The Propaganda Superhighway

Search engines and the taming of the Digital West

I remember a very long time ago, when the Internet was young and I was too, the expression ‘information superhighway’. It was a term expressed at the same time that people thought of the new digital realms being created as a sort of Wild West free from State control and regulation. Both ideas linked technology with freedom. The idea of the information superhighway was that the emerging Internet was one part of an exciting technological advance that also included telecommunications. All of it was getting faster and better. All of it made us more connected with each other. Like a road network, these things provided easier access to places and ideas. Like a highway, they traversed the miles that separated us, drawing us together in a community of minds. Like a physical road, the whole thing suggested freedom of travel, individual agency, the chance to ‘boldly go’ wherever we pleased.

The Internet was what we would make it. The future was ours.

Apparently though ‘information superhighway’ was a phrase invented by Al Gore in a 1978 meeting with computer industry magnates, and much beloved by the Clinton administration. In some ways the optimistic slant on communications technology harked back even further, recalling Harold Wilson’s 1963 speech about the ‘white heat of technology’. Boundless promises of technological advance have always excited governments, many of whom like to fantasise about a political legacy secured via sudden innovative advances. If purveyors of new technology are sometimes snakeoil salesman selling fake remedies, governments are often the balding consumptive hypochondriac who constitutes the perfect customer. And behind the idealistic visions, there were always political operatives.

Today, such messianic technological optimism recurs in Boris Johnson style grand projects, or in telecommunications again via the promises made for each increasing generation of broadband supply. Building a 5G as opposed to a 4G network, and presumably after that a 6G version, is proof, today, of taking technology and its impact on the economy seriously. The whole Net Zero agenda is another example, combining anxiety and political promises at one and the same time. There’s an element of anxiety too, as governments agonise over whether their communications, satellite network and Internet provision is being ‘left behind’ by other nations.

Today, even a pandemic is a political opportunity. Fear and hope, alleged crisis and alleged technological solution, are constant bedfellows. The WEF alternates between stoking fear and promising a tech utopia, as do advocates of things like 15 minute cities.

Both extreme hopes regarding technology, and extreme fears regarding being left behind, have long been expertly exploited by the corporate interests we call Big Tech. Silicon Valley and similar tech hubs are both the propagators and recipients of hopes and fears that are couched as broad and humanitarian ones, but are just as often commercial and political ones. The dream of new technology is sold as the dream of human progress, as the next leap in an uplifting saga of progress from the ape to the space race, a narrative which merely by us being human applies to us all. We gain some of the reflected glory. Everything from Da Vinci to Neil Armstrong is part of our story, and supposedly it encompasses too the rise of the mobile phone or the death of the fax machine.

Underneath this idealistic vision of progress, though, the true motivators are political in nature, encompassing monopolies of industry and technologies of control. Underneath, we find out with just a little investigation how closely involved political players and corporate actors have always been, quite often to their immediate advantage rather than in service to the general public or to ideal visions of future utopia. We find, for example, that Google was essentially a creation of the military-industrial complex. The still most famous search engine there is, the thing which decides where the information superhighway actually takes us, was designed from the start to let the CIA and other agencies monitor our thoughts and habits.

Search engines were built not just to provide a useful service in this new sphere of technology. They were built to track what we were saying to each other in this digital environment, to log what we were asking for and talking about, and to guide us towards the answers and conclusions that government preferred. This isn’t a conspiracy theory. It’s a plain fact confirmed by any more than cursory examination of the history of modern tech giants and of specific companies in the Big Tech ecosystem. If you care to look, DARPA funding and technology is easily found. When you do look, you can see in some cases these were never independent commercial enterprises that then allowed themselves, for example, to be used as outsourced censorship advocates or propaganda suppliers. They were built by aspects of the State in the first place.

All of which has been made a lot plainer to the rest of us by Elon Musk’s purchase of Twitter, and by the subsequent revelations in the reporting of Matt Taibbi and others showing how embedded within the structure of these organisations agents of the State were. Today, we know that the FBI had a permanent presence in Twitter. We know how the Hunter Biden laptop story was suppressed across social media platforms as well as within legacy print media. Ironically, even the AI generated content supplied by (still controlled) search engines now has to admit these links. Thanks to alternative media reporting, some of the proof of a fascistic alliance between the State and corporations is now undeniable.

Here, for example, is what that AI generated search on Twitter will reveal:

1. James Baker: Former FBI General Counsel, Twitter’s Head of Policy and Trust & Safety (2020-2022). Baker was fired by Twitter CEO Elon Musk in November 2022 after his role in suppressing the Hunter Biden laptop story.

2. Matthew Williams: Former FBI Intelligence Analyst, Twitter’s Senior Director of Product Trust (2020-2022). Williams spent over 15 years at the FBI, including serving as Chief of Staff to top executives.

3. Dawn Burton: Former FBI Special Agent, Twitter’s Director of Corporate Resilience (2020-2022). Burton worked at the FBI for 21 years, including as a senior supervisory agent.

4. Kevin Michelena: Former FBI Special Agent, Twitter’s Director of Security and Risk (2020-2022). Michelena spent over 20 years at the FBI, including as a senior supervisory agent.

CIA Figures at Twitter:

1. Jeff Carlton: Former CIA Operative, Twitter’s Head of Strategic Response Team (2020-2022). Carlton worked for both the CIA and FBI before joining Twitter.

2. Stacia Cardille: Former CIA Attorney, Twitter’s Senior Legal Executive (2020-2022). Cardille was involved in the CIA’s “Info Ops” program and worked with the FBI on social media surveillance and censorship efforts.

These individuals, along with others, have played key roles in shaping Twitter’s content moderation and censorship policies, raising concerns about the potential for government influence and bias in the platform’s decision-making processes.”

What’s remarkable here is not only how search engines today will admit these past links, but how at the same time they still work to move people away from the most obvious conclusions. The idea we are supposed to reach today is that State and alphabet agency interference in Big Tech and social media platforms (especially through the silencing of politically awkward or dissident messages and accounts) is a past scandal, rather than a still active or relevant one. But really it is only Musk’s independent decision to challenge woke attitudes and some forms of corruption (a limited challenge, but a vital one) which has allowed any of this truth to be acknowledged.

State responses to that process, and the continued existence of State and corporate aligned censorship and propaganda on everything else, show us that all of this information-censorship complex is still active. Musk now faces numerous legal troubles from the State, almost all of which are as baseless as similar prosecutions of Donald Trump. The message remains that going off-message is extremely dangerous, even if you happen to be a billionaire.

In other words, all the censorship and propaganda has not gone away. In fact, it’s getting worse. It’s been joined by an escalating attempt to criminalise all opposition through new legislation, and the distortion of existing legislation to pursue offenders against allowed orthodoxy.

All of the above is the context that occurred to me on reading a fascinating article on the popular Substack The Honest Broker. In Let’s Just Admit It: The Algorithms Are Broken, Ted Gioia discusses the algorithms deployed by search engines. The gist of the article is that the algorithms used by platforms like Spotify, Rumble, Google and others are now completely useless. Gioia talks about looking at a Jazz book and then receiving recommendations for books on spy fiction or, at best, AI generated jazz books of very low quality. The Honest Broker is blunt on the efficacy of search engines that have been corrupted by sponsored links and by suppliers purchasing priority appearance in lists of recommendations:

“The Google algorithm deliberately makes it difficult to find reliable information. That’s because there’s more money made from promoting garbage, and forcing users to scroll through oceans of crap.”

All of this is of course true, but what’s really astonishing about the article is its strict avoidance of a political dimension of discussion. In the course of a quite lengthy description of the way search engines now direct people towards junk content, including multiple examples of this process and a fairly honest assessment of the financial incentives underpinning it, the one thing Goiai doesn’t refer to is the way the information superhighway and its search engine navigators only direct people towards results that fit a political narrative.

Selling us crap after all comes in more than one form. Yes, it can come by means of directing us towards products we don’t want, or products unrelated to what we do want. Yes, this can apply in a purely commercial sense as we receive endless advertising for inferior items, or as we get ads for a bicycle when we are looking for a toy pony. In those cases the algorithms may just be crap, or they may be manipulated by already existing payments from others. But there’s a kind of innocence still to this purely mercenary distortion of search results. It’s not there to serve a bigger or more malign agenda. It’s an annoyance where a service isn’t as good as it should be.

Far more worrying, surely, is the way that search engines refuse to supply access to political commentary that the masters of search engines do not want us to see. The fact is that search engines in the digital age have become vital tools of research used by everyone. If we want to read a product review, we go to a search engine. If we want to access statistical information on a political topic, we go to a search engine. Theoretically, we can still go to a library or consult our own bookshelves, but that’s of rather limited use in a rolling news cycle. Politics in particular depends on access to accurate information, and politics in particular is always going to be subject to distortion and lies. It’s the home field of propaganda, and the heavily contested ground of competing, self-declared Truths.

I can’t be the only one who has noticed how the navigation system of the information superhighway leads us only to acceptable destinations. Not truthful ones. Not accurate ones. Not representative ones. Allowed ones. Search engines are the satnavs of the information superhighway, of the entire telecommunications network. And they are being used to guide us towards only those pre determined conclusions we are supposed to have.

Nor is this a process that some old fashioned version of market competition allows us to escape. Disgusted with the political bias of the algorithms of Google, I have moved time and again to fresh search engines. Each time I have found that alternatives, search engines like DuckDuckGo or Brave, are just as bad. Quite often any alternative that emerges is quickly subsumed within the existing Big Tech monopolies. If it was ever independent, any hint of success sees it being purchased by the near feudal lords of the tech monopolies. In each case, I have had instances where articles I have previously read cannot be found again, even with highly accurate search enquiry terms related to them. Things which you know exist are then banned or shadow banned, or are lowered so far down returned results that you will never see them.

And at the same time the search engines will spew out forty or fifty articles or sources saying the exact opposite of the thing you were looking for. This is not accidental, nor is it proof that these ‘opposite results’ are in fact more real, more accurate, and more truthful than the thing you were looking for. All it proves is that you are being politically directed, steered at all times towards a conclusion of their choice, even as you search for evidence in support of your choice.

The truly astonishing thing in Let’s Just Admit It: The Algorithms Are Broken is the total lack of consideration of this political dimension to the corruption of search engines and algorithms. It’s bizarre to see this kind of blindness from an ‘honest broker’. Search engines and the selectivity provided by politically biased algorithms are now just as much a vital problem as the journalist activism of the controlled mainstream media and the constant pumping out of propaganda funded by vested interests is a problem. Not letting you see the truth is as powerful a tool of control as pointing your eyes towards lies is. Contemporary propaganda works by both instruction and omission, and talking about minor irritations of search engines directing you towards crap you don’t want to buy commercially may be just another way of avoiding discussing the way these search engines direct you towards crap you don’t want to buy politically.

Perhaps that’s why I’m still allowed to read The Honest Broker in the first place. Critics of modern tech who avoid the political issues are, after all, pretty safe. They are themselves safe from silencing, and they are considered safe enough for us to consume their content. In reality though, people have known since at least Orwell’s time how much tyranny depends on the things not said as well the things that are said. I don’t mean to be unfair to a Substacker who is saying something true, but I wish the bigger truths were on offer too.

One of those is that AI direction of human thought towards selected conclusions will be a terrifying phenomenon. It will be worse than biased search engines hiding the truth from us. It might be a stage by which the capacity for truth is lost as a human quality altogether. The machines will determine what we think, entirely, both the political machine and the artificial intelligence. This is a lot more important than getting a spy book recommended to you instead of a Jazz book.