How much money are the various Wikimedia Foundation affiliates getting from Google, Facebook, and other major Internet behemoths? And what is the Wikimedia Foundation trying to do in Brussels, Washington DC, and elsewhere to counter the threat of what Harvard Social Psychology Professor Emeritus Shoshana Zuboff calls, "The Age of Surveillance Capitalism"?[1]
A variety of recent publications have reported that political polarization has been increasing within the US and many other countries, because Google, Facebook, and other Internet companies make money by selling clicks -- changes in audience behaviors -- to advertisers. Their AI software learns each individual's hot buttons and exploit that in ways that is increasing political polarization worldwide. These Internet companies aggressively lobby governments in Washington, Brussels, different states in the US and probably elsewhere, to protect their revenue streams against efforts to limit the threats all this poses to democracy and world peace.
The 2021 United States Capitol attack[2] was almost certainly a product of the funding model for Google and Facebook. If this trend towards political polarization continues on its present course, where will it end? This reminds me of the 1982 Falklands / Malvinas War, where, at least according to some versions of the story, weak political leaders in Argentina and the United Kingdom went to war in an effort to improve their respective political situations.[3] Might something like this happen in the not-too-distant future between the US and China? Former US Secretary of Defense William Perry has suggested a computer virus like Stuxnet could lead senior military and civilian leaders in the US to believe they are being attacked and must themselves initiate a nuclear response. Dan Ellsberg has claimed that the result would almost certainly be a nuclear winter lasting a decade during which 98 percent of humanity would starve to death if they didn't die of something else sooner. My research on this issue suggests that such a nuclear war and nuclear winter are likely but not certain,[4] and the risks are increasing.[5]
Surveillance capitalism is distorting academic research. In 2017, a researcher for the New America Foundation and his staff of 10 were fired after publishing a report praising the EU’s historic decision to levy a $2.7 billion fine on Google as the result of a multiyear antitrust investigation. “Google is very aggressive in throwing its money around Washington and Brussels, and then pulling strings”.[6]
Comments? Spencer Graves aka User:DavidMCEddy
[1] Shoshana Zuboff (2019) The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The fight for a human future at the new frontier of power (PublicAffairs, esp. pp. 54-55, 139, 84-86), available for free in PDF at:
https://we.riseup.net/assets/533560/Zuboff%2C+Shoshana.The+Age+of+Surveillan...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2021_United_States_Capitol_attack
Former President Trump continues to insist that the 2020 election was stolen from him. Only two Republicans in the US House have publicly opposed that claim, and Republican election officials in multiple states have received death threats.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Attempts_to_overturn_the_2020_United_States_pr...
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Falklands_War
[4] See references cited in:
https://en.wikiversity.org/wiki/Time_to_nuclear_Armageddon#Methodology
[5] https://en.wikiversity.org/wiki/Forecasting_nuclear_proliferation
[5] Zuboff, p. 86.