academia. Their credibility emerged over decades and centuries, and they enjoyed a prominent place in society."
In the United States, all three branches of government have been defiled.
"Western societies are no different. Our demise will be similar. We either get better at policing our institutions or they rot from within while the distracted barely notice them breaking down. With a bit of effort we can avoid this fate."
'With a bit of effort...'? I think you did an outstanding job of describing our demise, but a little lax on a solution. What is the bit of effort you write about? Those who have taken control of Western Civilization are damn serious about maintaining control!
I am still wondering about the solution. Or rather, solutions plural. I strongly suspect we may need to rebuild some of it from scratch. A parallel society in some cases.
It is difficult to know what is salvageable or not. I sometimes think representative democracy is finished, just too easily hijacked by moneyed interests or cult thinking. Then I think we can vote for change and our systems are robust enough to survive. But how do we tackle the activist judges? That seems intractable, especially for the fanatics in the judiciary.
My honest answer is I don't know. We don't see the emergence of alternative elites, although there may be some plotting in the background. So who knows.
I think there is much hope. Most of the things we are subjected too are bad ideas that will probably collapse anyway. Maybe more will up their game when starvation beckons.
It is certainly open to abuse, but more importantly open to manipulation. It is fine for trivial unimportant things I find. Anything controversial is policed.
Great piece Spaceman.
Google is going the same way. Look for something ’contentious’ and it defaults to the mainstream version, often preemptively using AI or a ‘fact checker’ to debunk what it perceives to be your dissenting inquiry.
It happens all the time when I’m researching for my Substack.
I've seen it too. They've been accused of managing narratives for a long time. Wikipedia is not even that bad, but any tinkering means it all becomes suspect.
It’s so blatant. I’m like ‘I’m sure I read some figures that said X’ and then it’s almost impossible to find them. Sometimes you can trick Chat GPT or google gemini by pretending you are researching a counter argument and you want to debunk the figures, then they magically turn up!
Just one of the reasons AI is possibly a dead end.
Yes. Ive never been convinced by the ‘intelligence’ of the LLM. The danger isnt that it will ‘take all our jobs’ it’s that it will provide a means to police our digital prisons.
That’s what Digital ID is after all. By connecting all the government ‘services’ it will essentially hand the authorities ‘one ring to rule them all’.
The threat of ai isn’t that it will change everything, it’s that it will be used to ensure everything stays the same…..
I think AI will be a disaster for the most part. I don't think it will live up to the hype. I sense a bubble forming.
"That’s what Digital ID is after all. By connecting all the government ‘services’ it will essentially hand the authorities ‘one ring to rule them all’."
The same is true for 'Digital Currency'.
Exactly 👍 All part of the same thing.
Make everyone dependent on digital infrastructure for their day to day needs. Grant yourself the exclusive right to turn stuff off when you feel like it. Now no one dares dissent.
Digital id. CBDC. Smart meters. ‘Money laundering’ laws. Speech laws. All the same thing.
Perfectly put, LSO. Wish I had more thumbs to point upward.
"Just one of the reasons AI is possibly a dead end."
Exactly, I have been saying for a long time that AI is overhyped. Computer programs can only do what they are told to do.
Very much so; garbage in, garbage out. That declines fast when some of the garbage coming in is itself AI slop. Photocopies of photocopies.
Small things amuse small minds. A program making a cool picture from a text prompt is impressive in a sense. Technically so. But that is not what art is. But for those with no appreciation of art then perhaps parlor tricks are impressive.
"A program making a cool picture from a text prompt is impressive in a sense. Technically so. But that is not what art is."
It is not art, but it is entertainment, which has a place in a healthy society. But in our current culture, entertainment has become a replacement for critical thinking, an addiction.
But not all AI programs are for entertainment; some, the important ones, are for science. One example is AlphaFold, which predicts, with incredible accuracy, the folding pattern of a potential protein by analyzing the amino acid structure. There are several other types of scientific AI tools, in physics, cosmology, biology, and others. LLMs are an essential tool in gaining knowledge about the universe we live in. They can analyze enormous amounts of data, sort into categories, and find relationships or patterns in the blink of an eye.
Also. Merry Christmas! 🎅🏻
Do you mean Happy Holidays? Lol
This parallel’s Chris Bray’s latest from yesterday.
I must check it out.
We're back to the holy scripture being written by a selected group, and the 99% not having access to the language used or the sources themselves.
To see what that results in, look at Europe from ca 1066AD to 1517AD. Or the Arabic-Islamic occupied parts of the world from ca 654AD to present. Or Jewish cultures - any and all technological or scientific discoveries or advances they've ever managed have been when they were living either under Babylonian, Egyptian, Hellenic or Roman rule or as diaspora in the lands of Aryan peoples. Which goes double for the Arabic-Islamic areas.
Do we really have to have another period resembling 410AD to 1066AD?
Or can we make a controlled collapse and then rise again?
I think our salvation is the multiplicity of communication mediums we have today. When Substack finally sinks other platforms will be available. And they can't control this, hence the digital IDs etc.
So I think the urge to control information is ancient, but today we have both widespread literacy and many avenues to publish or consume.
Great summary. One important addition though. The woke/leftist editors responsible for the hijacking of Wikipedia are also predominantly Western Whites.
I quite agree. So are the main architects dismantling Western nations. It is not immigrants pushing for decolonization etc. It is woke white folks.
Wikipedia started me on my path to the “far” right. When my son first returned home from abroad after ten years, in 2017, he was talking about The Frankfurt School and how its ideas had influenced everything. He showed me the entry on it on Wikipedia and it was a very good and comprehensive summary of the men and their ideas. A few days later I went to show the entry to my husband. It had disappeared, replaced by a warning that the term was used as part of a far right conspiracy. It was like being radicalized in real time.
As a mother of four sons and grandmother of five boys I have been horrified at the developments since, and I continue to read things like your substack to understand the world they have to struggle through.
Have a very Merry Christmas and thank you for your work.
You are very welcome. I am grateful anyone reads it. I write it to try to make sense of it myself.
The Wiki story is indeed a perfect analogy for the slow-motion dissolution of our Western institutions overall, Spiff. Great points. Like yourself, I use it rarely now, and only have ever for uncontentious things like band discographies, general geographical and population statistics etc.
I see that naughty Elon has done a bit of a trolling exercise with his Grokipedia creature. However as this is presumably AI-generated, I am not inclined to engage its services.
On solutions or lack thereof: if you haven't seen it, you might be interested in John Carter's latest (lengthy) piece on the partial seeds of this rot which has taken hold of all of our key institutions. His proposed rectification path is fairly drastic and by necessity systemic, although non-physical I should stress.
His piece focuses on the US, but the problems addressed are replicated across the West, as we are painfully aware.
Although his DEI-focused essay might seem tangential to your piece, I think there is a relationship in some way to the Wiki credibility loss.
I'll check it out. I usually read his pieces.
Wikipedia is fine for trivia. Anything sensitive is policed. It will destroy itself as a result. Reddit is similar, although a different beast. It is now almost comically biased.
I trust Wikipedia when I need to remember something like the laws of thermodynamics. But for anything political or controversial? Nope. Hard no.
Exactly. Sports trivia, actual hard physics, battleships of WW2? All pretty decent. Trump's second term? Not so much. Lol.
When we worship gods and not God, control becomes a powerful idol.
In most cases, the illusion of control. Whole nations destroyed so a handful can play God. The technocrats in particular are lost, blinded by the promise of technology to usher in an era of total surveillance. But I believe none of it will work.
Great topic, treatment, and discussion.
If I may, an onionbelt:
In 2001 some friends with an established, respected NGO contacted me, very excited about this new thing called Wikipedia. Their topics of concern converged on how the public relations industry constructs and drives news (80+% of "news" at that time actually being PR or advertising copy) and opinion, and they assayed to teach people how that industry works. So they were thrilled at the idea of an open source encyclopedia and asked if I'd be interested in being one of the editors for a "Wiki" for their group.
I declined, and explained that I had concerns about the model: what was to stop malicious actors from editing the content to spin it for their own reasons/gain?
Well, they said, if that happened, you just [insert explanation that I forget for how the editing and conflict process worked].
I opined that while the idea was very good, I didn't see it going as they hoped, and I feared that it would in fact open the door to an even more shaped and edited form of centralized/authoritative cultural memory. One dispersed among invisible forces in cyberspace. I noted that I would be happy to write articles on topics for them, gratis, for their Web site or blog, but the idea of wrangling with well remunerated malefactors in a losing model didn't fit with my preferred use of time/energy. I foresaw Wikipedia being a very attractive target for the Culture Pirates.
We parted still friends. A few months later were the Sept. 11 events...and many of us recall watching online information get reshaped and censored, using the PATRIOT Act as justification.
And it happened to them, concomitant with a very well heeled Sorosian/billionaire-Dem type drive to push out the man who was the founder of that organization...and completely change the tone, focus, and purpose of it.
Over the years I have returned to their organization's Wikipedia entry to see how it has been serially revised...to utterly erase some of the most important perspectives, projects, and conclusions of that small, dedicated original group. Today it is a brand, referring to a history and mission that its controllers today had nothing to do with (and were hostile to). Today I see Wikipedia as the perfect tool for stuffing the good old free-and-open internet into a dry cleaner bag to smother it to death.
It is the perfect tool to rewrite history. The masses view it as a miracle and give no thought to the "open" model and its shortcomings. It merely reflects what we are up against.
"Westerners have an unusual capacity to build complex things without the need for coercion. It accounts for a lot of Western dominance in recent centuries."
Excellent and accurate observation.
"Our great institutions built on trust and decency are easy targets for similar reasons. The police, the justice system, the great charities, media, academia. Their credibility emerged over decades and centuries, and they enjoyed a prominent place in society."
In the United States, all three branches of government have been defiled.
"Western societies are no different. Our demise will be similar. We either get better at policing our institutions or they rot from within while the distracted barely notice them breaking down. With a bit of effort we can avoid this fate."
'With a bit of effort...'? I think you did an outstanding job of describing our demise, but a little lax on a solution. What is the bit of effort you write about? Those who have taken control of Western Civilization are damn serious about maintaining control!
I am still wondering about the solution. Or rather, solutions plural. I strongly suspect we may need to rebuild some of it from scratch. A parallel society in some cases.
It is difficult to know what is salvageable or not. I sometimes think representative democracy is finished, just too easily hijacked by moneyed interests or cult thinking. Then I think we can vote for change and our systems are robust enough to survive. But how do we tackle the activist judges? That seems intractable, especially for the fanatics in the judiciary.
My honest answer is I don't know. We don't see the emergence of alternative elites, although there may be some plotting in the background. So who knows.
I think there is much hope. Most of the things we are subjected too are bad ideas that will probably collapse anyway. Maybe more will up their game when starvation beckons.
"I sometimes think representative democracy is finished, just too easily hijacked by moneyed interests or cult thinking."
That is a fair synopsis of democracy. But a better form is meritocracy, which requires a nation with a much tighter IQ bell curve to be viable.
Those in control, Deep State, elite, or whatever, are not going to lie down and play dead.
Or a section of a nation keen to ensure its own survival. 🤓 Not everyone makes it.
I think the ruling class, whoever they are, are more inept than we imagine.
"I think the ruling class, whoever they are, are more inept than we imagine."
I hope so.
"The encyclopedia ANYONE can edit!"
Lasted about one year.
Now it's another ✡️✡️✡️mouthpiece✡️✡️✡️ with no fact correction
It is certainly open to abuse, but more importantly open to manipulation. It is fine for trivial unimportant things I find. Anything controversial is policed.
Early Lifepedia
That does have its uses.