Like many others I’ve noticed that finding things you’re looking for on internet search engines has become much more difficult over the past decade. At one time on the internet it was possible to get very specific results without too much effort. Just a bit of thought into what it was you were actually searching for and the right word choice would get you there. Nowadays though, good luck.
Retrospectively it also seems finding related content was much easier, and upon finding what you were looking for the search results would often lead to other relevant information that would lead down a rabbit hole of related information. However now most will only link back to their own sites in order to get more web traffic and potential revenue streams. They don’t want you looking at other good information for the most part, they just want to monopolize your attention, which isn’t a conspiracy in itself just a bunch of people thinking the same way.
However the internet has lost most of the goodwill it once had by making every person sincerely trying to spread good info around obscure and nearly impossible to find unless you swim through a sea of shit from millions of people trying to profit without much to actually offer. The sites that most readily climb to the top of results are related to the power invested in nation states or well funded, or both.
For many the notion that anything is an actual conspiracy is mental terrain they aren’t prepared to travel as the grossly overused term conspiracy theory has such a shameful subtext built into it, thus making people afraid to entertain any sort of dissenting opinion. It’s quite clear though that people conspire together to cause an intended effect all the time. The way the entire economic system works runs on this concept of opportunism and to take out any perceived competition while teaming up with anyone who might serve their purposes. The public has effectively bought the lies of the powerful and have been sufficiently gaslit into believing that corruption isn’t innate in the system.
So when internet search results go from something that used to produce intended results in queries to garbage that is mostly saying all the same thing brought to you by largely by government and corporate influences we shouldn’t casually dismiss this as a coincidence or act as if there’s some technical reason others must be censored while people with all the power and the expert class, who are most always tied to power and will routinely puppet their views, can dominate the conversation as if they are above spouting propaganda. Because they aren’t, and they do.
Capitalism and the government can’t help but suck the usefulness out of things to make people desperate so they can be easily controlled along with the added benefit of selling things back to them that used to be free. Like say land and water for instance.
I felt it necessary to title this with conspiracy because it is. Anything that works against centralized power’s interest will be altered in a way so that they will either nullify or appropriate whatever it is that is antithetical to their interests. They’ll do so by utilizing any leverage at their disposal to enforce the reality they desire. Take the drug war for instance, launched by Nixon administration where they used the idea of safety and security to outlaw drugs and effectively giving good reason to throw lots of dissidents like black movements and hippies in jail who were making too much of a ruckus. It also had the added benefit of giving the establishment greater control of everything, which they want at all times, and more reasons to be able to break into anyone’s home on a whim and search every crevice to find those oh so dangerous drugs. You know, because they care about your health.
The more egregious the imbalance of power caused by a centralized dominator the more they’ll become paranoid and want to crush all real resistance since they know if they ever had to answer for all the senseless things they’ve done it would probably mean the end of them by a furious public. When you’re highly corrupt and doing atrocious things to life on this planet you’ll want to tightly control your public image.
And this brings me to exactly why corporations and the government want greater control over what shows up in search engines. Since the internet is nearly ubiquitous now they don’t want people to just be able to type in terms like “government corruption” and get a long list of things the government has done to royally screw over their own population and other countries so the powers that be can get their selfish way.
In fact, the search term “government corruption” is a great example. When entered into Duck Duck Go the first link returned was from the WhiteHouse.gov. Isn’t that convenient. I’m sure the government is a good source of information to point out its own corruption.
Google shows a similar kind of list regarding corruption. All of them adhering to the same “bad apples” style of logic, meaning they act as if the system basically works except for a few ne’er-do-wells. Again, never considered is to ask if the entire shebang operates in a corrupt manner systemically, instead they only offer a reductionist logic that scapegoats the most egregious offenders to take the blame for an entire philosophy of thought that goes completely unaddressed.
At the top of the search results of the time of this writing google returns the website transparency.org who says extensively they are out to end corruption with other trite assertions. While doing so they don’t point out a single case of corruption on most of their site. Then you see who they are funded by in the about section would you believe it that the first listing stated for their funders is, and I quote from the site: “Transparency International receives funding from a range of donors, including government agencies”
So the very first result on google related to government corruption is again funded by the government itself, a site that also claims to be independent, yet has ties to government funding. Seems unlikely they’re going to be a solid reference. If you’ll notice from the image above as well on Duck Duck Go the second returned result is from Harvard, who unsurprisingly also receives money from government funding.
Many still believe the government is just a large functionary for the will of the people, they say things like “Sure there are problems, but it’s necessary” or they’ll say something like it’s a work in progress, which is a funny thing to say when all that’s been steadily increasing is the abuse of the living world and the rate money and power is flowing to people at the top of the social pyramid.
Most anything that offers a challenging dissent that doesn’t look good for the establishment is glossed over in search results. During the pandemic I noticed continually when I’d try to do research and entering anything in regards to a dissenting covid opinion would never result in the information that would be useful to me, rather it would more often just return the antithesis of the search parameters. I was offered thousands of links reiterating what the powers that be wanted promote which was the status quo lines they were endlessly repeating on corporate news.
Search algorithms shouldn’t have a bias in their result sets, the goal should be to try to return information people are looking to see. The oversimplification of the one line search pioneered by google allows them to easily free associate what they return with few hard parameters to the search. If a search can’t be reliably fashioned through query parameters then it’s returning propaganda, not unbiased results like most people are looking for usually.
Unwanted search results also functions as a form of censorship. The powers that be are very aware of not doing things that directly will cause people to be alerted. Hence you’re never going to see a book burning nowadays or a leader with a small mustache. Rather neo-totalitarianism will be cloaked in whatever is accepted by contemporary standards of the time.
Organizations that don’t have anything to hide don’t need to do PR. People would know for themselves if that thing is worthwhile without the propaganda, however everyone that’s not on the up and up knows they have to oversell and jump on top of the narrative at the get go otherwise their lies fall apart because most can be easily seen through sans heaps of propaganda.
It’s no secret that every corporation wants to control the narrative around their organization. They want customers, they want to advertise endlessly, and they’ll lobby to get what they want, which is everything. Every corporation is a would-be imperialist that will grow like a cancer as fast as possible and do it just because they can. Of course corporations are just mirroring the behavior of the system they are in, where rules are set by the government that has the exact same goals. Expand and control.
People nowadays have become so propagandized that conspiracy theory means something negative when in fact our entire society was created and maintained by nothing but conspiracy the entire time. Group of oligarchs/potential oligarchs conspiring for control and dominance over others.
So there’s simply no reason to be incredulous that someone might want to conspire to keep you poorly informed, because it’s been the status quo for governments and businesses since the inception of top down empire.
