Tag: artificial-intelligence

Empire Earth: The Nano Age and the Architecture of an Epoch

Starting in the Digital Age in Empire Earth, the architecture suddenly shifts to a futuristic style. The Capitol for instance, isn’t trying to replicate the St. Basil’s Cathedral in London now, but some theoretical capital in the future. Its architecture is rounded, like it belongs on some distant planet and not on Earth. The culture that it represents is one that worships efficiency over the idea of human culture. Compare that to the Colosseum wonder being built next to it.

The Colosseum was an expression of Roman culture using the technology they had in order to construct it. It also represented their many abstract ideas of how to organize their society. The Digital Age capital in Empire Earth is a representation of the technology overtaking the expression of human culture. What we see in the buildings in the future epochs is really a continuation of what saw beginning with the Modern Epochs; architecture is now functional. Now architecture is basically just housing technology within those structures.

Here is the great idea behind Cyber Labatory which is right behind the Colosseum; it isn’t about the structure which is mattering in here, its the technology which matters here. Gameplay wise, the Cyber Labatory is representing something new in military affairs in the game. These Cybers are made specifically to counter other Cybers not the remaining human units. This is Cyber on Cyber conflict not human.

This is the essence of the Nano Age.

Tech is more important than when we use it to make culture.

It is not surprising that the houses in the Nano Age do not have any distinctive cultural aspects to it. Art and Culture is subordinate to the interests of efficiency, or more specifically, how we use technology to interact with our epoch.

That is the essence of the Digital and more importantly, the Nano Ages in Empire Earth.

Google Search and the Paywall: A consequence of near monopolistic power

Google is a company that has been controlling the search market in its grip for well over 20 years at this point. While the company offers many convenient services, it has also become a monopoly. Some people would disagree with that but the company is one and also is also dominating in mobile phones with the android operating system. There is a need for the internet to untangle from this monopolistic system that Google has made. Just for the interests of keeping the internet interesting and useful for many types of people, that is important. However, one of the main reasons why I am focusing on this issue is because of paywalls on news sites.

Paywalls used to be rarer in the past. Only really the WSJ (Wall Street Journal) had them in a significant way. However, as time has gone on and the internet went from a place for bragging rights to a necessity for someone to be able to have a journalism career, paywalls have been going up across cyberspace. The building of walls across the internet feels like an admission of failure of the internet’s ability to reduce the cost of producing news. I have seen it in real-time here; this is not a change that one sees through generations but it happened after 2008 and we have seen more and more paywalls.

Google’s inability to categorize paywalls is huge issue. Their unwillingness to categorize websites to make it more useful to the public shows their institutional inertia. The company makes billions upon billions of dollars on advertising, yet it is unable to even pay attention to its search engine that made it popular in the 2000s.

Why is Google so unwilling to change?

It’s because they are comfortable in taking ad revenue from sites. Changing that revenue stream would make them take a hit and they can only tolerate having more and more revenue streaming into it.

If Google was to take its search engine seriously, it would take a hit to its reputation. It would have to respond to all the calls about it having a monopoly on the internet and manipulating people’s minds. They would have to make the legacy outlets which seek to maintain their power have to play by the rules rather just allowing them to regurgitate what the ruling parties want to see.

Paywalled sites do need to not show up in the search results. Many of these sites are business sites that often hide their arcane language away from public view. The internet should be divided up into small kingdoms where you have to pay entry fees to get into the castle.

Google’s unwillingness to categorize such things show that monopolies that hold onto power for so long have a way of shaping the whole culture around them. The internet, once free and vibrant, is becoming yet another shopping mall where everything has a price.

Having free access to information on the internet isn’t a right but essential aspect to cyberspace.