Computers As Vampires Of Democracy: It's Time For People Willing To Put Their Names To Things To Be In Charge, Not Computers Programmed By Cyber Whores

The other day when I wanted to read more about George Papadopoulos's changing, post sentencing claims about what he said to the Australian diplomat, I noticed while searching on Google I got a whole listing of right wing-Putin-Trump friendly outlets in the "news" listing.  My first inclination was to suspect that Putin-Republican or other geeks had ratfucked the search algorithms of Google to give such a weird result that is certainly not based on my clicking.  I've been experimenting with trying the same search on lesser used, lesser known browsers and am not finding the same results.  I  find it very hard to believe that most of the people who were searching the topics I got that result from are clicking on right-wing-Putin-Trump friendly lie spouting sources so I conclude that it's probably a result of artificial manipulation.  I think that's inevitably a possibility in any algorithm driven system, that people who can buy sophisticated nerds without any morals will skew what the search engines, etc. do.

I had to scoff the other day when the generally sensible people at Majority Report gave the conventional claim that the demonstrably rat-fucked Wikipedias are reliable.  I think they share the common faith in science and technology to an unrealistic degree, even the most sci-skeptical of them, Michael Brooks.  My conclusion from looking at controversial topics on Wikipedia is that you don't get reliable reliability without people putting their names on reference materials.  When it's not only anonymous people who hijack an online source but it's the bots hacked by anonymous and amoral nerds, it's compounding the unreliability of these things.

I predict that we're going to find that these systems, driven by anonymity and liable to manipulation of the kind that we are finding is ubiquitous are a danger to democracy and the world and that, as with the world fed on lies, the choice is between those and the possibility of democracy and decency.  I don't think it is going to be possible to make such things safe for democracy, I think it's going to be a matter of banning them or removing them from the kind of amoral geek-businessmen for whom "don't be evil" is just a sales slogan, not a moral absolute.

Democracy is under attack from many things, many of those driven by the intentions of geeks in the pay of people like Putin, others choosing to ignore them because it enhances the profitability of their companies.  When you put computers in control, automated "decision making" instead of people making those decisions, the potential for it to damage democracy increases.  "Demos" the common people can't be replaced by bots, algorithms, automatic pilots susceptible to that kind of manipulation without it damaging democracy.  The People knowing the truth, the real truth, the truth, not a result of popular delusion is the life blood of democracy.  Computers, under their for-profit development since the internet came into wide use, turn out to be more like vampires than servants of The People.