By Tim Bousquet
This essay originally appeared as VIEWS 2 in Morning File, April 24, 2024
Ed Zitron has read through internal Google emails that reveal just how and why Google Search has become shit. The emails became public as part of the U.S. Department of Justice’s antitrust lawsuit against the company.
Zitron details the blow-by-blow, but summarizes as follows:
These emails are a stark example of the monstrous growth-at-all-costs mindset that dominates the tech ecosystem, and if you take one thing away from this newsletter, I want it to be the name Prabhakar Raghavan, and an understanding that there are people responsible for the current state of technology.
These emails — which I encourage you to look up — tell a dramatic story about how Google’s finance and advertising teams, led by Raghavan with the blessing of CEO Sundar Pichai, actively worked to make Google worse to make the company more money. This is what I mean when I talk about the Rot Economy — the illogical, product-destroying mindset that turns the products you love into torturous, frustrating quasi-tools that require you to fight the company’s intentions to get the service you want.
Zitron is one of a small but growing number of analysts and commentators who are a counter-balance to cheerleading tech press that provides exactly zero critical analysis of the bullshit claims of the tech industry. I discovered Zitron through Paris Marx’s excellent podcast, Tech Won’t Save Us.
I’ve long commented that we hit Peak Internet around 2006 or so, and it’s been downhill ever since, becoming ever-less useful and ever-more frustrating.
You know that one- or two-second delay you get when you try to open a webpage? That’s because there is just then an auction of your eyeballs to marketers and the page won’t load until your attention is awarded to the highest bidder, who will fill your page with customized ads based on your past viewing history and a profile of you that has been constructed.
Then, before you can actually read the page, you are bombarded with at least two pop-up windows — the EU-required cookies warning and the ubiquitous ask for notifications sign up — often followed by ad pop-ups. You spend another 15 seconds or so cancelling out shit and looking for increasingly hidden Xes to close windows. And even then, the ads fill the site at irregular times such that the text you’re trying to read moves up and down the page willy-nilly.
Kids: it didn’t use to be like this.
And that’s before we get to the pernicious rat-fucking of the collation algorithms that determine your social media feeds based largely on what will rile you up and make you feel like shit. Cambridge Analytica was the least of it; Instagram is quite literally trying to get your pre-teen daughter to kill herself.
On top of all that, big tech is disrupting the economy — and possibly destroying the world — with one investment scam after another. We’ve seen this time and again, and yet the prominent tech writers continue to credulously cheerlead.
Self-driving cars have been two years away from reality for two decades, inflating the value of Tesla stock to the stratosphere while killing innocent bystanders along the way, until now, finally, the man behind the curtain is fully revealed holding a piece of crap called the Cybertruck.
Scammers like Sam Bankman-Fried ripped off other scammers thinking they could get rich from the promise that cryptocurrency could be used for selling drugs and hiring hit men. Mark Zuckerburg lost investors $170 billion on the vapour dream he called the Metaverse, and for that he was awarded $700 million in stock dividends. Don’t get me started on Silicon Valley Bank, which was basically bailed out so celebrated venture capitalists wouldn’t lose money, once more giving the lie to the mythology of risk-taking.
And now there’s “artificial intelligence,” which is nothing of the sort — ‘AI’ started as basically an amped up Excel sheet; large language models are simply predictive text based on what is already on the internet. But now the term AI gets applied to just about anything on the internet. Fortnite? AI. Chatbots? AI. Mortgage calculators? AI. The term AI is tossed out with no regard to any underlying tech such that it is now completely meaningless, even more meaningless than calling LLMs “intelligent.”
Thanks to AI, the “dead internet,” which used to be a fringe conspiracy theory, is looking increasingly likely, even probable: the internet will fill up with gazillions of AI-generated websites which then become the feedstock for the next generation of AI, crap building upon crap until it becomes impossible to find anything real and true on the internet.
And these LLMs are powered with enormous amounts of energy — more than used by entire nations, and making bitcoin mining look almost green in comparison. Imagine some alien culture finding our burnt-out planet some centuries in the future and learning that just as getting off fossil fuels was an existential matter, we allowed the AI companies to burn countless billions of tonnes of coal and barrels of oil to feed AI computations so that Acme Inc. could save on labour costs by replacing a sales representative with a chat bot that sells customers the wrong products.
As I understand it, Microsoft’s investment in OpenAI is in the form of credits to Microsoft’s cloud computing, which is then portrayed to investors as a revenue stream. I am not an investment lawyer, but to my eyes this seems like outright fraud, right in the open, for all to see.
The whole thing requires growth — so more baseless hype, ever-widening definitions of AI (your clock is AI!), more investment dollars chasing fraudulent revenue streams, more power usage, more people laid off in hopes that the technology might one day work, until eventually, inevitably, it all comes crashing down.
On his podcast, Zitron calls out the AI mania as a classic investment bubble.
We live in terrible times.
