[pfisherman]

To be fair I do not think of the proposed search as particularly “feudal”. He is basically just describing what people do by appending “Reddit” to their Google searches. I think Yarvin diagnoses partt if the problem correctly, but misses (1) the massive amount of money that can be generated from paid manipulation of rankings (by Google or others), and (2) the adversarial environment this creates.

[hellerve]

I wasn’t particularly interested in entering the discussion (mainly providing the link and an explanation), but I used the word "feudal" because Yarvin himself used it, in the name as well as in the description of the system.

[topynate]

Yarvin was talking about Google Search in 2010 as a mutated but recognizable version of PageRank. That's correct, I think, but it was already heading in a different direction. By the end of the year the NYT was reporting on malicious manipulation of search results for profit¹ and Google responded quickly by changing their algorithm². Then, as the "don't be evil" era draws to a close, Google gets more and more aggressive about extracting user value and the 'democratic' PageRank (which Yarvin was by no means alone in identifying as such³) is totally subverted. In 2016 Trump wins and 'fake news' – successively renamed to 'false news', 'misinformation', and now 'disinformation' – becomes the issue, and Google responds to that, too⁴. So post-2016 there really is a kind of sociological health and safety factor in the algorithm, and it's only then that Morozov's 'woke' becomes applicable to Google Search.

Now if anyone was going to guess that something like that would happen, it'd be Yarvin – but none of that is in that 2010 blog. When he said 'democratic' he meant exactly what Wired did in the article linked below – the action of masses of people. It's Morozov that makes the association between 'woke' (i.e. P.C.) and 'democratic', which has all sorts of implications. A woke-democratic Google Search isn't one that is powered by democracy, but one which protects democracy – meaning, protects the masses from manipulation by exposure to sociologically harmful 'content'. Sensu Yarvin, that is neither feudal nor democratic. It is in fact oligarchic.

The final irony is that when Morozov fudged the name Feudle, wittingly or no, and omitted a link to the blog in question, it was entirely in accord with the idea of exercising democratic power by not giving UR any link juice, but the result of that when posted to HN – a site not lacking in markers of community reputation – is that two people find the link (thanks again) and a small discussion ensues which otherwise would not have happened.

¹ https://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/28/business/28borker.html, see also https://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/15/opinion/15thu3.html ² https://www.theguardian.com/technology/blog/2010/dec/02/goog... ³ https://www.wired.com/2010/02/ff-google-algorithm/ ⁴ https://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/26/technology/google-search-..., https://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/10/technology/google-algorit...