A call and response, between Casey Newton and Mike Masnick, with plenty of others that have commented lately.
First, Newton on Google’s turn into AI, and it’s rather predictable and yet still somehow inevitable results that make everything a little worse. As Google drives people to scraped information without attributing a source, people won’t click anymore. And that’s what Google wants.
Still, as the first day of I/O wound down, it was hard to escape the feeling that the web as we know it is entering a kind of managed decline. Over the past two and a half decades, Google extended itself into so many different parts of the web that it became synonymous with it. And now that LLMs promise to let users understand all that the web contains in real time, Google at last has what it needs to finish the job: replacing the web, in so many of the ways that matter, with itself.
There’s an argument that Google will still have an incentive to drive people to actual websites, because that’s how Adsense makes money and Adsense is a cash cow. I’m skeptical of that argument. Ads are on a steep decline, and I don’t think Google has ever really cared much about cannibalizing their own business. Anything for progress.
Mike Misnick thinks the solution lies outside of Google anyway, and I agree. He points to decentralized systems. Not because they are better, necessarily, but simply because they are more difficult to contorl.
And it’s one of the reasons I am still hoping that people will spend more time thinking about solutions that involve decentralization. Not necessarily because of “search” (which tends to be more of a centralized tool by necessity), but because the world of decentralized social media could offer an alternative to the world in which all the information we consume is intermediated by a single centralized player, whether it’s a search engine like Google, or a social media service like Meta.
It’s the decay of a once great service that’s interesting. It’s easy that Google is an institution. But Google was invented in 1997. It didn’t have dominance like it does until about 15 years ago. It very well can somewhere and very well may go straight into the dumpster if they keep pumping out crap.
And it’s hard to think the world wouldn’t be a better place for it at this point.
George Sauders on living life without regret:
So what is stopping me from stepping outside my habitual crap?
My mind, my limited mind.
The story of life is the story of the same basic mind readdressing the same problems in the same already discredited ways.
