June 20, 2023

The "information super highway" no longer exists. It was replaced by "social media." There is no indication of that happening in social discourse.

It happened because power mongers took over the process. How and why they did that tells the story of power mongers taking over social structures and turning them into power structures for personal gain at everyone else's expense.

When the internet took off for the general public during the 1990s, the search engines were in a panic trying to get the crazies off the internet. The crazies were new sources of information that were no longer dominated and suppressed by the power mongers, which means real information was contradicting a lot of official reality. My web site would disappear for two weeks at a time from the search engines, as they tried to find a method of getting the crazies off the internet but failing to do so.

One of the search engines was organized like a library, with a subject index and author index, allowing authors to enter their own information including a summary. We would pick one or more categories and build the index. Then the method was changed to having experts write the summary. You can guess how a mushroom expert described my web site. It was trash that didn't belong on the internet. That went on for a few weeks; and that was the end of that methodology.

Then a new method of searching showed up. It was a blank, white page with three items: a box for entering a search term, below it was "Do No Evil" and at the top was "Google." And that was the end of several other search engines.

After a couple of decades of transformation, it was Google that put an end to the information super highway. They now cut off searches after about two hundred items, while they fill the two hundred spaces with garbage including kiddie questions, official web sites, some news, a few products and endless trivia. If you search for black mold, you will get a band or song named black mold with a hundred variations and comments but no mycology.

That's why retailers have to sell through Amazon. They no long have visibility on the internet. They try to gain visibility through Amazon and can do their own shipping afterwards; but the search engines don't exist for them. The search engines don't exist. And with them went the information super highway.

But no one noticed, because social media and cat pictures are everything. Five thousand years of human knowledge was replaced by debased entertainment.

Of course, there is the quick fix: Wikipedia. Find the facts on Wikipedia. It's not bad for chemistry, but nothing else. The degradation process was the usual routine: imperceptibly omit this, add that and bury it all in garbage lengthened to unusability by combining subjects. If you look for mouse trap, you get the history of anthropology, syntax of mouse, the transformation of housing and someplace in there that you will never find is something about catching mice.

All of that is how incompetent power mongers took over the social structures and converted them into power structures for dominating society. They need to eradicate rationality before they can prevail, because rationality exposes them as the incompetent corrupters that they are.