People's moral, values, tastes obviously come from artificial (is that the right word?) sources, so where do we want them coming from? Do we want people inundated by so many contradictory opinions that they become paralyzed like Hamlet? Do we want people to be able to argue in favor of any opinion and therefore be unable to be captured by any opinion? (In which case, we should have all students participate in National Forensics League's Cross-Examination debate.)
Mind control is not new, what is new is having so many people try to control each individual mind in so many ways. In the Egypt of ~1500 B.C. or in the society that produced the Epic of Gilgamesh, there were so few voices heard per brain that many thoughts were "heard" in the brain with the voices of those who first uttered them to that brain. Now we hear words from so many voices (and read them silently) such that they don't have a particular voice in our brain. Each individual command or religious proclamation was much harder to critique or resist. Power, including monetary power, has always influenced salience of information and always will.
We need a positive conception of what we want—a purely negative conception that just wants no outside influence on another's thoughts... makes no sense. It means no schools, no media, no habitat / creature interaction whatsoever!
Your local library does have a biased card catalog based on what officials decide to buy and keep. Even donated books are subjected to processes and must be approved by staff.
If adwords is unethical, how should we expect Google to operate? If people paid for search, they could get more helpful results, but how are they going to get the resources to pay for it? Most people no longer pay sustainable prices for news, software, music, or videos. Is that ethical?
Page and Brin: "advertising income often provides an incentive to provide poor quality search results. For example, we noticed a major search engine would not return a large airline’s homepage when the airline’s name was given as a query. It so happened that the airline had placed an expensive ad, linked to the query that was its name. A better search engine would not have required this ad, and possibly resulted in the loss of the revenue from the airline to the search engine. In general, it could be argued from the consumer point of view that the better the search engine is, the fewer advertisements will be needed for the consumer to find what they want. This of course erodes the advertising supported business model of the existing search engines."
One could read this in a unwonted way: sometimes internet companies have to provide an intentionally poorer service in order to get the revenue needed to provide any service at all.
Money !== relevance, but money is a strict subset of relevance; it is certainly not noise. I'm more worried about its influence being against my interests than being a more chaotic / passive obstacle to my interests.
We shouldn't talk about money buying speech without an eye to what buys money. Should everyone get equal time on the networks and equal space in the newspapers until they look like comments sections / public access / twitter / facebook, too? Until Donald Trump looks like a moderate? If there's no centralized propoganda forming a "Common Core", then there's no basis for a society and Babel is the result. So things need to be balanced somehow. I feel afraid, too, about Google. Obviously Eric Schmidt and I are not equals, because he is the chairman of the Defense Innovation Advisory Board that will revamp the DOD's technology, he is the head of The Groundwork that is the tech heart of the Hillary campaign, and he is the head of the company that controls what we get to look at through the internet.
"So basically we're stuck between government influence and monetary influence."
Well, and the government is heavily influenced by money through campaign donations and the Clinton foundation (and similar groups) and the government heavily influences money through grants and stimulus and prosecutions and fines and regulations and so on. What's important is to try to diversify the influence and try to spread it out and get enough "blood" flowing to the parts that will benefit from that. These elements will always be in flux and we need to figure out what we want the system as a whole to look like.
"Money is not just a tool. I think it would be possible to make the case that money as it interacts with our systems is inherently unethical in that it forces unethical behavior from agents trying to maximize their utility. And the legal system that we have built around it only amplifies this behavior."
I don't know what you consider ethical or if you know what you consider ethical. How is money not just a tool? It's a counting mechanism, but it is also a religious talisman. What bothers you is that money is given to some things that you like and some things that you don't like. It's good that you feel a difference between utility and the ethical, but that presumably would always be there unless you equate the two. That's why it makes sense to say "more money should be spent on this" or "people should stop spending money on this" but not criticize the "influence of money" since money is an exchange medium not a power in-and-of-itself... it's lack of power in-and-of-itself is it's most defining characteristic. For example, candy doesn't make good money because if you get a craving you might eat it. The system is always firstly in people's minds / thoughts / ideas / whatever drives their behavior. That and software. Oh sure, the system is in everything but software is what's most efficiently changed.
Re: the "Omelas" bargain:
I don't get how the reference is relevant. Who's the kid in this scenario? I do think that pleasure is often bought at the expense of pain and that pleasure often sows the seeds of pain... Certainly a lot of the video games I've enjoyed have been hell to create. Overall, Omelas makes no sense; it doesn't attempt to explain in any realistic way how the kid's suffering can provide for so much joy, how people can sustain their economy / consumption / partying without painful labor, how people can avoid hedonic adaptation, or many other obstacles to trying to map this story onto the universe as some sort of useful metaphor.
Re: fund Google like a Kickstarter with a low "max donation" amount
I think Kickstarter's rely on big fish almost as much as "casual" games. I do not think that's a workable solution.
Re: "workers should own the means of production"
What could that possibly even mean today? Especially for this particular topic? Should "the people" own Google? If so, everyone would have their own search engine to the point there would be unsustainable redundancy, or it would be too small to be useful, or it would still be huge and centralized but "the people" would no more control its operations than the People's Republic of China. Or if Google employees should own it, that's not really too many people. With Apple spending $2 billion dollars to build a massive data center in Arizona that will employ a whoppping 150 people, it's clear that workers owning the means of production will soon mean that the few people who know how to run the world should own it, or its time for the computers to own themselves. Given that fewer and fewer people will be able to meaningfully "work", it seems that the former slaves are getting too useless for the elites and a retreat to the pity religions or the post-Marxisms that don't rely on now completely untenable labor theories of value or a radical luddism if one wants to hold onto these labor theories, believing that labor and "[f]reedom... is rather the indispensable condition for the quest for human completion" (Freire).
EXECUTIVE SUMMARY: Bias is inevitable, what kind should we want, and why? Our answer to that will be decided by who best seduces us into an answer. See: Baudrillard
Mind control is not new, what is new is having so many people try to control each individual mind in so many ways. In the Egypt of ~1500 B.C. or in the society that produced the Epic of Gilgamesh, there were so few voices heard per brain that many thoughts were "heard" in the brain with the voices of those who first uttered them to that brain. Now we hear words from so many voices (and read them silently) such that they don't have a particular voice in our brain. Each individual command or religious proclamation was much harder to critique or resist. Power, including monetary power, has always influenced salience of information and always will.
We need a positive conception of what we want—a purely negative conception that just wants no outside influence on another's thoughts... makes no sense. It means no schools, no media, no habitat / creature interaction whatsoever!
Your local library does have a biased card catalog based on what officials decide to buy and keep. Even donated books are subjected to processes and must be approved by staff.
If adwords is unethical, how should we expect Google to operate? If people paid for search, they could get more helpful results, but how are they going to get the resources to pay for it? Most people no longer pay sustainable prices for news, software, music, or videos. Is that ethical?
Page and Brin: "advertising income often provides an incentive to provide poor quality search results. For example, we noticed a major search engine would not return a large airline’s homepage when the airline’s name was given as a query. It so happened that the airline had placed an expensive ad, linked to the query that was its name. A better search engine would not have required this ad, and possibly resulted in the loss of the revenue from the airline to the search engine. In general, it could be argued from the consumer point of view that the better the search engine is, the fewer advertisements will be needed for the consumer to find what they want. This of course erodes the advertising supported business model of the existing search engines."
One could read this in a unwonted way: sometimes internet companies have to provide an intentionally poorer service in order to get the revenue needed to provide any service at all.
Money !== relevance, but money is a strict subset of relevance; it is certainly not noise. I'm more worried about its influence being against my interests than being a more chaotic / passive obstacle to my interests.
We shouldn't talk about money buying speech without an eye to what buys money. Should everyone get equal time on the networks and equal space in the newspapers until they look like comments sections / public access / twitter / facebook, too? Until Donald Trump looks like a moderate? If there's no centralized propoganda forming a "Common Core", then there's no basis for a society and Babel is the result. So things need to be balanced somehow. I feel afraid, too, about Google. Obviously Eric Schmidt and I are not equals, because he is the chairman of the Defense Innovation Advisory Board that will revamp the DOD's technology, he is the head of The Groundwork that is the tech heart of the Hillary campaign, and he is the head of the company that controls what we get to look at through the internet.
"So basically we're stuck between government influence and monetary influence."
Well, and the government is heavily influenced by money through campaign donations and the Clinton foundation (and similar groups) and the government heavily influences money through grants and stimulus and prosecutions and fines and regulations and so on. What's important is to try to diversify the influence and try to spread it out and get enough "blood" flowing to the parts that will benefit from that. These elements will always be in flux and we need to figure out what we want the system as a whole to look like.
"Money is not just a tool. I think it would be possible to make the case that money as it interacts with our systems is inherently unethical in that it forces unethical behavior from agents trying to maximize their utility. And the legal system that we have built around it only amplifies this behavior."
I don't know what you consider ethical or if you know what you consider ethical. How is money not just a tool? It's a counting mechanism, but it is also a religious talisman. What bothers you is that money is given to some things that you like and some things that you don't like. It's good that you feel a difference between utility and the ethical, but that presumably would always be there unless you equate the two. That's why it makes sense to say "more money should be spent on this" or "people should stop spending money on this" but not criticize the "influence of money" since money is an exchange medium not a power in-and-of-itself... it's lack of power in-and-of-itself is it's most defining characteristic. For example, candy doesn't make good money because if you get a craving you might eat it. The system is always firstly in people's minds / thoughts / ideas / whatever drives their behavior. That and software. Oh sure, the system is in everything but software is what's most efficiently changed.
Re: the "Omelas" bargain:
I don't get how the reference is relevant. Who's the kid in this scenario? I do think that pleasure is often bought at the expense of pain and that pleasure often sows the seeds of pain... Certainly a lot of the video games I've enjoyed have been hell to create. Overall, Omelas makes no sense; it doesn't attempt to explain in any realistic way how the kid's suffering can provide for so much joy, how people can sustain their economy / consumption / partying without painful labor, how people can avoid hedonic adaptation, or many other obstacles to trying to map this story onto the universe as some sort of useful metaphor.
Re: fund Google like a Kickstarter with a low "max donation" amount
I think Kickstarter's rely on big fish almost as much as "casual" games. I do not think that's a workable solution.
Re: "workers should own the means of production"
What could that possibly even mean today? Especially for this particular topic? Should "the people" own Google? If so, everyone would have their own search engine to the point there would be unsustainable redundancy, or it would be too small to be useful, or it would still be huge and centralized but "the people" would no more control its operations than the People's Republic of China. Or if Google employees should own it, that's not really too many people. With Apple spending $2 billion dollars to build a massive data center in Arizona that will employ a whoppping 150 people, it's clear that workers owning the means of production will soon mean that the few people who know how to run the world should own it, or its time for the computers to own themselves. Given that fewer and fewer people will be able to meaningfully "work", it seems that the former slaves are getting too useless for the elites and a retreat to the pity religions or the post-Marxisms that don't rely on now completely untenable labor theories of value or a radical luddism if one wants to hold onto these labor theories, believing that labor and "[f]reedom... is rather the indispensable condition for the quest for human completion" (Freire).
EXECUTIVE SUMMARY: Bias is inevitable, what kind should we want, and why? Our answer to that will be decided by who best seduces us into an answer. See: Baudrillard