Jeffrey A Tucker – Canada Free Press July 24, 2024

Such confusing times, so much in dispute, so much to discover and know. Billions of people are right now lifting their phones to their faces and searching for answers. The results they see are dramatically different from what they were just a few years ago.

You have surely noticed that Google searches aren’t what they used to be. Or maybe you haven’t, and that’s the idea. For many years, we trusted Google to give us consensus results based on the standard of crowd-sourced credibility. While the system was imperfect, it worked well enough.

The ranking in Google search was based on the status of a website, which in turn was based on how many people used the site, how many and which sites linked to it, and how much traffic it consistently generated. As part of that, you could optimize your site’s results with the use of good keywords, site maps, clean structure, and stable links. Then you could win the game.

A whole industry emerged to help you achieve this, with every expert claiming to have cracked the code.

That system is officially over. What you see on search now is what elites want you to see. They are in charge and they pick and choose results based on political and cultural issues that affect nearly everything.

It’s hard to know precisely when it came to an end, but sometime in the past year or 24 months, the new system came to be codified. The new search results aren’t based on user experience. They are based on what someone thinks you should know. That someone is the usual gang, some amorphous bureaucrats who might be influenced by political concerns or might be deep-state agents themselves. Regardless, what you see is now what some authority wants you to see.

This isn’t an accident but the fulfillment of a plan. Some people simply could not handle the freedom that the web allowed. They had to smash it, cartelize it, censor it, and pound it into a system that serves power rather than the insatiable drive of human beings to know.

It’s possible to trace the tragic change from the past to the present by following the trajectory of various declarations that have been issued over the years. The tone was set at the dawn of the World Wide Web in 1996 by digital guru Grateful Dead lyricist and Harvard University fellow John Perry Barlow, who died in 2018.

Barlow’s Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, somewhat ironically written in Davos, Switzerland, is still hosted by the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), which he founded. The manifesto waxes lyrical about the liberatory, open future of internet freedom:

“Governments of the Industrial World, you weary giants of flesh and steel, I come from Cyberspace, the new home of Mind. On behalf of the future, I ask you of the past to leave us alone. You are not welcome among us. You have no sovereignty where we gather.”

So on it went. His words defined the whole ethos of a generation of entrepreneurs and users. The internet would give us freedom and unlimited access to information. We would no longer be bound by authority and propaganda. The new “information superhighway,” as Al Gore called it, would emancipate humanity with unprecedented access, and this access would change the world, bringing ever-more progress toward free people and democracy the world over.

Nearly a decade and a half later, by 2012, that idea was fully embraced by the main architects of the emergent app economy and the explosion of smartphone use across the world. The result was the Declaration of Internet Freedom, which went live in July 2012 and garnered a great deal of press attention at the time. It was signed by the EFF, Amnesty International, Reporters Without Borders, and other liberty-focused organizations.

If you go to the site InternetDeclaration.org now, your browser won’t reveal any of its contents. The secure certificate is dead. If you bypass the warning, you will find yourself forbidden from accessing any of the content. The tour through Archive.org shows that the last living presentation of the site was in February 2018

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