Editors A.K.A. Minions

A few astute observers claim that since politicians cannot solve the big problems, they get their constituents and minions to cause trouble for “the little guys”so that it looks like government is getting something done. I would say that the same can be said about big-time Internet advertising publishers: They go after the small-time clickers, surfers, and bloggers who make less than minimum wage on the Net. They start “witch hunts” in order to deflect attention from the fact that they have a very hard time making the world obey whatever temporary rules they dream up during their unending quest to protect their multi-million (or multi-billion) dollar profits. They call these phony mass actions of theirs “The Wisdom of Crowds.”

Any election run on a technical platform rationalized as something called “The Wisdom of Crowds” would attract the public scorn of every newspaper in the world. In the United States, the American Civil Liberties Union (the ACLU) would assist in the prosecution of any organization that utilized the so-called wisdom of crowds as the basis of government and democratic representation.

Yes, it seems that blogger.com’s, blogspot.com’s, opera.com’s, and technorati.com’s minions (a.k.a. editors) are made from identical pots of suspect stew. They have learned a means of deflecting attention away from their bosses’ burgeoning advertising revenues: they get their hundreds of thousands of unpaid dupes to waste a lot of time and make a lot of noise.

You’re supposed to cringe in fear and then write, blog, surf, and click for nothing or for less than minimum wage. That is how the Internet is designed. The rich can’t get you to work for free in their factories and suburban malls, but they can get quite a few loose-knit online bullies and tattletales to lead you by the nose here in cyberspace.

See http://neo-fascism.blogspot.com/2005/09/wisdom-of-crowds-does-not-exist.html:

The wisdom of crowds does not exist.

There is no such thing as the wisdom of crowds (compare this to blogger.com’s “What is the ‘Flag'” button) – people belong to groups and hang together as groups: age groups, political groups, national groups, Internet groups, [gangs, bullies, fools, and conspirators], to mention a few. Individuals are constantly influenced by their respective groups and the media produced by those groups and therefore do not make independent decisions. And when the data are suspect (as is often the case in field studies of society at large), statistics are fruitless.