Speaker 1: More Zone Media. Hello, and welcome to Better Offline. I'm
Speaker 1: at Zetron. This episode is the first of a three
Speaker 1: part series about how the tech industry has been snatched
Speaker 1: from the hands of people who actually build things using
Speaker 1: software and hardware by a bunch of managers that have
Speaker 1: little or no interaction with the products they're actually profiting from.
Speaker 1: The same managers also don't appear to do much work,
Speaker 1: and today I'm going to walk you through exactly how
Speaker 1: bad things have gotten as a result. In early April,
Speaker 1: Meta revealed in Emotion Training to dismiss an FTC anti
Speaker 1: monopoly lawsuit that Instagram made an astonishing thirty two point
Speaker 1: four billion dollars in advertising revenue in twenty twenty one.
Speaker 1: That figure becomes even more shocking when you consider Google's
Speaker 1: YouTube only made twenty eight point eight billion dollars during
Speaker 1: the same period. I'd argue YouTube is significantly more useful anyway.
Speaker 1: Bloomberg reports that Instagram made almost thirty percent of Meta's
Speaker 1: entire revenue in the early part of twenty twenty two.
Speaker 1: Ninety six percent of Meta's forty point one billion dollar
Speaker 1: fourth quarter twenty twenty three revenue came from advertising and
Speaker 1: It's made over one hundred billion dollars a year since
Speaker 1: twenty twenty one, a trend that's likely to continue based
Speaker 1: on the fact that the only thing these platforms care
Speaker 1: about is ducing as much revenue from these apps. Google
Speaker 1: made eighty six point three billion dollars in the fourth
Speaker 1: quarter of twenty twenty three, with forty eight billion dollars
Speaker 1: of that coming from Google Search and its related advertising,
Speaker 1: up thirteen percent from the previous quarter. According to Pew Research,
Speaker 1: in America, eighty three percent of adults use YouTube, sixty
Speaker 1: eight percent of the meuse Facebook, and forty seven percent
Speaker 1: of the mew's Instagram. Each platform both over two billion users,
Speaker 1: and over the last three years, Meta and Google have
Speaker 1: made over a half trillion dollars in revenue from these platforms.
Speaker 1: I now want you to go to Facebook. I want
Speaker 1: you to scroll down, and I want you to see
Speaker 1: how quickly you hit an advertisement or a sponsored content thing.
Speaker 1: In my case, after a single post from a friend,
Speaker 1: I was immediately hit with a suggestion for me to
Speaker 1: join a group for adult Bluey fans. I do not
Speaker 1: watch blue I have not watched Bluey. This was then
Speaker 1: followed by a post from a friend, followed by another ad,
Speaker 1: followed by two posts and friends, followed by a suggestion
Speaker 1: to join a group called Aviation Meme Lords, followed by
Speaker 1: another ad. On Instagram, I saw one post from a
Speaker 1: person I followed, followed by an AD for a game,
Speaker 1: followed by a suggested video, followed by something from someone
Speaker 1: I followed, followed by a suggested video, followed by an
Speaker 1: ad of followed by a person I followed posting something,
Speaker 1: and then another yested piece of content the first ad.
Speaker 1: When I clicked my Stories, a totally different and even
Speaker 1: more confusing part of Instagram that's mostly just a rip
Speaker 1: off of Snapchat, I got an ad for a game
Speaker 1: using footage that isn't actually in the game itself, an
Speaker 1: outright bait and switch employed by mobile game developers like
Speaker 1: those who make Ebony, that make millions of dollars off
Speaker 1: of these horrifying, annoying, micro transaction heavy games. When I
Speaker 1: went to YouTube, my first result was for an eleven
Speaker 1: minute long Taiwanese news video of some sort. The next
Speaker 1: one was a video that appeared to be in Chinese.
Speaker 1: I don't speak these languages. That's my fault, not theirs,
Speaker 1: but it is kind of YouTube's wort for trying to
Speaker 1: show them to me. In fact, when I went around
Speaker 1: and I scrolled through, it was all in Chinese. So
Speaker 1: I went to Google and I typed, why are my
Speaker 1: YouTube videos in Chinese? The first result was a Reddit
Speaker 1: post where several users were, for whatever reason, being served
Speaker 1: random videos in Chinese. There was actually no conclusion to this.
Speaker 1: I still do not know why this happened. I can't read.
Speaker 1: I can only speak and read of like in English,
Speaker 1: and I can barely do that. I'm very sorry anyways,
Speaker 1: Google though, is especially annoying because while researching the beginning
Speaker 1: of this podcast, it took me about half an hour
Speaker 1: to get the basics for the beginning because every time
Speaker 1: I googled something like, say, what percentage of web traffic
Speaker 1: goes to Google? Which I really was not able to find.
Speaker 1: I kept being given these so called authoritative sources like
Speaker 1: Forbes Advisor, which to be clear, is not Forbes magazine.
Speaker 1: It is an affiliate marketing arm of Forbes. It's very deceptive.
Speaker 1: The sources inside the Forbes Advisor piece I found ranged
Speaker 1: from things from blogging wizard to a literal list of
Speaker 1: website names with no links. I'm talking about just a
Speaker 1: plaintext list. The state of Google's very worrying. A year
Speaker 1: long study from Leipzig University published last year and reported
Speaker 1: on by Jason Kobler of four or four Media found
Speaker 1: that the quality of good Google search results has decayed
Speaker 1: at a remarkable rate. The incentives of content creators to
Speaker 1: search engine optimize their content based on standards published by
Speaker 1: Google has filled search full of crap, with higher ranked
Speaker 1: pages that are on average, more optimized, more monetized with
Speaker 1: affiliate marketing, and featuring predominantly lower quality text. To make
Speaker 1: matters worse, the researchers found that only a small portion
Speaker 1: of product reviews on the web use affiliate marketing, but
Speaker 1: the majority of search results raised by Google do. If
Speaker 1: you're unfamiliar with affiliate marketing, it's when outlets run pieces
Speaker 1: about something, say top ten speakers or top ten laptops,
Speaker 1: and they have a bunch of links like Amazon or
Speaker 1: Walmart of best Buy, and they get a little bit
Speaker 1: of cash from the platform. When everyone someone clicks that
Speaker 1: and buys something doesn't even have to be the thing
Speaker 1: that they were originally clicking on. This revenue model incentivizes
Speaker 1: sites to write lots of best of articles that exist
Speaker 1: entirely to make click things to make the money. To
Speaker 1: be clear, this is actually a perfectly normal business model
Speaker 1: in the right hands. The Wirecutter has done a great
Speaker 1: job of monetizing affiliate marketing while providing very thorough recommendations.
Speaker 1: The Verge has two there are decent people doing this.
Speaker 1: The majority of them are not decent though, Just so
Speaker 1: we're abundantly clear. To quote the study, search engine optimization
Speaker 1: is a constant battle, and we in this case the
Speaker 1: study people see repeated patterns of review spam, entering, and
Speaker 1: leaving the results as search engines and SEO engineers take
Speaker 1: turns adjusting their parameters. So in Layman's terms, Google is
Speaker 1: in this battle with the people writing search engine optimized content. Now,
Speaker 1: to be clear, this content, the search optimized stuff, is
Speaker 1: done so with Google's approval. And there are people at
Speaker 1: Google who'll kind of nudge you in the right direction.
Speaker 1: They never really give full directions, but they they're okay
Speaker 1: with search engine optimization. You think they wouldn't be, you'd
Speaker 1: think they'd want to fight for like standards and quality,
Speaker 1: but no, they actively help these people gain the system.
Speaker 1: So what Google will do is they will update Google
Speaker 1: and then these people will change their means to beat Google,
Speaker 1: and then Google will maybe update again. And that's kind
Speaker 1: of the problem. You see. The Leipzig University researchers refer
Speaker 1: to tweets to these algorithms to fight spam as only
Speaker 1: really having a temporarily positive effect, and that search engines
Speaker 1: always seem to lose the cat and mouse game that
Speaker 1: is seo spam now. In March twenty twenty four, Google
Speaker 1: announced that it was making changes to its algorithm that
Speaker 1: would reduce spam and AI generated content by forty percent,
Speaker 1: and very specifically said it would raise human authored content
Speaker 1: to the top of Google. Everyone in the press was
Speaker 1: gleeful about this. They're saying how good it was and
Speaker 1: that Google was finally doing something. It's been a month,
Speaker 1: nothing's happened. Things still suck. Scammy outlets called things like
Speaker 1: tech Gate and Daily Good Morning Kashmir wholesale steel articles,
Speaker 1: and places like tech Crunch and coin Telegraph, and at
Speaker 1: times these stolen articles will rank above or in place
Speaker 1: of the original articles, depriving journalists and publishers of traffic
Speaker 1: and revenue. It's insane. I briefly sparred with Danny Sullivan,
Speaker 1: who is the he's the search liaism for Google about
Speaker 1: this and tech gate has now disappeared as of doing
Speaker 1: this day. The Good Morning Kashmir has them, And indeed
Speaker 1: there are multiple journalists I know that have said that
Speaker 1: their articles are regularly outpaced by these spam shops. And
Speaker 1: seemingly every time I talk to anyone on the Google
Speaker 1: side about this, they say, ah, I am I done.
Speaker 1: I want to do about it. Danny's a good bloke.
Speaker 1: Danny used to run search engine land, I believe, and yeah,
Speaker 1: he's just part of the machine now and it sucks.
Speaker 1: Danny's a good bloke. I want to like Danny. But mate, Danny,
Speaker 1: if you're gonna be the search liaison, it's art to
Speaker 1: liaise with the search engine, it's time to promote the
Speaker 1: journalists saying oh, mate, we don't know how to fix
Speaker 1: the machine is not aloody excuse. Google, a company worth
Speaker 1: around two trillion dollars, is either unable or unwilling to
Speaker 1: fix the problem. But I think the truth might be
Speaker 1: just a little simpler. There's just no incentive for it
Speaker 1: to make things better, as Google Search remains one of
Speaker 1: the most profitable businesses in the damn world. In episode two.
Speaker 1: By the way, I'm going to tell you the people responsible,
Speaker 1: and they're led by a fellow called Prabhakar Ragavan. You're
Speaker 1: gonna hear that name a lot in the next episode.
Speaker 1: I'm not going to say it another time. I've been
Speaker 1: thinking and saying it a lot though. Anyway, this is
Speaker 1: the state of the modern Internet. Ultra profitable platforms outright
Speaker 1: abdicating any responsibility toward the customer or even the wider
Speaker 1: digital ecosystem. They're not offering a service or a portal
Speaker 1: or an app or a useful thing, but they're finding
Speaker 1: as many ways to interrupt you, the user, to push
Speaker 1: you into doing something or seeing something that's profitable for them.
Speaker 1: And yes, I really I am describing modern business. But
Speaker 1: if you look at Facebook or Instagram right now, can
Speaker 1: you really tell me that's a service. Can you really
Speaker 1: tell me you are getting to see your friends and
Speaker 1: family on Instagram or Facebook. No, the whole thing's a mess,
Speaker 1: a huge, big, ultra profitable mess. The greatest lie in
Speaker 1: tech is that Facebook and Instagram are for catching up
Speaker 1: with your friends, because that's not what they do, and
Speaker 1: it's not what they've done for years. These platforms are
Speaker 1: now pathways for this nebulous concept of content discovery, which
Speaker 1: really means it's just a barely personalized entertainment network that
Speaker 1: occasionally drizzles or dribbles things you choose to see on
Speaker 1: top of crappy sponsored content, ads and groups that are
Speaker 1: part of a relational database that has your name on it.
Speaker 1: On some level, it's kind of hard to say you
Speaker 1: even use these apps anymore. The term use suggests the
Speaker 1: level of industry and user control that Meta has spent
Speaker 1: over high for a decade destroying, and they've turned Instagram
Speaker 1: and Facebook into tubes to funnel human beings in front
Speaker 1: of those who either pay for the privilege of visibility
Speaker 1: or have found ways to trick Facebook's algorithms into showing
Speaker 1: you their crap. And it's all the direct result of
Speaker 1: what I call the rot economy, a growth at all
Speaker 1: cost mindset built off the back of immovable monopolies where
Speaker 1: tech companies profitably punish you as a means of showing
Speaker 1: the markets eternal growth. In practice, this means turning these
Speaker 1: platforms into something that offers you a service into something
Speaker 1: that drives engagement, which, in Facebook and Instagram's case, means
Speaker 1: finding the maximum amount of times they can interrupt you
Speaker 1: before you close the app entirely. In Google's case, it
Speaker 1: means making changes the search that made advertisements and sponsored
Speaker 1: links kind of impossible to tell the difference between for
Speaker 1: most people, and making it so that users had to
Speaker 1: make more queries on Google. Now I sound paranoid when
Speaker 1: I say that I realized the idea that Google would
Speaker 1: have a metric that said, we need people to search
Speaker 1: for more stuff on Google. I am quoting Google saying
Speaker 1: this emails from the antitrust lawsuit between them and the
Speaker 1: Department of Justice. Episode two. I'm going to go into it,
Speaker 1: don't you worry? And really it is kind of the
Speaker 1: government's fault here. They've taken this optimistic, respectful and trustworthy
Speaker 1: approach to tech. They've said, well, tech is providing something
Speaker 1: for free, aren't they, so really can't be too much
Speaker 1: of a bastard to them. And the result is we've
Speaker 1: just got this Internet riddled with decay and pain. It's
Speaker 1: an Internet that incentivizes mining human beings like veins of awe.
Speaker 1: And in these next few episodes, I'm going to walk
Speaker 1: you through how big tech turned the Internet into a
Speaker 1: multi trillion dollar social experiment. And I'm going to name
Speaker 1: the bastards responsible underpinning these profitable torture machines. It's an
Speaker 1: online advertisement industry built off the back of fucking advertisers
Speaker 1: and users alike. In the mid twenty tens, Facebook mistakenly
Speaker 1: told online publishers that their videos were receiving more engagement
Speaker 1: than they actually did, leading to multiple publishers pivoting to video,
Speaker 1: a disastrous industry movement that cost hundreds of reporters their jobs.
Speaker 1: Led to a massive class action suit against meta media.
Speaker 1: Companies based on Facebook's lies radically changed their operations, with
Speaker 1: MTV News cutting its entire rating team and shifting to
Speaker 1: short form video in July twenty seventeen. Vocative did the same.
Speaker 1: The following month, Vice Media cut roughly sixty editorial roles
Speaker 1: and expanded its video production capabilities. In response to this
Speaker 1: so called growth, Mike, a much smaller company than MTV
Speaker 1: newser Vice Media but quite beloved at the time, slashed
Speaker 1: ten rolls and shifted the rest of its output to video,
Speaker 1: going all in on a bet that, as you can guess,
Speaker 1: failed catastrophically, with the company eventually being sold off the
Speaker 1: Bustle Digital Group for a pittance. Those video roles were
Speaker 1: of course cut or vastly reduced when it was obvious
Speaker 1: that there really wasn't any engagement on these things that
Speaker 1: I have a whole episode on this, please go back
Speaker 1: and listen to it. Meta is also currently the subject
Speaker 1: of a class action suit led by Metroplex Communications, which
Speaker 1: claimed that metas inflated metrics lwered advertisers away from competing platforms,
Speaker 1: something that has been sued for before. When all of
Speaker 1: your incentives are aligned around bigger and more and growth,
Speaker 1: you'll take just about anybody's money. In Meta's case, this
Speaker 1: means getting advertisers who compare the COVID nineteen vaccine to
Speaker 1: the Holocaust, or quack doctors with phony cancer treatments, scammers
Speaker 1: selling counterfeit phishing equipment, scammers offering fake discounts for puzzles,
Speaker 1: and of course, cryptocurrency cons An investigation from late last
Speaker 1: year found that a third of advertisements on Facebook marketplace
Speaker 1: in the UK were scams, and earlier in the year,
Speaker 1: UK financial services authorities said it had banned more than
Speaker 1: ten thousand illegal investment ads across Instagram, Facebook, YouTube and
Speaker 1: TikTok in twenty twenty two alone. A fifteen hundred percent
Speaker 1: increase over the past year, and as these platforms begin
Speaker 1: to decay, things only get worse for the user. Elon
Speaker 1: Musk's acquisition of Twitter and his obvious outright hostility towards
Speaker 1: blue chip advertisers, and also his anti Semitic posts just
Speaker 1: there's a lot of bad stuff with Elon. They've turned
Speaker 1: Twitter into kind of the digital equivalent of Downtown Vegas.
Speaker 1: Seemingly every post is replied to by a bot offering
Speaker 1: nudes in bio, or pussy in bio, something in bio,
Speaker 1: or at the moment, quite literally, just a picture of
Speaker 1: a fully nude woman, which is pretty funny until you
Speaker 1: realize that according to John Herman and New York Magazine,
Speaker 1: these bots are afront for a series of very big,
Speaker 1: nasty online dating scams that lose people tens of thousands
Speaker 1: of dollars. Elon Musk choosing to check the blue check
Speaker 1: mark from something that was given by Twitter to say
Speaker 1: that you are the real person into a thing that
Speaker 1: you buy for eight dollars has allowed cryptocurrency scammers, according
Speaker 1: to Protos, to make millions by tricking users into connecting
Speaker 1: their wallets to fund drain their entire thing like it's
Speaker 1: somewhat technical, but you just click these websites and you say, yeah, sure,
Speaker 1: i'll connect my whilet and then they take all of
Speaker 1: your money. And it seems like they're even buying ads
Speaker 1: on the platform to do so, using stolen credit cards
Speaker 1: musks desperation for ad revenue has even led Twitter to
Speaker 1: start pushing ads that don't actually say their ads, leading
Speaker 1: to an advertising watchdog called check my Ads to file
Speaker 1: a formal complaint with the FTC demanding that it investigates
Speaker 1: Twitter and enforces its truth in advertising standards. Also, right
Speaker 1: now on Twitter, there is something called the Creator program,
Speaker 1: and if you have Twitter Blue, that's right, you have
Speaker 1: to pay them to get paid. You can make a
Speaker 1: little money off of advertising. When other Twitter Blue people reply.
Speaker 1: The significance of this is right now, Twitter is posting
Speaker 1: tons of unlabeled ads for mister Beast videos so that
Speaker 1: Elon Musk can give money to mister Beasts, so that
Speaker 1: mister Beast will repost things from YouTube, allowing Elon Musk
Speaker 1: to pay him money. It's a very confusing thing, and
Speaker 1: Twitter is really bad. I won't call it X. I
Speaker 1: think X is a stupid name. It's terrible to search for.
Speaker 1: It sucks. The whole site kind of sucks. I'm on
Speaker 1: it until the end. It's like the Titanic. I can
Speaker 1: see the iceberg coming, but nevertheless it's in a bad way.
Speaker 1: Yet it's foolish to act as if the sorry state
Speaker 1: of Twitter is really that different to the rest of
Speaker 1: the web. Instagram is flooded with pornobots. It has been
Speaker 1: for years, and what they do is they engage with
Speaker 1: regular posts enough times through likes and replies as a
Speaker 1: means of pretending they're real so that they can avoid
Speaker 1: Meta's flimsy automated content moderation, and that, by the way,
Speaker 1: is only quasi auto. Meta also underpays, horribly underpays. I
Speaker 1: should add people in other countries like Kenya, they make
Speaker 1: as little as two dollars and twenty cents an hour
Speaker 1: to view what Wired referred to as the most hideous
Speaker 1: content on the Internet. Because that's what's important to know.
Speaker 1: Meta is doing something. They're stopping you from seeing literal
Speaker 1: beheadings and child abuse and such, and they're doing that
Speaker 1: by paying basically prison labor rates in other countries. This
Speaker 1: is also something that open ai and AI companies do
Speaker 1: with training data. It's a disgusting practice. They should all
Speaker 1: be in a lot of trouble for this, and they
Speaker 1: never will be because no one ever eld them accountable.
Speaker 1: Much like every major tech platform, Meta is just half
Speaker 1: fastening its approach to moderation, and they're committing human rights
Speaker 1: violations to do so, so that they can spend the
Speaker 1: smallest amount of money possible to stop the things it
Speaker 1: needs to stop you seeing. They need to make sure
Speaker 1: you don't see someone being stabbed to death on Facebook.
Speaker 1: They don't really need to stop pornography or scams. They
Speaker 1: should need to should be a government body that stops them,
Speaker 1: but there isn't, so they don't. As you'd expect, these
Speaker 1: standards have led to Facebook being flooded with generative AI
Speaker 1: content spam, and a study came out of Stanford and
Speaker 1: Georgetown that revealed that Facebook's algorithm is now boasting spam
Speaker 1: content riddled with misinformation, and they're sending hundreds of millions
Speaker 1: of impressions to pages that direct people to WordPress sites
Speaker 1: crammed full of spammy and scammy ads. It's insane. It's
Speaker 1: actually really crazy. When you really look into this, you
Speaker 1: can see that the web is falling apart in front
Speaker 1: of us. And yet the most obvious sign of this
Speaker 1: decay is just visiting a website on your telephone. Go
Speaker 1: to IGN dot com lot could people work at Igana
Speaker 1: Feel bad for saying this, but they have over three
Speaker 1: hundred million views and you go on there and you
Speaker 1: immediately hit with two giant ads, one that fills the
Speaker 1: top thirty page and auto playing videos. And this happens
Speaker 1: on a lot of sites. ESPN also another third for this.
Speaker 1: It's so weird. When I I went on there earlier,
Speaker 1: I was hit with two giant acts. They took up
Speaker 1: most of my screen, and on opening a story about
Speaker 1: the new for that TV show, which is very good,
Speaker 1: I'll give them that, it then covered the top quarter
Speaker 1: of my screen with another or playing at It's so weird.
Speaker 1: It's so weird when you see this happening. I feel
Speaker 1: like more people should be talking about this. This field.
Speaker 1: It's like if the road was just full of used condoms.
Speaker 1: It's like if there was trash everywhere. This is the
Speaker 1: web now anyway, Anyway, Reach PLC. They are publicly traded,
Speaker 1: multimillion dollar business that dominates local journalism in the UK
Speaker 1: and they hold basically monopolies in several regions and also
Speaker 1: own three newspapers. Very depressing, they're notorious for this kind
Speaker 1: of aggressive approach to monetization. Their websites have been described
Speaker 1: as an over monetized mess and impossible to navigate with
Speaker 1: a poor digital experience. Named as a partial contributor to
Speaker 1: the declining financial fortunes of one of the more loathsome
Speaker 1: companies in the world. If you open a local new
Speaker 1: UK news website, especially one owned by Reach, with just
Speaker 1: Safari on your phone, for example, you'll be met with
Speaker 1: an endless deluge of page covering ads that appear in
Speaker 1: the middle of articles as you're scrolling, and other ads
Speaker 1: that redirect you to an external website without any warning,
Speaker 1: or while you're on the page trying to read the
Speaker 1: thing that you went to the website for. Even the
Speaker 1: giants of journalism haven't resisted the temptation to fuck their
Speaker 1: users over. CNN, one of the most influential news publications
Speaker 1: in the world by hundreds of millions of people. They
Speaker 1: host their own journalism and they spice in spami content
Speaker 1: from something called a chumbox company. And these companies make
Speaker 1: hundreds of millions of dollars driving clicks to everything from
Speaker 1: just scams to straight up this information. And you'll find
Speaker 1: them on CNN, you find them on NBC, you find
Speaker 1: them in tons of major media outlets, and all of
Speaker 1: them are these insane stories, like two steps to tell
Speaker 1: when a slot is close to hitting the jackpot, or
Speaker 1: the best hearing aid. It's really strange to see this
Speaker 1: in the in between Pulitzer Prize winning journalists and like
Speaker 1: international conflicts. These chum box companies. They're ubiquitous because they
Speaker 1: pay well, and it makes them super attractive to cash
Speaker 1: strap media entities because you can just plug this bollocks
Speaker 1: in and you just get money, even if it makes
Speaker 1: your products suck. And they're awful. They're super horrible. They're
Speaker 1: ruining the web, and they keep making more money. In
Speaker 1: twenty eighteen, the late great podcast reply All, which by
Speaker 1: the way, was killed by the rot economy Fuck you
Speaker 1: Spotify anyway. Reply All had an episode that centered around
Speaker 1: a widower whose wife's death had been hijacked by one
Speaker 1: of these chumbox advertisers to push content that, using stolen
Speaker 1: family photos, implied she had been unfaithful to him. The
Speaker 1: title of the episode and add for the worst day
Speaker 1: of your life was fitting, and it was only until
Speaker 1: a massively popular podcast intervene that any of these networks
Speaker 1: ban the advert. These networks outbrain taboola, evil companies run
Speaker 1: by evil people. They're harmful, They're harmful to the Internet,
Speaker 1: They're harmful to users, and they're harmful to the news
Speaker 1: brands that host them. If I was working for a
Speaker 1: major news company, I'd be absolutely humiliated to see my
Speaker 1: work put next to this nonsense, this celebrity bullshit, these
Speaker 1: diet scams, these get rich quick schemes, Tommy Chong's fucking
Speaker 1: CBD chews. I apologize swearing, but it's just so frustrating.
Speaker 1: Are these outlets so unprofitable that they just have to
Speaker 1: sell out like this? I refuse to believe that I
Speaker 1: just reviews. The modern Internet was built on a social
Speaker 1: contract that said the big tech gave us services for
Speaker 1: free in exchange for some sort of nebulous concept of data,
Speaker 1: which largely took the form of content and connections we
Speaker 1: made between people and the things that we posted. As
Speaker 1: a result, this social contract was both assumed and extremely
Speaker 1: easy to enter into because all of these sites were free,
Speaker 1: which meant that there was really never any attempt to
Speaker 1: regulate the terms of it. There are terms and conditions,
Speaker 1: but that's really it, and you what you're gonna do.
Speaker 1: You're gonna barter with meta And there were never conditions
Speaker 1: set for what can't be done to a user, what
Speaker 1: can be done with the data. Look at Cambridge Analytica,
Speaker 1: look at all of the different ways that Facebook hads
Speaker 1: hurt people. None of that matters to them because it
Speaker 1: doesn't have to. They don't care. There's nobody stopping them.
Speaker 1: The FDC won't stop them, lawyers won't stop them. It's
Speaker 1: very depressing when you say it out loud anyway. As
Speaker 1: a result, these platforms were are a form of bait
Speaker 1: and switch, which underpins coreytor else very good but annoying
Speaker 1: to say in shitification theory, where platforms have built these
Speaker 1: massive monopolies based off for in good, useful services and
Speaker 1: then turn them into something terrible but very profitable. But
Speaker 1: as I've noted before and shertification kind of misses one point,
Speaker 1: these companies are not doing this out of a lack
Speaker 1: of profitability or some sort of failure in their business model.
Speaker 1: They're doing so because the Internet has become something between
Speaker 1: a social experiment and a mining operation. They're doing it
Speaker 1: because they can. Nobody's stopping them. And doctor Oo has
Speaker 1: upgraded his theory to the insure to see now he
Speaker 1: has brought in some of these things. I think I'm
Speaker 1: just tired of people responding to the Rock economy and
Speaker 1: saying in citification Corey Rock's I'm gonna have him on
Speaker 1: the podcast Jesus. But seriously, though, it's not because they're
Speaker 1: suddenly left hand hand. They've just kept turning the screw
Speaker 1: because who's going to stop them? What's you're going to do?
Speaker 1: Not use Google, not use Facebook, not use Instagram anyway,
Speaker 1: Charlie Warsall, who I've given a lot of shit. Charlie
Speaker 1: did a good thing there. He framed this well in
Speaker 1: a recent piece in the Atlantic published in the middle
Speaker 1: of April that described the overall techscape as a form
Speaker 1: of hostage negotiation. Interactions with tech companies are no longer
Speaker 1: a purchase or a two way contract, but kind of
Speaker 1: a trade of information long after you've purchased the product itself.
Speaker 1: Every interaction with tech now requires us to share our
Speaker 1: email address or our phone number, to accept a kind
Speaker 1: of subtle tracking. Don't worry it's anonymous, or of course,
Speaker 1: to share your personal information that will probably be leaked.
Speaker 1: It's try it at this point to say that human
Speaker 1: beings themselves are the product, but it's kind of impossible
Speaker 1: to avoid saying when you look at the state of
Speaker 1: the Internet now. Tech companies have found every imaginable way
Speaker 1: to monetize every imaginable thing we do, all based on
Speaker 1: the idea that they're providing us with something in return,
Speaker 1: and when you really think about it, haven't really provided
Speaker 1: a service at all. Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Google. They're platforms
Speaker 1: that only have as much utility as the content they host,
Speaker 1: which is created by billions of mostly unsupported and unpaid users.
Speaker 1: This kind of shitty trade off was meant to be
Speaker 1: something that was rewarded, with these platforms creating and hosting
Speaker 1: this content in a way that was easier to find
Speaker 1: and use and to help either surface to a wider
Speaker 1: audience or quickly get it to people we cared about,
Speaker 1: all while making sure the conditions we created it under
Speaker 1: and posted it under were interesting and safe, something that
Speaker 1: I think we can all agree is no longer the
Speaker 1: case now. The state of the Internet's now far simpler.
Speaker 1: The cost of using free platforms is a constant war,
Speaker 1: a war with the incentives and intentions of the platforms themselves.
Speaker 1: We're constantly negotiating with Instagram or Facebook to see content
Speaker 1: from people that we chose to follow. Because these platforms
Speaker 1: are no longer built to show us things that we
Speaker 1: want to see. We no longer search Google, but barter
Speaker 1: with the seedy little search box to try and coax
Speaker 1: out result that isn't either search engine optimized half answer,
Speaker 1: or an attempt to trick us into clicking an ad.
Speaker 1: Twitter in its prime succeeded by connecting real people to
Speaker 1: real things at a time when the Internet actively manufactures
Speaker 1: or experience in interactions with others. Now, Twitter is mostly
Speaker 1: ads and pornobots. Great stuff, but the core problem lies
Speaker 1: in the fact that these platforms don't really create anything,
Speaker 1: and their only value exists in making an internet of
Speaker 1: billions of people small enough to comprehend. Like seemingly every
Speaker 1: goddamn problem with capitalism, the Internet has become dominated by
Speaker 1: forces that don't contribute to the product that actually enriches them,
Speaker 1: and as a result, they have no concept or interest
Speaker 1: in quality. They only care about more, and this makes
Speaker 1: them extremely poor. Arbiters of what good looks like. Inevitably,
Speaker 1: this leads to products that suck as they become more
Speaker 1: and more profitable, because the machine they've built is a
Speaker 1: profit excavator dressed up as a god service. I know,
Speaker 1: I hate the whole we're the product thing. I've always
Speaker 1: thought it was very cheesy, but we are literally the product.
Speaker 1: We are the content creator that makes Google money while
Speaker 1: also the thing that makes Google money by search and Google,
Speaker 1: it's very annoying. Look. By allowing and encouraging search engine optimization,
Speaker 1: Google has handed matches to fucking arsonists and pointed them
Speaker 1: on the most flammable parts of the Internet. The existence
Speaker 1: of SEO is inevitable. People are going to try and
Speaker 1: game any system. But Google should never have encouraged these people.
Speaker 1: They should have terrified them. They should have set clear
Speaker 1: standards about what to do and what not to do,
Speaker 1: and heavily punished those who failed to comply. Except doing
Speaker 1: so would mean less content on Google, because there'd be
Speaker 1: less articles that say things like what time is the
Speaker 1: Super Bowl or best televisions to buy. Google actually would
Speaker 1: fully have the ability to make most of these problems
Speaker 1: go away. They should treat SEO people like scam artists,
Speaker 1: and they should run them out of town with pitchforks. Instead,
Speaker 1: they pat him on the ass and they say, good job, buddy.
Speaker 1: I'd argue that the state of search makes Google and
Speaker 1: by extension, executives like Sundhar Peshaian Google Search lead Prabhakar Ragavan,
Speaker 1: some of the greatest villains in business history. Well, one
Speaker 1: can't forget about the damage done by Meta and Mark
Speaker 1: Zuckerberg's failure, outright failure to maintain any kind of quality
Speaker 1: standards on Instagram and Facebook. Allowing Google Search to decay
Speaker 1: so severely for any reason, let alone one that involves profits,
Speaker 1: is actively damaging to society and was an entirely intentional
Speaker 1: act perpetrated by people like Ragavan, the former head of
Speaker 1: Google's Ads division, who took over search not long after
Speaker 1: his predecessor was burdened by the bullshit demands of the
Speaker 1: ads department, led by Ragavan himself. And I'm going to
Speaker 1: get into that in episode too, don't you worry. It's
Speaker 1: not enough though, for me to just say how bad
Speaker 1: the web has got. It's not enough. The web is
Speaker 1: too bad right now for me to just sit here
Speaker 1: and say, oh it sucks. It's so bad. You all
Speaker 1: know that. I hope I've helped you find out a
Speaker 1: little bit more about it. But this phenomenon, it didn't
Speaker 1: come out of nowhere, and it has a cause, and
Speaker 1: that cause is the rise of managers and the managerial
Speaker 1: class in tech. These assholes have largely supplanted the voices
Speaker 1: of actual technologists, coders, engineers, people who work in software
Speaker 1: and hardware, actual innovators, and replace them with this kind
Speaker 1: of zero sum McKinsey s loser, and all they care
Speaker 1: about is profit. All they care about is growth, sometimes
Speaker 1: growth that destroys profit, and they're actively hostile to workers
Speaker 1: and consumers and the actual products they're making. In the
Speaker 1: next two episodes, we're going to take a closer look
Speaker 1: at these managers and how they're destroying innovation. And we're
Speaker 1: going to start with the tale of Prabakar Ragavan, a
Speaker 1: man who has spent his entire life failing up overseeing
Speaker 1: Yahoo during its period of terminal client jumping ship to
Speaker 1: Google in twenty twelve. In twenty nineteen, Ragavan used this
Speaker 1: political influence to push out the head of Search, a
Speaker 1: guy called Ben Gomes. A hero, a hero who fought
Speaker 1: to protect Search from a man trying to turn it
Speaker 1: into a growth machine even when it was still very profitable.
Speaker 1: That's what's really crazy. While far from our household name,
Speaker 1: Ragavan is emblematic of every single thing I've written and
Speaker 1: podcasted about. He personifies this horrifying decline and the short
Speaker 1: term thinking that's destroying the products we use every day.
Speaker 1: He and people like him are destroying companies that we
Speaker 1: used to respect. And as I'll explain, Ragavan's influence times
Speaker 1: exactly with the deterioration of Google Search as a product.
Speaker 1: After that, we're going to look at the managerial class
Speaker 1: more broadly and how some people, such as Instagram's Adamisari
Speaker 1: and of course open Ai CEO Sam Altman, have been
Speaker 1: able to disguise their true intent and ineptitude through the
Speaker 1: clothing of innovation disruption. It's a facade, one that doesn't
Speaker 1: withstand even the slightest bit of scrutiny, and I can't
Speaker 1: wait to tell you all about it. Thank you for
Speaker 1: listening to Better Offline. The editor and composer of the
Speaker 1: Better Offline theme song is Matasowski. You can check out
Speaker 1: more of his music and audio projects at Matasowski dot
Speaker 1: com M A T T O S O W s
Speaker 1: KI dot com. You can email me at easy at
Speaker 1: better offline dot com or check out better offline dot
Speaker 1: com to find my newsletter and more links to this podcast.
Speaker 1: Thank you so much for listening. Better Offline is a
Speaker 1: production of cool Zone Media. For more from cool Zone Media,
Speaker 1: visit our website cool Zonemedia dot com, or check us
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Speaker 1: get your podcasts.