Surfing the Reality Filter

Personalisation has given us something very different: a public sphere sorted and manipulated by algorithms, fragmented by design, and hostile to dialogue.

Eli Pariser, The Filter Bubble

The internet has been heralded by many as part of the great democratisation of knowledge. Almost anything you want to know can be found on the net, thus ending the great hegemony of governments and the powerful, and their long history of manipulation and control over what information we can and should be exposed to.

However the situation is not quite as neutral as many might think, as is made clear in Eli Pariser's book The Filter Bubble: What the Internet is Hiding from You. This is a book that should be read by anyone who is interested in the future of the internet and knowledge. This is one of my ‘standard’ book reviews, as opposed to my intuitive reviews. .

The Filter Bubble begins with the revelation that in December 2009 Google changed its search engine to make it more ‘personalised’, and it is the phenomenon of personalisation that Pariser rail against in this book. The internet is now constructed such that the most dominant sites tend to feed back to us our own worldview, and our own construct of reality.

It is now true that two people doing the same web search will not necessarily get the same results, because the software "knows" your web history, tailors the results, and feeds back to you the information it 'thinks' you want. In recent times Facebook, Amazon, Yahoo, YouTube and many other major internet organisations have followed suit.

The top fifty internet sites install an average of 64 cookies and tracking beacons in your computer. This is how these sites keep ‘track of you.

The result is that you are now being fed a less diversified diet of information when you surf the net. The ‘real’ (at least on the net) is beginning to look like a circle of ever-diminishing size. This is not what the internet was supposed to be! Pariser argues that this runs against the spirit of democracy, which requires that we are exposed to ideas and opinions that run counter to our own. Instead, we are becoming enclosed in “the filter bubble”.

There are 'choices' being made which effect what we "perceive" in the world, and they are not being made by human beings. They are increasingly being made by machines, and those machines are owned and operated by gargantuan internet corporations – such as FaceBook, run by 26 year old Mark Zuckerberg.

WikiLeaks & The Matrix: Neo Goes to Jail

 Marcus T Anthony's new web site and blog can be found at: www.mind-futures.com.

For more recent insight into WikiLeaks, Julian Assange and his feud with Daniel Domscheit-Berg, click here; where I have written an intuitive review on Domscheit-Berg's book, Inside WikiLeaks.

My last blog post was a relatively mundane comment on the implications of the WikiLeaks story for anyone who writes personal stuff on the internet, whether using their real identify or their pseudonym (which probably means several hundred million people!). This time I’m going to move into a rather ‘deeper’ level of the whole saga.

Most discussions in the mainstream media, including the blogosphere, examine issues at a fairly superficial level. They probe the surface level, the facts and arguments which define the appearance of a problem.  They will sometimes also explore the systems level of the problem, attempting to uncover hidden determinants which lie behind the scenes. Even the most radical of these, such as conspiracy theories, still tend to remain at a fairly superficial level of analysis. Someone is pulling the strings: the oil companies, the Chinese, the Illuminati, the aliens, whomever. The problem is that such examinations simply shift focus from one part of a system to another, regardless of how “hidden” that part may be.

I suppose you could say my “expertise” lies at another level beyond the systems - the consciousness domain. This is where mostly unconscious drivers and energies are influencing the problem.

The most popular version of the WikiLeaks story sees defenders and attackers lining up on two sides of a divide, ready to save or condemn Julian Assange. He is either a defender of free speech and accountability (the majority), or a criminal threat to social and political stability (governments and minority of the general public).  Defenders say we have the right to know what the government is saying and thinking. Attackers say he is dangerously destabilising the system.

Let’s move to the next level.

Behind all life stories there are deeper narratives which exist at a psychic level. Here I am going to examine some of the psycho-spiritual issues which underpin the actions of Julian Assange, in particular the soul issues which he is facing in this lifetime, including the karmic situations behind them.

WikiLeaks in Love

Journalists, bloggers and media commentators have been having a field day with the Julian Assange/WikiLeaks case. So much is being written and discussed that it is difficult to keep up with it all. For futurists like me, and those passionate about the development of society and planet, the saga is of enormous importance. In fact there are so many issues, and the information is changing so rapidly, that it is difficult to articulate thoughts on it into any definite narrative. Given, this, I have decided to write shorter posts on the topic, taking one seminal idea at a time.

Julian Assange's OK Cupid photo

Let's begin with another recent development in the case, a somewhat ironic  one. Reporters and researchers (and undoubtedly government operatives) have been trawling the net and information systems in a bid to scrape together any information on Julian Assange. Yesterday, a story circulated through the media about Assange’s profile on the OK Cupid, web site where he (presumably) hoped to connect with women. Calling himself Harry Harrison, he wrote:

# I like women from countries that have sustained political turmoil. Western culture seems to forge women that are valueless and inane. OK. Not only women!

# I am DANGER, ACHTUNG, and ??????????????!

# Directing a consuming, dangerous human rights project which is, as you might expect, male dominated

# I have asian teengirl stalkers. Hello.

# Do not write to me if you are timid. I am too busy. Write to me if you are brave.

But wait, there's more!

What I’m doing with my life. Directing a consuming, dangerous human rights project which is, as you might expect, male dominated. Variously professionally involved in international journalism/books, documentaries, cryptography, intelligence agencies, civil rights, political activism, white collar crime and the internet. Formal background in neuroscience, mathematics, physics and philosophy.

Live by the sword, die by the sword, as they say. One can only imagine how many women would have actually believed any of this to be true, given that it sounds like the ravings of a James Bond wannbe! 

On a more serious note, this does bring to the fore questions about information that we put on the web, even if it is anonymously posted under a pseudonym. This posting from OK Cupid was last updated 4 years ago. Right now the intrepid WikiLeaks founder is probably ruminating over every internet posting he ever made since the web began.

While today’s net trawling technologies are in their infancy, who is to say what will be available in ten, twenty, 100 years time? Perhaps all an amateur will have to do is know an IP address, type it in, then everything ever entered from that address might appear. And that’s just one top-of-my-head speculation. If such technologies become widely available, any person who assumes a position of power or fame might have their entire web browsing history made available to the general public. And this is not to even consider the possibilities of manufacturing fake web histories and postings.

It’s scary, and no doubt the Assange case will show just what is possible in this domain as of the present day. He has plenty of enemies in high places, and any information which even slightly defames him will almost certainly make the rounds.

The other irony here is that whatever does surface about the private life of Julian Assange, it will further suggest that there are limits of freedom of information.  Many in western countries, especially from "freedom-loving"  United States, have been deeply conditioned to think of freedom of information as being a given in a developed society. But just where do we draw the line? Perhaps you (like me) felt a little queasy about viewing Harry Harrison's photo here. 

Marcus