Man manipulating manipulators?

Botnet fraud costs display advertisers $6m a month, security researchers say

'Chameleon' botnet falsely views billions of pages and adverts on about 200 sites owned by a small group of publishers

If it can be manipulated it will be manipulated.

Self interest doesn't necessarily play by any other 'self''s rules or alliances of self-interest.

As long as there is a sense of being manipulated, defence will be employed. Attack is then seen as the best form of defence, unless it cant succeed, in which case withdraw, block and hide until your day comes!

Just as well the human mind doesn't work along the lines that the internet does - or our world would be in a complete mess wouldn't it!

Botnet operaters are going to have to emulate human clickers now - surely an impossible feat!

If advertising were replaced by genuine information about products and services, might we actually find what we want when we want because we want it?

Is advertising primarily a protection racket that businesses have to pay to not be rendered insignificant and unknown? With a front end that bombards the unconscious mind with images and phrases designed to trigger archetypal responses in an endless war to exploit anything in our mind that can be leveraged?
Is it a bit like the serpent in the Garden of Eden. Empty promises to pull us into a dependence on a false sense of ourselves.

Is advertising considered part of our real economy in terms of growth? Is it a cancerous imposition on the body politic?
What would genuine information look like?

What does truth feel like?

Here's to a mind that is NOT at war with itself and a body politic that is not all the part acting without shared purpose. Self interest - in the sense of a private self interest cannot really be a shared purpose - because no matter how many billions 'share' it - they each operate as a non-communing privacy of hidden intent under a mask of whatever passes muster.

The tower of Babel seemed like it was 'going somewhere'. Will the internet disintegrate in dystopian fashion - for the 'one ring' of Tolkien's symbolic power - cannot be shared.

Surely we can trust market forces to come up with the best possible outcome!
And no doubt global corporate interest can pull the appropriate strings in remaining free of any real limitation on their bold march into a future where we can all be branded - and not just the likes of cola.

I think I wrote this in a humorous vein because the story made me laugh!
Someone I know and love is in process of dying. This cuts away so much that is froth - I was going to say crap - but some of us like it some of the time.

And I am prompted to say that what life is really about is love. Not special love just for special me or special you - but love. Somehow this has become perhaps the most fearful and hateful fact - such that society forms in defending against its exposure.
Keep piling on the crap, fighting over crap and making or buying crap!
It isn't all like that. Life is still Life. It breaks through in all sorts of ways. It is under the radar. It is all that is really going on - even so.
Even for those of us who are releasing our grip - our control - our capacity to play the game of manipulating life.