<nettime> search no more

[Morlock Elloi <morlockelloi@gmail.com>]

You may have noticed in the last few days that date-based searches on 
industrial-surveillance properties are malfunctioning. Especially if you 
search for something recent (like "sort by date"). This is most easily 
seen on the Youtube subsidiary: try sorting by date uploaded, see what 
you get.

The reason is simple: failure of scalable censoring mechanisms (because 
ML (AI for the masses) has to 'learn' - that's what L stands for) to 
prevent dissemination of just uploaded undesirable content, they simply 
decided that you can never search by that criteria. This new episode in 
'search' adulteration is entertaining because it could not be made 
invisible.

The end game is obvious - searching will return only approved content, 
and the gap between the most recent searchable content and 'now' will 
depend on the speed of content approval processing. Right now they seem 
to be far behind.

Can they close the gap? It remains to be seen, as this looks like the 
first real war between humans and AI: if humans win, the search engines 
will start to look like Wayback machine or Wikipedia - very few curated 
results, which will undoubtedly affect the bottom line. Maybe this is 
acceptable, as other sources of data-siphoning income are steadily 
growing. If the machines win, the Network will start to look far more 
sterile and barren, but it will be in real time, and thus can 
successfully project that sterility into hapless users, who interface 
the world through handsets. Words you cannot hear and things you cannot 
see you cannot think.

Both of these outcomes will provide lots of initiative for alternative 
systems. I wouldn't be surprised if Russians or Chinese provide free 
uncensored search services to US/EU audiences (like they already do for 
the news). Now you know what Huawei vs. Cisco is all about.

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