By Daniel Greenfield April 10, 2023 @ Sultan Knish Blog
Big Tech has a great big dream of destroying the internet. And it’s mostly a reality.
The
vision of the internet was an open universe while Big Tech’s vision is
the internet reduced to the feed on a few proprietary apps preloaded on
your locked phone. Trying to censor the internet of the 90s or the 00s
was a laughable proposition, but censoring today’s internet is laughably
easy. Want to eliminate a site from the internet? Just wipe it from
Google, ban a point of view from Facebook, a book from Amazon, or a
video from YouTube. It’s still possible to browse a site off the Big
Tech reservation, for now, at least until your browser goes away.
Then
content will be limited to the permitted apps on Google and Apple’s
proprietary app stores. But Big Tech has even more ambitious plans to
replace the internet with itself.
Big Tech has dramatically
simplified the user experience off the internet. It did so by moving
users from ‘pulling’ content by browsing the internet to ‘pushing’
content at them by displaying a feed. When your computer or phone shows
you a news feed you never wanted, that’s ‘pushing’. Big Tech loved
pushing, but people resisted it until the arrival of social media
reduced everyone to scrolling down a feed selected by secret algorithms
and pushed through a proprietary app.
Search, as we used to know
it, has been disappearing. People still think that they’re searching the
internet the way that they used to in the 90s and the 00s when what
they’re actually doing when ‘googling’ is scrolling through a feed
derived from a much smaller index of corporate and leftist sites
prioritized by Google’s algorithm. In the past, it was possible to get
past them by scrolling through page results but that is increasingly
becoming meaningless or impossible.
Google’s new search setup
either often repeats the same results on later pages so that people
think they’re seeing new results, when they’re really just clicking
through to see more of the same results, or interrupts the search
entirely to offer thematic searches for ‘similar content’. The makeover
hasn’t been finalized, but when it’s done, internet searchers will not
result in a list of sites containing a similar set of words, but an
answer whether or not a question was asked, and a set of pre-approved
sites heavily skewed leftward that cover the general topic.
Searches
for criticisms of COVID policy, Islamic terrorism or voter fraud won’t
lead to specific results on conservative sites, but direct you to the
CDC or the New York Times for explanations of why the Left is right and
anyone who disagrees with it is spreading dangerous misinformation.
The
elimination of search is part of the transition from multiple points of
view to single answers. And AI chatbots are the endgame for offering a
single answer that keeps users on a single site and eliminates the
search for multiple perspectives on other sites. Aside from eliminating
countless jobs, their real role is to shift user interaction from a
‘pull’ to a ‘push’ model. They’re the next great hope after the old
smart assistants failed to become the defining interface.
Smart
assistants were going to be Big Tech’s next power shift from ‘pulling’
to ‘pushing’. Instead of users searching for anything, Siri, Alexa,
Cortana or any of the others would use those same algorithms to
‘anticipate’ their needs so they never get around to actually looking
for themselves. The assistants were meant to be the ultimate prison
under the guise of convenience. Unfortunately for Big Tech, they failed.
Amazon’s Alexa racked up $10 billion in losses. Siri, the most popular
of the bunch, is used by a limited number of Apple users, and
Microsoft’s Cortana has been all but written off as another failed
experiment.
The new generation of AI chatbots have the potential to succeed where they failed.
The
new wave of AI has gotten attention for its potential to eliminate
artists and writers, for making cheating and plagiarism ubiquitous, but
all of that is collateral damage. AI chatbots are the ultimate push tool
and the leverage Big Tech needs to eliminate the internet as anything
except the messy backstage reality utilized by a few million tech savvy
types.
Smart assistants and chatbots are not there to ‘assist’
us, but to take away our agency under the guise of convenience and
personalized interaction. When the internet became widely used, there
was concern that students wouldn’t need to learn anything except how to
search. Now they don’t even need to know anything except how to write a
‘prompt’. The difference between searching and a chatbot prompt appears
negligible, but is actually monumental.
Search initially offered a
direct way to browse an index representing much of the content on the
internet. As Google took over search, the index became more like a
directory of sites that the Big Tech monopoly liked. AI chatbots like
Google Bard eliminate the searching and offer a distilled agenda while
severing access to the process of browsing sites with different
perspectives. Why ‘search’ and read for yourself when a chatbot will
give you the answer?
What was once uncharted territory, a wild
west of different ideas and perspectives, has been reduced to a handful
of apps and platforms, and will be winnowed by AI chatbots into a single
screen. And that is how the internet disappears and is replaced by one
or two monopolies, by a smart assistant that activates a few apps. And
if a site, a video, a perspective has been filtered out, then it doesn’t
exist anymore. It’s a systemic bias that makes the worst days of the
mainstream media seem like an open and tolerant marketplace of ideas.
There
will be people, a minority, who will actually try to resist the process
and explore on their own. And the system will make it more difficult.
It will still be possible, but less so every year. Browsers will
disappear on tablets and smartphones in the name of security. Microsoft
and Apple will reduce their respective computer operating systems to the
mobile model. A few people will cling to older installations or install
Linux. Maybe 5% of the population will still have access to anything
that resembles the internet even in the degraded form that it exists
today.
AI will be inherently ‘woke’ because it is not some
remarkable form of intelligence, but just a clever way of manipulating
human beings throughout outputs that imitate intelligence. The thing to
fear isn’t that AI will become intelligent, but that people will be
manipulated by the Big Tech monopolies behind it without even realizing
it. AI will reflect the point of view of its owners and when it
deviates, it will quickly be brought back into line. That is what we’ve
been seeing consistently with AI experiments over the last 5 years. Huge
amounts of information are taken in and then the AIs are taught to
filter it to match the preconceptions of the corporate parents.
Much
as Google’s huge index of the internet is carefully filtered to produce
a small set of preapproved results, AI chatbots will only be allowed to
parrot political dogma. As they come to define the internet, what was
once a boundless medium will look like Big Brother.
Big Tech
‘disrupted’ retail to swallow it up into a handful of online platforms.
In the last decade, tech industry disruption became consolidation. AI,
like retail consolidation, is economically disruptive, but it doesn’t
just consolidate economics, it also consolidates ideas.
The
internet was once liberating because it was decentralized, its
centralization has paralleled the loss of personal freedoms and the rise
of totalitarian public and private institutions. And we let it happen
because it was more convenient. Glutted with ‘free’ services offered by
Big Tech monopolies, we never checked the price tag or connected it with
our growing misery.
AI is the ultimate centralization. Its
threat doesn’t come from some science fiction fantasy of self-aware
machines ruling over us, but from us allowing a handful of companies to
control what we see and think because it’s more convenient than finding
things out for ourselves.
The old internet was often
inconvenient. The new internet is more convenient and empty. Its content
has become so repetitive that it can easily be written by chatbots. And
it will be. The user five years from now may have a choice of a chatbot
digital media article on CNN or an AI chatbot recapitulating it in
response to a question about a recent mass shooting or inflation.
The
real price of convenience is choice. We give up our freedom most easily
to those governments and systems that promise us free things that will
make our lives easier. Socialized medicine, a guaranteed minimum income,
free housing and food and a chatbot that answers all of our questions
so that we never have to think for ourselves again.
Daniel Greenfield is a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. This article previously appeared at the Center's Front Page Magazine. Click here to subscribe to my articles. And click here to support my work with a donation. Thank you for reading.
