Rub out the word
Then came this. Entitled The
Second Superpower Rears its Beautiful Head, by James F Moore, it was
accompanied by a brand new blog.
The details need not detain us for very long, because the consequences of
this piece are much more important than its anodyne contents.
It's a plea for net users to organize themselves as a
"superpower", and represents a class of techno-utopian
literature that John Perry Barlow has been promoting - the same sappy
stuff, but not as well written - for the past ten years.
Only note how this example is sprinkled with trigger words for
progressives, liberals and NPR listeners. It concludes - if you can find
your way through this mound of feel-good styrofoam peanuts - "we do
not have to create a world where differences are resolved by war. It is
not our destiny to live in a world of destruction, tedium, and tragedy.
We will create a world of peace".
In common with the genre, there's no social or political context,
although the author offers a single specific instruction that is very
jarring in the surrounding blandness: we must co-operate with The World
Bank. Huh?
It's politics with the politics taken out: in short, it's
"revolution lite".
Now here's the important bit. Look what the phrase "Second
Superpower" produces on Google now. Try
it!. Moore's essay is right there at the top. And not just
first, but it already occupies all but three of the first thirty
spots.
The bashful Moore writes: "It was nice of Dave Winer [weblog tools
vendor] and Doc Searls [advertising consultant] to pick up on it, even if
it's not really ready for much exposure." No matter, Moore is an
overnight A-list blogging superstar, at his very first attempt.
Although it took millions of people around the world to compel the Gray
Lady to describe the anti-war movement as a "Second
Superpower", it took only a handful of webloggers to spin the
alternative meaning to manufacture sufficient PageRank™ to flood Google
with Moore's alternative, neutered definition.
Indeed, if you were wearing your Google-goggles, and the search engine
was your primary view of the world, you would have a hard time believing
that the phrase "Second Superpower" ever meant anything else.
To all intents and purposes, the original meaning has been erased.
Obliterated, in just seven weeks.
You're especially susceptible to this if you subscribe to the view that
Google's PageRank™ is "inherently democratic," which is how
Google, Inc. describes it.
And this Googlewash took just 42 days.
You are in a twisty maze of weblogs, all alike
All a strange coincidence, no doubt, but the picture darkens when you
look at a parallel conversation taking place elsewhere, whose hyperlinks
contributed to the redefinition, and help explain how this semantic
ethnic-cleansing took place so quickly.
Moore's subversion of the meaning of "Secondary Superpower" -
his high PageRank™ from derives from followers of 'A-list' tech bloggers
linking from an eerily similar "Emergent Democracy" discussion
list, which in turn takes its name from a similarly essay posted by Joi
Ito [Lunch -
Lunch -
Lunch -
Segway -
Lunch -
Lunch -
Fawning Parody] who is a colossus of
authority in these circles, hence lots of PageRank™-boosting hyperlinks,
and who like Moore, appeared from nowhere as a figure of authority.
Lunchin' Ito's essay is uncannily similar to Moore's - both are vague and
elusive and fail to describe how the "emergent" democracy might
form a legal framework, a currency, a definition of property or - most
important this, when you're being hit with a stick by a bastard - an
armed resistance (which in polite circles today, we call a
"military").
As with Moore, academic and historical research in this field is vapored
away, as if by magic.
However, we have an idea of how this utopian "democracy" might
look, if we follow the participants of Lunchbox's mailing list. These
participants are quite clear about how they define democracy:
"Democracy can function perfectly well without people painting their
faces and blocking streets," writes one contributor.
42 Days
Orwell would be amused, indeed.
"Words define action," sums up Alan Black. Black helps organise
San Francisco's annual LitQuake event and is holding a festival to
commemorate Orwell's centenary in the city in June.
"Newspeak was one of the planks of the totalitarian regime. Big
Brother was constantly redefining history and redefining words - he knew
people respond to key words," he says. "It's interesting that
they've identified that the only way to oppose the one superpower comes
from the people, and sought to redefine that."
But the real marvel is that they did it with so few people. Pew Research
Center's latest research says the
number of Internet users who look at blogs is " so small that it is
not possible to draw statistically meaningful conclusions about who uses
blogs." They peg it at about four per cent. But we're looking at a
small sub-genre of blogdom, the tech blogs, and specifically, we're
looking at an 'A list' of that sub- sub-genre.
Which means that Google is being "gamed" - and the language
perverted - by what in statistical terms in an extremely small fraction
indeed.
That was enough to make a "meaning" disappear.
Googlewash
Writing about Google's collusion with the People's Republic of China to
block access to mainland users, censorship researcher Seth Finkelsetein
observed:
"Contrary to earlier utopian theories of the Internet, it takes very
little effort for governments to cause certain information simply to
vanish for a huge number of people."
Rub out the word 'government', and replace it with 'weblog A-list'. In
this case a commons resource, this very potent and quite viral phrase,
was created by millions of people. But it was poisoned by a very select
number of 'bloggers'. Possibly a dozen, but no more than 30, we'd guess.
Who is poisoning the well?
The phrase "greenwash" will be familiar to many of you: it's
where a spot of judicious marketing
paint is applied to something decidedly rotten, transforming
it into something that looks as if it's wholesome and radical new, but
which is essentially unchanged.
This is the first Googlewash we've encountered. 42 days, too.
What else is coming down the pipe?
http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/6/30087.html