Small Dictators, Big Bots
Slate
vruz: dear former sheep friend, here’s some utter extremism from a plain vanilla microsoft-operated website. maybe now a mainstream operation tells it like it is your authoritarian senses will be more inclined to trust what they say.
We are ruled, in effect, by small dictators and big bots. And this unelected, inefficient, and sometimes-petty tyranny is throttling the growth of a vibrant, healthy Internet and fuels many problems ranging from inane “real name” policies on sites like Google+—where people can be asked for official proof of identity if their account is flagged as a nickname—to major disruptions in connectivity. This is terrible because the Internet is not just any widget—it’s increasingly the heart of our networked commons. Dominance of a bad business model on the Internet doesn’t just result in bad products; it results in unhealthy social dynamics.
Take the Yahoo hiccup: What likely happened was that the offending URL, https://occupywallst.org, was added to a spam filter master file. (Maybe this was a politically motivated act. More likely, was just random error. In either case, it demonstrates the problem.) Most platforms rely on centralized huge databases of spam originators that are heavily automated and run by very small numbers of actual people. A long time can pass before an error is caught and a human is tasked to intervene and recalibrate the system.
