Three Companies Now Run The World

The price of convenience

There are two methods by which predators snag prey: one is to attract victims into a snare, and the other is to simply strike. Today’s corporate predators use both. First, they lure us in with convenience. But unlike natural predators their objective is not to consume us immediately; their profit lies in keeping us alive and coercing us to obey their directives. To accomplish this, they gradually sneak in more hooks. Like the bee in the photo above we are waking up, but it’s already too late; it’s hard to see how we’re going to escape.

The Google Model

You will own nothing

Years ago, I joined a local arts organization to help promote its upcoming art exhibition. The members were using Google Docs, which I’d never seen before. Google Docs, I learned, was free, so we didn’t need to buy any software licenses. This was a big deal for a group with almost no budget. The other interesting thing was that Google documents were sharable. I could edit a document and save it, and then someone else could edit that same shared document, and later I’d see that person’s changes. Even as an IT person, it took me awhile to realize that this was something really different.

I was fine with Google Docs until I decided to make a local copy of one document, so that I could later edit it offline using my locally installed Google Docs app. I was expecting to produce a file that I could see on my Windows machine’s local hard drive, which I could copy or otherwise manipulate using local Windows tools like the File Explorer. But try as I might, I could not create such a thing. Yes I could “export” a Google document into some other format (such as PDF) and download that object and then manipulate it on my local file system, but that was no longer a Google document; I could not then modify that exported thing and then somehow return it to the Google Docs environment. Google documents, it turns out, exist only in Google’s “cloud,” and the only “copies” that one can produce locally are links to those documents, links that can be followed only using Google’s tools. You can manipulate a Google document while offline, using a browser or the local Google Docs app, but nothing outside those tools can see the file(s) containing your data.

It took awhile for this reality to sink in: You do not own your Google documents; Google does. Yes, technically and legally you might own your documents’ contents. You can copyright them, copy those contents into other formats, distribute them, whatever. But if your organization’s day-to-day operations depend on accessing Google documents in their original online formats, all that doesn’t matter. Without Google’s tools and Google’s express permission, you are toast. Even if you regularly make backups in other formats, your organization’s staff and applications can’t operate using those backups. If Google someday decides to close your account, you and your organization are done, and there’s nothing you can do about it.

And you’ll be happy (as we control public perception)

Using the Google search engine to search for “Dr. Robert Malone”, the right side of my resulting page contained this teaser prompting me to click on a link that took me to Wikipedia’s article on him:

I didn’t need to click in order to imagine that Dr. Malone is a person not to be trusted, since he “promoted misinformation.”

Ironically, Dr. Malone is indisputably one of the world’s foremost authorities on mRNA technology, having been one of its primary developers. Yet apparently there is someone, some Wiki-god at Wikipedia who is so eminently qualified to judge Dr. Malone’s opinions that this Wiki-god can claim that Malone is either clueless or malicious. And someone at Google apparently believes that on this subject, as with most subjects, Wikipedia is the world’s foremost authority, since Wikipedia is (in my experience at least) the single source that by far appears most frequently at the tops of Google searches.

My survey of Wikipedia’s content suggests:

• Wikipedia’s political commentary appears to be nearly pure propaganda of the Democratic Party. For evidence of this, compare Wikipedia’s statements about competing Republican and Democratic Party members. For example, at this writing the arguably two most outspoken U.S. House members of the two parties are, respectively Marjorie Taylor Greene and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.
  

• Wikipedia’s science- and health-related commentary appears to be an extension of the mainstream media, who are massively sponsored by the corporate entities upon which they report. In other words, the “news” that reports on Pfizer is “brought to you by Pfizer.”

Even more perplexing is Google’s preoccupation with listing Wikipedia as the top source on almost every subject. The authorship of Wikipedia articles is to some large degree open to anyone, for which Wikipedia is frequently criticized, so how is it possible that the world’s most influential search engine constantly assumes that Wikipedia content should be displayed first? Wikipedia itself doesn’t even claim to be accurate. Quoting from Wikipedia itself:

“As a user-generated source, it can be edited by anyone at any time, and any information it contains at a particular time could be vandalism, a work in progress, or simply incorrect.”

My guess is that there are thousands of persons like Dr. Malone and Marjorie Taylor Greene who are both professionally and personally libeled on Wikipedia. It is a wonder to me, then, that no enterprising law firm has arisen to mount a class-action lawsuit against both Wikipedia and Google on behalf of such persons.

Google, via its reliance on its favorite information provider Wikipedia, is actively and openly defaming and discrediting one of the world's foremost authorities on mRNA technology, even though Google as a company presumably has no authority on the subject and probably employs no one who has any authority on the subject. If “GoogleWiki” has the power to do this without facing any repercussions whatsoever,  what else might GoogleWiki do?

Recently Google has been sending me emails addressing me as “Akash”. Here is an unretouched excerpt:

So someone in some division of Google has determined that my name is “Akash.” Who is to say that it isn’t? If, according to GoogleWiki, Dr. Malone is not qualified to speak on a technology that he was involved in inventing, then who am I to say that my name isn’t Akash? Let us suppose that tomorrow someone at GoogleWiki decides that I am a female. How would I dispute this? Suppose someone writes a Wikipedia article that is indisputably about me (say, with references to my works online) but claiming that I am a female named Akash?

Let’s also suppose that Wikipedia locks me out of editing its article about myself, as its editors have famously been known to do with people they don’t like (for example Mark Dice - almost everything on Dice’s Wikipedia page is derogatory, but Dice has no power to change it). To the world, both my name and sex would be different from the reality, and there’d be absolutely nothing I could do to fix that. The name and gender on my birth certificate, for example, might be of no consequence; interestingly some very powerful forces are now inducing state legislatures to encode into law the provision that information on one’s birth certificate (particularly one’s sex) is no longer relevant to any physical reality.

So now let’s suppose that someone at Google or Wikipedia claims that Google owns my house. Who could dispute this - Some measly title company that I might hire? How could I possibly afford a lawsuit defending my title? Is it really that hard to see where this is going?

Does that sound far-fetched? Remember, Google (via its proxy Wikipedia) has declared many of the world’s top virologists and mRNA specialists to be spreading “misinformation.” Virtually every “conservative” commentator and politician is derided on Wikipedia as a conspiracy theorist, white supremacist, racist, or some combination. Wikipedia editors do not let these people edit their own Wikipedia articles. Millions of people read these bios daily. Are you really sure that Google can’t simply decide that it owns your property and garner enough popular and government support to enforce that idea?

The Amazon Model: Bang, you’re dead

Amazon’s Jeff Bezos owns the Washington Post. Anyone who reads the Post knows that it is no friend of Republicans, and many would say that the Post, like most mainstream “news” publications, functions primarily as a mouthpiece for the Democratic Party. In the wake of the Twitter revelations following Elon Musk’s acquisition, Twitter was clearly also in bed with the Democrats.

During 2020 a Twitter competitor named Parler was gaining a lot of steam. Republicans and conservatives, tiring of the relentless political bias on Twitter, were flocking to Parler. By election day 2020, BBC News reported that Parler was adding thousands of new users per minute in the wake of Twitter’s draconian clampdowns on any discussions that Democrats didn’t like, such as the Hunter Biden laptop story. Clearly, friends of Twitter needed to do something quickly. And do something they did.

Two months later, Amazon Web Services (AWS) notified Parler that Amazon was shutting down Parler’s entire data infrastructure. Amazon did this on the premise that Parler was failing to moderate calls to violent action in the wake of the January 6 riot at the Capitol. It was a perfect excuse to rid Twitter, which for years had itself contained calls to violence from terrorists like Antifa, of its greatest threat. Amazon gave Parler a two-day notice. By the end of the following weekend Parler was offline, where it would remain for weeks while it found a new way to host its data. By the time Parler recovered, more than a month later, it had lost the momentum it had gained from the furor over the election, after which it was little more than a fading ember amidst a sea of other small “free speech” Twitter alternatives.

On April 14, 2023, Amazon achieved its ultimate objective when Parler was acquired by a company called Starboard and immediately shut down. Mainstream media outlets are lying, as they almost always do about almost everything, claiming that the shutdown is “temporary” for the purpose of “revamping,” but this is so patently ridiculous that even the average fool who reads such media can probably vaguely sense that there is something wrong. Nobody in his right mind shuts down a social media site for an undisclosed amount of time for the purpose of reviving it later. Really, how stupid do they think we are?

I am retired, but I have younger friends who are still in the workplace. One such friend casually told me how his company’s operating environment is mostly dependent upon Amazon Web Services. I responded by saying, “Oh really? So Amazon owns your company?” He reacted with a look of shock. My friend is a reasonably sophisticated programmer who knows fully well what Amazon did to Parler, and yet it apparently never once occurred to him that Amazon might do the same thing to his company, and there would be absolutely nothing his company could do about it.

Amazon’s AWS model is as simple as it gets. You ignorantly build your company’s application infrastructure on AWS, and then you are completely at the mercy of Amazon.

The Microsoft Model

Do as we say

Like most Microsoft Office users I now have a subscription to “Office 365,” under which Office tools (Word, Excel, etc.) are updated regularly and automatically. The snare here is the convenience of getting improvements without having to do anything. The downside is that via my dependence on its tools, Microsoft can gradually force me to do whatever it wants.

A couple of years ago I noticed a nasty change that Microsoft had snuck into my Office tools. Whenever I want to save a new document, I get this:

followed by this:

It’s pretty clear where Microsoft wants me storing my files. Formerly, when saving documents, my Office programs sent me straight to a dialog box that gave me direct access to my machine’s hard drive - but now I must go through the two intermediaries above to get to the same place, and I must know exactly what I’m doing. I’m waiting for the day when saving my own files locally will no longer be an option.

Microsoft “News”

Microsoft is very determined that I get my “news” from Microsoft. I know this because Microsoft keeps trying to force it upon me in various ways.

I use Microsoft’s “Edge” browser. Edge has four selectable options for the layout of its new blank tabs, two of which are called Focused and Informational. In Focused mode, my page is empty except for some icons representing the sites that I visit often. In Informational mode, I get a page full of MSN News. Guess which option I prefer and which one Microsoft prefers?

Microsoft keeps trying to get me to switch:

• On one occasion, Edge switched me to Informational automatically.
  

• Upon every minor update, it seems, Edge gives me a popup dialog asking me if I wouldn’t really prefer to change my layout (implicitly to Informational).
  

• There’s a little bell on my initial page, which often has a nearby circled number implying that I have notifications. But when I click on the bell, my only “notifications” are MSN articles.

Microsoft knows who and where I am

I have a Windows machine in my den downstairs, which I use exclusively to stream video into a TV we have down there. I have never logged into this machine using any Microsoft account; the machine has only a local account whose name I’ve never used anywhere else. This machine uses my router to access the Internet, but it cannot access my primary network; it’s on a “guest” network that can’t do anything but access the Internet.

A while ago I was streaming some video downstairs, and suddenly a calendar reminder popped up. It was for an appointment that was on my Microsoft calendar. Problem is, there was no reason for Microsoft to know that I was the person using that machine. I intentionally set the machine up for anonymous access. Furthermore, I’m not the only person who uses our primary network (which we access via other machines). How does Microsoft know that of the people at our house, I am the current user of a supposedly anonymous machine?

Of course there are ways that Microsoft could have deduced my identity. It could have picked up any number of clues from my usage. It could have queried my router and deduced that this is the same router used by our primary network, where Microsoft indeed does know our identities. But all of this requires conscious effort. It requires that our Microsoft software has embedded algorithms or artificial intelligence that deduces things about our household. The nagging question is, why would Microsoft go to this trouble?

Microsoft knows what I’m thinking

Recently my Microsoft Office documents, browsers, and other tools started completing my phrases for me as I typed. For example, when I started this sentence with the word “for”, MS Word suggested that the next word might be “example.” This capability goes well beyond such trivial examples; Word, Edge, and other tools might try to complete a large phrase for me, especially if the phrase is an idiom. A tool with this capability can probably also discern the topic of my discussion, the nature of my opinions, and might even be able to guess at my overall intent. All this is, of course, in addition to Microsoft’s knowledge of my past browsing history, my “Edge” favorites, and so on.

A program that anticipates what I’m typing can also analyze my writings and report them back to … where? Microsoft? My local, state, and federal governments? The police? Political parties? Such reporting would be hard for me to prove (say, in a lawsuit), since there is no way for me to discover such transmissions. If Microsoft is storing educated guesses about my voting habits, how could I prove that?

I’m pretty sure that Microsoft plans much more than just tracking and reporting my thoughts. Awhile back I was typing into a Word document and I used the phrase “illegal alien.” Word popped up a suggestion that my term might be offensive, and it advised that I choose some other verbiage. I dismissed the suggestion, and since then Word has issued me no more warnings regarding that phrase, so it apparently remembers my response.

By now, many of us have become accustomed to having our social media postings, comments, articles, and videos removed. As disturbing as this is, there is still something remote about it. It’s some corporate entity removing our content from its platform. We don’t yet have the notion that our PCs and our word processors and our content in our houses are not really under our control. But the fact is that your PC is not really under your control and you don’t really own it. If you’re a Windows user, Microsoft controls everything you do with it, and similarly Apple is controlling what you’re doing with your Macs and iPhones, and Google is controlling what happens on your Android phones, Chromebooks, and tablets.

There will come a day, probably soon, where Microsoft will do more than simply warn me about my use of “unacceptable” language. Rather than give me the option to dismiss its suggestion, Word will instead prohibit me from entering and saving such language.

But Microsoft will probably do much more than just that. Microsoft controls the Windows machines on which my Word documents are stored, and it is constantly updating Windows with stuff I can’t possibly know about. Windows has already indexed most of my file systems, and so it has had dictionaries of my content for years. It could easily be running an app that monitors all my stuff. That same app could also retroactively modify or remove my content, with or without notifying me. Windows could also prohibit me from uploading “objectionable” content to web sites or copying it onto removable media. Windows could also scan and refuse to read such content from the web or from removable media, and it could modify or delete content on such media.  In short, Microsoft has the power to censor and remove all of my current and past writings.

Unless I have copies of previously written content stored on non-writable removable media, and unless I can read such content using tools that mimic Microsoft’s tools (except for the censorship part), Microsoft controls all of my content. In the manner of “1984,” Microsoft could simply make it seem that my past content never existed, and in the absence of non-removable copies, who is to say otherwise?

Does this sound far-fetched? Everything I’ve described above is probably already written into Microsoft’s, Google’s, Apple’s, Amazon’s, and other companies’ ever-changing Terms of Service. And as Amazon has shown (with its suppression of Parler), Terms of Service can be interpreted in any way the vendor pleases. Material that you currently imagine to be OK could be declared a violation of your provider’s TOS tomorrow and removed. Believe it.

There may come a day when people seeking freedom of the press will have to resort to mechanical typewriters, paper documents and printing presses. That day may be sooner than you imagine.

Microsoft can turn off your account

Beyond all this behavior modification, Microsoft licenses its software to virtually every company. Years ago when you bought a Microsoft operating system or office suite, you got a perpetual license and Microsoft could not remotely manipulate your tools; to update them, you had to manually invoke a software installer from a DVD. But today Microsoft can simply disable your entire machine and all the Microsoft software on it by disabling your account. And if there is some new power that Microsoft wants to have over you, it can install that power into its tools without you even knowing it.

You are no longer in control

Lately there’s been a resurgence of vinyl records. Most consumers are probably driven by nostalgia and/or the tactile experience of holding such large media and their associated artwork in their hands, but there’s another aspect of vinyl records that I’ve never heard anyone discuss: consumers control vinyl records because they are analog devices and they’re played on analog equipment.

When my father bought vinyl records back in the 1950s and 1960s, he effectively agreed to contracts that granted him perpetual licenses to play them for personal use (i.e. within the confines of his home). I inherited those contracts when I took possession. I can enforce my right to play his (and my own) vinyl records, not so much because of some piece of paper filed in some copyright office somewhere, but mainly because I have complete control over the records and the equipment upon which I play them. There is nothing digital in the process: the records themselves are analog devices, as are my turntable, my amplifier, and my speakers. No external agent has the power to change the behavior of these things. Short of sending a SWAT team (or maybe the CCP) to confiscate my stuff, my heirs and I can play my records so long as we can keep my analog setup alive.

But it is not so with updatable digital devices. At the turn of the 21^st century there was a popular TV show called Friends. Until recently its fans thought it was OK. But now Jennifer Anniston, who herself appeared in the series, complains that Friends was not OK. Friends is now retroactively “offensive,” and if even the people who made it say so, who is to say otherwise? You may have a box set of Friends on DVD, and you may play those DVDs on an internet-connected DVD player. You might believe that your player in your house will always play those DVDs, but you might be wrong. One day you could pop your DVD into your player, and the player will respond with a message saying that it refuses to play objectionable content.

Your reality is that you ultimately have no control over any content that is stored on a digital device or processed by a digital device. Even if the device is in your own house, if that device has an Internet connection that allows remote control and/or updates, you can’t control it.

Battle of the Titans

The three titans keep slinging it out, because each one wants a bigger piece of the others’ pies:

• Google wants more of Amazon’s web service business and Microsoft’s application business.

• Amazon wants more of Google’s information business and Microsoft’s application business.

• Microsoft wants more of Amazon’s web service business and Google’s information business.

In this battle of the elephants, we are just ants. We will continue noticing changes that are designed to coerce us into one camp or another. All these companies are exerting increasingly insistent demands that we do as they say. I can’t do a transaction on Amazon without being solicited to join Prime. I can’t save a file on Windows without being forced to expressly avoid OneDrive. But it’s going to get a lot worse.

I have a little Android tablet that I use primarily for browsing when I’m away from my computer. This tablet came with an app called “Keep Notes”, which until recently was just another app. But a few weeks ago, the app changed. Now when I launch it, its launch page says “Google Workspace.” I’d never heard of Google Workspace before, so I thought this might just be just some re-branding.

But I was wrong. For the subsequent few weeks, Google pestered me with emails. I find this strange since Google has never previously emailed me about anything. Lately the emails are about getting me started with Google Workspace. I never asked for Google Workspace, but the emails are almost threatening, demanding that I verify my account info. It seems that Google plans to muscle in on my use of Microsoft products whether I like it or not.

There’s only one thing I’m sure about in this battle: it won’t be fun being an ant.

The Missing Piece

In the late 1800s, there arose a set of “robber barons” who controlled the top echelons of American business (for a sense of this watch the History Channel’s series, The Men Who Built America):

• Rockefeller ruled the oil industry,

• Vanderbilt ruled the railroad industry,

• Carnegie ruled the steel industry,

• and Morgan ruled the banking industry.

The first three were the “tech” industries of the time. Today the “tech” industries are really just arms of one giant computer industry, and above I’ve documented the three who I believe to control the world via their ability to elevate or demolish national discourse and their partners and enemies with the flick of a switch.

Notably absent from this mix are the banks, which seem to have missed out on the tech revolution. Today they merely wield the same type of power in the same way they did back in the 1800s, which was to elevate or strangle businesses and individuals by either extending or denying credit. In the 1800s, the three “tech” industries were to a great degree dependent upon the banks. All the “techs” required bank financing, but banks were not critically and immediately dependent upon oil, railroads, or steel.

Today the tables seem to have turned. The banks are at the mercy of Amazon, Google, and Microsoft, because the banks are dependent on the technologies provided by those companies. My guess is that if any one of the three tech titans were to disable the accounts used by any particular bank, that bank would be in collapse immediately. Conversely, there is probably nothing that Bank of America could do to shut down Microsoft.

Without anyone planning it, the technology of the late 20^th and early 21^st centuries has reorganized the world’s power such that the banks no longer have the degree of control that they formerly did. In order to regain their “rightful” piece of the global power pie, the banks must institute an enormous counteracting change. They must create a “new world order,” if you will, and during this process they must amass incredible, unimaginable wealth at the expense of the world’s populace. In fact, that is precisely what they are doing, and that is the subject of a future article.

=== ADDENDUM OF 8/8/2023

Google is about so much more than just relieving you of ownership:

• Here is Google, in its own words, effectively telling its employees in 2016 that it will control the results of the 2020 election: “Google TGIF Following 2016 Election”
  

• Thanks to Mark Dice for producing this long-overdue analysis of Google. Are you still using Google's search engine? Well then,  you're in the Matrix whether you know it or not, and Google’s aim is to ensure that you will never know it: "CONTROLLING THE THOUGHTS OF A BILLION PEOPLE"
  

• If you’re not of the correct opinion or political persuasion, Google has a plan for you: Zach Vorhies is the Google Whistleblower

==== ADDENDUM of 9/25/2023

For more insights on Wikipedia, and by association its greatest benefactor (Google), watch Mark Dice’s commentary: IT ALL MAKES SENSE NOW