[GrantS]

Agreed, it takes awhile to get there but the core idea comes toward the end:

The genius — sometimes deliberate, sometimes accidental — of the enterprises now on such a steep ascent is that they have found their way through the looking-glass and emerged as something else. Their models are no longer models. The search engine is no longer a model of human knowledge, it is human knowledge. What began as a mapping of human meaning now defines human meaning, and has begun to control, rather than simply catalog or index, human thought. No one is at the controls. If enough drivers subscribe to a real-time map, traffic is controlled, with no central model except the traffic itself. The successful social network is no longer a model of the social graph, it is the social graph. This is why it is a winner-take-all game. Governments, with an allegiance to antiquated models and control systems, are being left behind.

[pnathan]

Yes, I don't buy most of what the essay said, but that was bang on, generally. I disagree heavily with the last sentence, but the bit about how we've generally shifted from models->actuality is very, very true. It's acutely obvious when you look for knowledge that isn't in the consensual standard places online, or really try to use Google as a search engine as opposed to a handy-dandy bookmark replacement thing.

[pesmhey]

Could you give an example of looking for knowledge that isn’t in the concensual standard places online, where that search ends up finding nothing?

[pnathan]

Not a specific thing, no. It tends to be trade knowledge or bits of history & beliefs that were printed, or orally known. I have a certain store of oral history regarding a few 20thC movements that was passed down, for instance. But there are no electronic editions of that information - if you find it on Wikipedia, it'll be filtered, somewhat mangled, and altogether minimal in description.

These days when I want to find obscure knowledge, I purchase books written on the topic by scholars; they concentrate the information very well with good sourcing.

[narrator]

I don't think China's being left behind. They have a successful system of censorship. In the west we are slowly being led down the path where we've moved our knowledge and understanding of the world to the hands of private companies who deplatform and delete whole universes of information on a whim. Large subreddits getting banned for example deletes tends of thousands of man hours of work from existence.

[AJ007]

EC2 and Google Cloud concern me a lot more than Facebook and Reddit. A lot of those censor-able platforms have only been successful because the users believed they were using something different than it actually was (surprise, Tumblr users.) We still have Wikipedia, Archive.org, Bittorrent, Tor, Bitcoin, and so on.

To define China's system of censorship as successful seems premature. We have had similar systems in the past, and while they maintained some form of stability for the status quo they ultimately hindered those society's progress.

"It is true that if you have a tyranny of ideas, so that you know exactly what has to be true, you act very decisively, and it looks good – for a while. But soon the ship is heading in the wrong direction, and no one can modify the direction any more." -Richard Feynman

[pickpuck]

"Simulacra are copies that depict things that either had no original, or that no longer have an original."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simulacra_and_Simulation

[bryanrasmussen]

If the search engine is now human knowledge that would explain why everything seems to have gotten dumber in the last few years. We are all google now.