April 24, 2024 • 34 mins
The growth-at-all-costs management consultant mindset has turned most of the modern internet into a painful and profitable social experiment - and in this episode, Ed Zitron walks you through how these disconnected, growth-hungry personalities have made Google and Meta abdicate any responsibility toward their users and products.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:02):
More Zone Media. Hello, and welcome to Better Offline. I'm
at Zetron. This episode is the first of a three
part series about how the tech industry has been snatched
(00:23):
from the hands of people who actually build things using
software and hardware by a bunch of managers that have
little or no interaction with the products they're actually profiting from.
The same managers also don't appear to do much work,
and today I'm going to walk you through exactly how
bad things have gotten as a result. In early April,
Meta revealed in Emotion Training to dismiss an FTC anti
(00:47):
monopoly lawsuit that Instagram made an astonishing thirty two point
four billion dollars in advertising revenue in twenty twenty one.
That figure becomes even more shocking when you consider Google's
YouTube only made twenty eight point eight billion dollars during
the same period. I'd argue YouTube is significantly more useful anyway.
(01:07):
Bloomberg reports that Instagram made almost thirty percent of Meta's
entire revenue in the early part of twenty twenty two.
Ninety six percent of Meta's forty point one billion dollar
fourth quarter twenty twenty three revenue came from advertising and
It's made over one hundred billion dollars a year since
twenty twenty one, a trend that's likely to continue based
(01:29):
on the fact that the only thing these platforms care
about is ducing as much revenue from these apps. Google
made eighty six point three billion dollars in the fourth
quarter of twenty twenty three, with forty eight billion dollars
of that coming from Google Search and its related advertising,
up thirteen percent from the previous quarter. According to Pew Research,
(01:51):
in America, eighty three percent of adults use YouTube, sixty
eight percent of the meuse Facebook, and forty seven percent
of the mew's Instagram. Each platform both over two billion users,
and over the last three years, Meta and Google have
made over a half trillion dollars in revenue from these platforms.
I now want you to go to Facebook. I want
(02:12):
you to scroll down, and I want you to see
how quickly you hit an advertisement or a sponsored content thing.
In my case, after a single post from a friend,
I was immediately hit with a suggestion for me to
join a group for adult Bluey fans. I do not
watch blue I have not watched Bluey. This was then
followed by a post from a friend, followed by another ad,
(02:35):
followed by two posts and friends, followed by a suggestion
to join a group called Aviation Meme Lords, followed by
another ad. On Instagram, I saw one post from a
person I followed, followed by an AD for a game,
followed by a suggested video, followed by something from someone
I followed, followed by a suggested video, followed by an
ad of followed by a person I followed posting something,
(02:59):
and then another yested piece of content the first ad.
When I clicked my Stories, a totally different and even
more confusing part of Instagram that's mostly just a rip
off of Snapchat, I got an ad for a game
using footage that isn't actually in the game itself, an
outright bait and switch employed by mobile game developers like
those who make Ebony, that make millions of dollars off
(03:22):
of these horrifying, annoying, micro transaction heavy games. When I
went to YouTube, my first result was for an eleven
minute long Taiwanese news video of some sort. The next
one was a video that appeared to be in Chinese.
I don't speak these languages. That's my fault, not theirs,
but it is kind of YouTube's wort for trying to
show them to me. In fact, when I went around
(03:45):
and I scrolled through, it was all in Chinese. So
I went to Google and I typed, why are my
YouTube videos in Chinese? The first result was a Reddit
post where several users were, for whatever reason, being served
random videos in Chinese. There was actually no conclusion to this.
I still do not know why this happened. I can't read.
(04:06):
I can only speak and read of like in English,
and I can barely do that. I'm very sorry anyways,
Google though, is especially annoying because while researching the beginning
of this podcast, it took me about half an hour
to get the basics for the beginning because every time
I googled something like, say, what percentage of web traffic
goes to Google? Which I really was not able to find.
(04:27):
I kept being given these so called authoritative sources like
Forbes Advisor, which to be clear, is not Forbes magazine.
It is an affiliate marketing arm of Forbes. It's very deceptive.
The sources inside the Forbes Advisor piece I found ranged
from things from blogging wizard to a literal list of
website names with no links. I'm talking about just a
(04:48):
plaintext list. The state of Google's very worrying. A year
long study from Leipzig University published last year and reported
on by Jason Kobler of four or four Media found
that the quality of good Google search results has decayed
at a remarkable rate. The incentives of content creators to
search engine optimize their content based on standards published by
(05:10):
Google has filled search full of crap, with higher ranked
pages that are on average, more optimized, more monetized with
affiliate marketing, and featuring predominantly lower quality text. To make
matters worse, the researchers found that only a small portion
of product reviews on the web use affiliate marketing, but
the majority of search results raised by Google do. If
(05:33):
you're unfamiliar with affiliate marketing, it's when outlets run pieces
about something, say top ten speakers or top ten laptops,
and they have a bunch of links like Amazon or
Walmart of best Buy, and they get a little bit
of cash from the platform. When everyone someone clicks that
and buys something doesn't even have to be the thing
that they were originally clicking on. This revenue model incentivizes
(05:56):
sites to write lots of best of articles that exist
entirely to make click things to make the money. To
be clear, this is actually a perfectly normal business model
in the right hands. The Wirecutter has done a great
job of monetizing affiliate marketing while providing very thorough recommendations.
The Verge has two there are decent people doing this.
(06:16):
The majority of them are not decent though, Just so
we're abundantly clear. To quote the study, search engine optimization
is a constant battle, and we in this case the
study people see repeated patterns of review spam, entering, and
leaving the results as search engines and SEO engineers take
turns adjusting their parameters. So in Layman's terms, Google is
(06:39):
in this battle with the people writing search engine optimized content. Now,
to be clear, this content, the search optimized stuff, is
done so with Google's approval. And there are people at
Google who'll kind of nudge you in the right direction.
They never really give full directions, but they they're okay
with search engine optimization. You think they wouldn't be, you'd
(07:00):
think they'd want to fight for like standards and quality,
but no, they actively help these people gain the system.
So what Google will do is they will update Google
and then these people will change their means to beat Google,
and then Google will maybe update again. And that's kind
of the problem. You see. The Leipzig University researchers refer
to tweets to these algorithms to fight spam as only
(07:22):
really having a temporarily positive effect, and that search engines
always seem to lose the cat and mouse game that
is seo spam now. In March twenty twenty four, Google
announced that it was making changes to its algorithm that
would reduce spam and AI generated content by forty percent,
and very specifically said it would raise human authored content
(07:43):
to the top of Google. Everyone in the press was
gleeful about this. They're saying how good it was and
that Google was finally doing something. It's been a month,
nothing's happened. Things still suck. Scammy outlets called things like
tech Gate and Daily Good Morning Kashmir wholesale steel articles,
and places like tech Crunch and coin Telegraph, and at
times these stolen articles will rank above or in place
(08:08):
of the original articles, depriving journalists and publishers of traffic
and revenue. It's insane. I briefly sparred with Danny Sullivan,
who is the he's the search liaism for Google about
this and tech gate has now disappeared as of doing
this day. The Good Morning Kashmir has them, And indeed
there are multiple journalists I know that have said that
(08:30):
their articles are regularly outpaced by these spam shops. And
seemingly every time I talk to anyone on the Google
side about this, they say, ah, I am I done.
I want to do about it. Danny's a good bloke.
Danny used to run search engine land, I believe, and yeah,
he's just part of the machine now and it sucks.
Danny's a good bloke. I want to like Danny. But mate, Danny,
(08:51):
if you're gonna be the search liaison, it's art to
liaise with the search engine, it's time to promote the
journalists saying oh, mate, we don't know how to fix
the machine is not aloody excuse. Google, a company worth
around two trillion dollars, is either unable or unwilling to
fix the problem. But I think the truth might be
(09:11):
just a little simpler. There's just no incentive for it
to make things better, as Google Search remains one of
the most profitable businesses in the damn world. In episode two.
By the way, I'm going to tell you the people responsible,
and they're led by a fellow called Prabhakar Ragavan. You're
gonna hear that name a lot in the next episode.
(09:32):
I'm not going to say it another time. I've been
thinking and saying it a lot though. Anyway, this is
the state of the modern Internet. Ultra profitable platforms outright
abdicating any responsibility toward the customer or even the wider
digital ecosystem. They're not offering a service or a portal
or an app or a useful thing, but they're finding
as many ways to interrupt you, the user, to push
(09:55):
you into doing something or seeing something that's profitable for them.
And yes, I really I am describing modern business. But
if you look at Facebook or Instagram right now, can
you really tell me that's a service. Can you really
tell me you are getting to see your friends and
family on Instagram or Facebook. No, the whole thing's a mess,
(10:16):
a huge, big, ultra profitable mess. The greatest lie in
tech is that Facebook and Instagram are for catching up
with your friends, because that's not what they do, and
it's not what they've done for years. These platforms are
now pathways for this nebulous concept of content discovery, which
really means it's just a barely personalized entertainment network that
(10:39):
occasionally drizzles or dribbles things you choose to see on
top of crappy sponsored content, ads and groups that are
part of a relational database that has your name on it.
On some level, it's kind of hard to say you
even use these apps anymore. The term use suggests the
level of industry and user control that Meta has spent
over high for a decade destroying, and they've turned Instagram
(11:03):
and Facebook into tubes to funnel human beings in front
of those who either pay for the privilege of visibility
or have found ways to trick Facebook's algorithms into showing
you their crap. And it's all the direct result of
what I call the rot economy, a growth at all
cost mindset built off the back of immovable monopolies where
tech companies profitably punish you as a means of showing
(11:24):
the markets eternal growth. In practice, this means turning these
platforms into something that offers you a service into something
that drives engagement, which, in Facebook and Instagram's case, means
finding the maximum amount of times they can interrupt you
before you close the app entirely. In Google's case, it
means making changes the search that made advertisements and sponsored
(11:46):
links kind of impossible to tell the difference between for
most people, and making it so that users had to
make more queries on Google. Now I sound paranoid when
I say that I realized the idea that Google would
have a metric that said, we need people to search
for more stuff on Google. I am quoting Google saying
(12:06):
this emails from the antitrust lawsuit between them and the
Department of Justice. Episode two. I'm going to go into it,
don't you worry? And really it is kind of the
government's fault here. They've taken this optimistic, respectful and trustworthy
approach to tech. They've said, well, tech is providing something
for free, aren't they, so really can't be too much
(12:28):
of a bastard to them. And the result is we've
just got this Internet riddled with decay and pain. It's
an Internet that incentivizes mining human beings like veins of awe.
And in these next few episodes, I'm going to walk
you through how big tech turned the Internet into a
multi trillion dollar social experiment. And I'm going to name
(12:49):
the bastards responsible underpinning these profitable torture machines. It's an
online advertisement industry built off the back of fucking advertisers
and users alike. In the mid twenty tens, Facebook mistakenly
(13:11):
told online publishers that their videos were receiving more engagement
than they actually did, leading to multiple publishers pivoting to video,
a disastrous industry movement that cost hundreds of reporters their jobs.
Led to a massive class action suit against meta media.
Companies based on Facebook's lies radically changed their operations, with
MTV News cutting its entire rating team and shifting to
(13:33):
short form video in July twenty seventeen. Vocative did the same.
The following month, Vice Media cut roughly sixty editorial roles
and expanded its video production capabilities. In response to this
so called growth, Mike, a much smaller company than MTV
newser Vice Media but quite beloved at the time, slashed
ten rolls and shifted the rest of its output to video,
(13:55):
going all in on a bet that, as you can guess,
failed catastrophically, with the company eventually being sold off the
Bustle Digital Group for a pittance. Those video roles were
of course cut or vastly reduced when it was obvious
that there really wasn't any engagement on these things that
I have a whole episode on this, please go back
and listen to it. Meta is also currently the subject
(14:16):
of a class action suit led by Metroplex Communications, which
claimed that metas inflated metrics lwered advertisers away from competing platforms,
something that has been sued for before. When all of
your incentives are aligned around bigger and more and growth,
you'll take just about anybody's money. In Meta's case, this
means getting advertisers who compare the COVID nineteen vaccine to
(14:40):
the Holocaust, or quack doctors with phony cancer treatments, scammers
selling counterfeit phishing equipment, scammers offering fake discounts for puzzles,
and of course, cryptocurrency cons An investigation from late last
year found that a third of advertisements on Facebook marketplace
in the UK were scams, and earlier in the year,
UK financial services authorities said it had banned more than
(15:02):
ten thousand illegal investment ads across Instagram, Facebook, YouTube and
TikTok in twenty twenty two alone. A fifteen hundred percent
increase over the past year, and as these platforms begin
to decay, things only get worse for the user. Elon
Musk's acquisition of Twitter and his obvious outright hostility towards
(15:22):
blue chip advertisers, and also his anti Semitic posts just
there's a lot of bad stuff with Elon. They've turned
Twitter into kind of the digital equivalent of Downtown Vegas.
Seemingly every post is replied to by a bot offering
nudes in bio, or pussy in bio, something in bio,
or at the moment, quite literally, just a picture of
a fully nude woman, which is pretty funny until you
(15:45):
realize that according to John Herman and New York Magazine,
these bots are afront for a series of very big,
nasty online dating scams that lose people tens of thousands
of dollars. Elon Musk choosing to check the blue check
mark from something that was given by Twitter to say
that you are the real person into a thing that
you buy for eight dollars has allowed cryptocurrency scammers, according
(16:09):
to Protos, to make millions by tricking users into connecting
their wallets to fund drain their entire thing like it's
somewhat technical, but you just click these websites and you say, yeah, sure,
i'll connect my whilet and then they take all of
your money. And it seems like they're even buying ads
on the platform to do so, using stolen credit cards
(16:29):
musks desperation for ad revenue has even led Twitter to
start pushing ads that don't actually say their ads, leading
to an advertising watchdog called check my Ads to file
a formal complaint with the FTC demanding that it investigates
Twitter and enforces its truth in advertising standards. Also, right
now on Twitter, there is something called the Creator program,
(16:49):
and if you have Twitter Blue, that's right, you have
to pay them to get paid. You can make a
little money off of advertising. When other Twitter Blue people reply.
The significance of this is right now, Twitter is posting
tons of unlabeled ads for mister Beast videos so that
Elon Musk can give money to mister Beasts, so that
(17:10):
mister Beast will repost things from YouTube, allowing Elon Musk
to pay him money. It's a very confusing thing, and
Twitter is really bad. I won't call it X. I
think X is a stupid name. It's terrible to search for.
It sucks. The whole site kind of sucks. I'm on
it until the end. It's like the Titanic. I can
see the iceberg coming, but nevertheless it's in a bad way.
(17:35):
Yet it's foolish to act as if the sorry state
of Twitter is really that different to the rest of
the web. Instagram is flooded with pornobots. It has been
for years, and what they do is they engage with
regular posts enough times through likes and replies as a
means of pretending they're real so that they can avoid
Meta's flimsy automated content moderation, and that, by the way,
(17:58):
is only quasi auto. Meta also underpays, horribly underpays. I
should add people in other countries like Kenya, they make
as little as two dollars and twenty cents an hour
to view what Wired referred to as the most hideous
content on the Internet. Because that's what's important to know.
Meta is doing something. They're stopping you from seeing literal
(18:19):
beheadings and child abuse and such, and they're doing that
by paying basically prison labor rates in other countries. This
is also something that open ai and AI companies do
with training data. It's a disgusting practice. They should all
be in a lot of trouble for this, and they
never will be because no one ever eld them accountable.
Much like every major tech platform, Meta is just half
(18:41):
fastening its approach to moderation, and they're committing human rights
violations to do so, so that they can spend the
smallest amount of money possible to stop the things it
needs to stop you seeing. They need to make sure
you don't see someone being stabbed to death on Facebook.
They don't really need to stop pornography or scams. They
should need to should be a government body that stops them,
(19:02):
but there isn't, so they don't. As you'd expect, these
standards have led to Facebook being flooded with generative AI
content spam, and a study came out of Stanford and
Georgetown that revealed that Facebook's algorithm is now boasting spam
content riddled with misinformation, and they're sending hundreds of millions
of impressions to pages that direct people to WordPress sites
(19:24):
crammed full of spammy and scammy ads. It's insane. It's
actually really crazy. When you really look into this, you
can see that the web is falling apart in front
of us. And yet the most obvious sign of this
decay is just visiting a website on your telephone. Go
to IGN dot com lot could people work at Igana
Feel bad for saying this, but they have over three
hundred million views and you go on there and you
(19:46):
immediately hit with two giant ads, one that fills the
top thirty page and auto playing videos. And this happens
on a lot of sites. ESPN also another third for this.
It's so weird. When I I went on there earlier,
I was hit with two giant acts. They took up
most of my screen, and on opening a story about
the new for that TV show, which is very good,
(20:07):
I'll give them that, it then covered the top quarter
of my screen with another or playing at It's so weird.
It's so weird when you see this happening. I feel
like more people should be talking about this. This field.
It's like if the road was just full of used condoms.
It's like if there was trash everywhere. This is the
web now anyway, Anyway, Reach PLC. They are publicly traded,
(20:31):
multimillion dollar business that dominates local journalism in the UK
and they hold basically monopolies in several regions and also
own three newspapers. Very depressing, they're notorious for this kind
of aggressive approach to monetization. Their websites have been described
as an over monetized mess and impossible to navigate with
a poor digital experience. Named as a partial contributor to
(20:53):
the declining financial fortunes of one of the more loathsome
companies in the world. If you open a local new
UK news website, especially one owned by Reach, with just
Safari on your phone, for example, you'll be met with
an endless deluge of page covering ads that appear in
the middle of articles as you're scrolling, and other ads
(21:14):
that redirect you to an external website without any warning,
or while you're on the page trying to read the
thing that you went to the website for. Even the
giants of journalism haven't resisted the temptation to fuck their
users over. CNN, one of the most influential news publications
in the world by hundreds of millions of people. They
host their own journalism and they spice in spami content
(21:37):
from something called a chumbox company. And these companies make
hundreds of millions of dollars driving clicks to everything from
just scams to straight up this information. And you'll find
them on CNN, you find them on NBC, you find
them in tons of major media outlets, and all of
them are these insane stories, like two steps to tell
(21:58):
when a slot is close to hitting the jackpot, or
the best hearing aid. It's really strange to see this
in the in between Pulitzer Prize winning journalists and like
international conflicts. These chum box companies. They're ubiquitous because they
pay well, and it makes them super attractive to cash
strap media entities because you can just plug this bollocks
(22:20):
in and you just get money, even if it makes
your products suck. And they're awful. They're super horrible. They're
ruining the web, and they keep making more money. In
twenty eighteen, the late great podcast reply All, which by
the way, was killed by the rot economy Fuck you
Spotify anyway. Reply All had an episode that centered around
(22:40):
a widower whose wife's death had been hijacked by one
of these chumbox advertisers to push content that, using stolen
family photos, implied she had been unfaithful to him. The
title of the episode and add for the worst day
of your life was fitting, and it was only until
a massively popular podcast intervene that any of these networks
ban the advert. These networks outbrain taboola, evil companies run
(23:06):
by evil people. They're harmful, They're harmful to the Internet,
They're harmful to users, and they're harmful to the news
brands that host them. If I was working for a
major news company, I'd be absolutely humiliated to see my
work put next to this nonsense, this celebrity bullshit, these
diet scams, these get rich quick schemes, Tommy Chong's fucking
(23:26):
CBD chews. I apologize swearing, but it's just so frustrating.
Are these outlets so unprofitable that they just have to
sell out like this? I refuse to believe that I
just reviews. The modern Internet was built on a social
(23:55):
contract that said the big tech gave us services for
free in exchange for some sort of nebulous concept of data,
which largely took the form of content and connections we
made between people and the things that we posted. As
a result, this social contract was both assumed and extremely
easy to enter into because all of these sites were free,
(24:15):
which meant that there was really never any attempt to
regulate the terms of it. There are terms and conditions,
but that's really it, and you what you're gonna do.
You're gonna barter with meta And there were never conditions
set for what can't be done to a user, what
can be done with the data. Look at Cambridge Analytica,
look at all of the different ways that Facebook hads
(24:37):
hurt people. None of that matters to them because it
doesn't have to. They don't care. There's nobody stopping them.
The FDC won't stop them, lawyers won't stop them. It's
very depressing when you say it out loud anyway. As
a result, these platforms were are a form of bait
(24:57):
and switch, which underpins coreytor else very good but annoying
to say in shitification theory, where platforms have built these
massive monopolies based off for in good, useful services and
then turn them into something terrible but very profitable. But
as I've noted before and shertification kind of misses one point,
these companies are not doing this out of a lack
(25:20):
of profitability or some sort of failure in their business model.
They're doing so because the Internet has become something between
a social experiment and a mining operation. They're doing it
because they can. Nobody's stopping them. And doctor Oo has
upgraded his theory to the insure to see now he
has brought in some of these things. I think I'm
just tired of people responding to the Rock economy and
(25:41):
saying in citification Corey Rock's I'm gonna have him on
the podcast Jesus. But seriously, though, it's not because they're
suddenly left hand hand. They've just kept turning the screw
because who's going to stop them? What's you're going to do?
Not use Google, not use Facebook, not use Instagram anyway,
Charlie Warsall, who I've given a lot of shit. Charlie
(26:02):
did a good thing there. He framed this well in
a recent piece in the Atlantic published in the middle
of April that described the overall techscape as a form
of hostage negotiation. Interactions with tech companies are no longer
a purchase or a two way contract, but kind of
a trade of information long after you've purchased the product itself.
Every interaction with tech now requires us to share our
(26:23):
email address or our phone number, to accept a kind
of subtle tracking. Don't worry it's anonymous, or of course,
to share your personal information that will probably be leaked.
It's try it at this point to say that human
beings themselves are the product, but it's kind of impossible
to avoid saying when you look at the state of
the Internet now. Tech companies have found every imaginable way
(26:46):
to monetize every imaginable thing we do, all based on
the idea that they're providing us with something in return,
and when you really think about it, haven't really provided
a service at all. Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Google. They're platforms
that only have as much utility as the content they host,
which is created by billions of mostly unsupported and unpaid users.
(27:08):
This kind of shitty trade off was meant to be
something that was rewarded, with these platforms creating and hosting
this content in a way that was easier to find
and use and to help either surface to a wider
audience or quickly get it to people we cared about,
all while making sure the conditions we created it under
and posted it under were interesting and safe, something that
(27:29):
I think we can all agree is no longer the
case now. The state of the Internet's now far simpler.
The cost of using free platforms is a constant war,
a war with the incentives and intentions of the platforms themselves.
We're constantly negotiating with Instagram or Facebook to see content
from people that we chose to follow. Because these platforms
(27:50):
are no longer built to show us things that we
want to see. We no longer search Google, but barter
with the seedy little search box to try and coax
out result that isn't either search engine optimized half answer,
or an attempt to trick us into clicking an ad.
Twitter in its prime succeeded by connecting real people to
real things at a time when the Internet actively manufactures
(28:10):
or experience in interactions with others. Now, Twitter is mostly
ads and pornobots. Great stuff, but the core problem lies
in the fact that these platforms don't really create anything,
and their only value exists in making an internet of
billions of people small enough to comprehend. Like seemingly every
(28:31):
goddamn problem with capitalism, the Internet has become dominated by
forces that don't contribute to the product that actually enriches them,
and as a result, they have no concept or interest
in quality. They only care about more, and this makes
them extremely poor. Arbiters of what good looks like. Inevitably,
(28:51):
this leads to products that suck as they become more
and more profitable, because the machine they've built is a
profit excavator dressed up as a god service. I know,
I hate the whole we're the product thing. I've always
thought it was very cheesy, but we are literally the product.
We are the content creator that makes Google money while
(29:12):
also the thing that makes Google money by search and Google,
it's very annoying. Look. By allowing and encouraging search engine optimization,
Google has handed matches to fucking arsonists and pointed them
on the most flammable parts of the Internet. The existence
of SEO is inevitable. People are going to try and
game any system. But Google should never have encouraged these people.
(29:33):
They should have terrified them. They should have set clear
standards about what to do and what not to do,
and heavily punished those who failed to comply. Except doing
so would mean less content on Google, because there'd be
less articles that say things like what time is the
Super Bowl or best televisions to buy. Google actually would
fully have the ability to make most of these problems
(29:55):
go away. They should treat SEO people like scam artists,
and they should run them out of town with pitchforks. Instead,
they pat him on the ass and they say, good job, buddy.
I'd argue that the state of search makes Google and
by extension, executives like Sundhar Peshaian Google Search lead Prabhakar Ragavan,
some of the greatest villains in business history. Well, one
(30:18):
can't forget about the damage done by Meta and Mark
Zuckerberg's failure, outright failure to maintain any kind of quality
standards on Instagram and Facebook. Allowing Google Search to decay
so severely for any reason, let alone one that involves profits,
is actively damaging to society and was an entirely intentional
act perpetrated by people like Ragavan, the former head of
(30:40):
Google's Ads division, who took over search not long after
his predecessor was burdened by the bullshit demands of the
ads department, led by Ragavan himself. And I'm going to
get into that in episode too, don't you worry. It's
not enough though, for me to just say how bad
the web has got. It's not enough. The web is
too bad right now for me to just sit here
(31:03):
and say, oh it sucks. It's so bad. You all
know that. I hope I've helped you find out a
little bit more about it. But this phenomenon, it didn't
come out of nowhere, and it has a cause, and
that cause is the rise of managers and the managerial
class in tech. These assholes have largely supplanted the voices
of actual technologists, coders, engineers, people who work in software
(31:25):
and hardware, actual innovators, and replace them with this kind
of zero sum McKinsey s loser, and all they care
about is profit. All they care about is growth, sometimes
growth that destroys profit, and they're actively hostile to workers
and consumers and the actual products they're making. In the
(31:45):
next two episodes, we're going to take a closer look
at these managers and how they're destroying innovation. And we're
going to start with the tale of Prabakar Ragavan, a
man who has spent his entire life failing up overseeing
Yahoo during its period of terminal client jumping ship to
Google in twenty twelve. In twenty nineteen, Ragavan used this
political influence to push out the head of Search, a
(32:07):
guy called Ben Gomes. A hero, a hero who fought
to protect Search from a man trying to turn it
into a growth machine even when it was still very profitable.
That's what's really crazy. While far from our household name,
Ragavan is emblematic of every single thing I've written and
podcasted about. He personifies this horrifying decline and the short
(32:30):
term thinking that's destroying the products we use every day.
He and people like him are destroying companies that we
used to respect. And as I'll explain, Ragavan's influence times
exactly with the deterioration of Google Search as a product.
After that, we're going to look at the managerial class
more broadly and how some people, such as Instagram's Adamisari
(32:53):
and of course open Ai CEO Sam Altman, have been
able to disguise their true intent and ineptitude through the
clothing of innovation disruption. It's a facade, one that doesn't
withstand even the slightest bit of scrutiny, and I can't
wait to tell you all about it. Thank you for
(33:19):
listening to Better Offline. The editor and composer of the
Better Offline theme song is Matasowski. You can check out
more of his music and audio projects at Matasowski dot
com M A T T O S O W s
KI dot com. You can email me at easy at
better offline dot com or check out better offline dot
com to find my newsletter and more links to this podcast.
(33:40):
Thank you so much for listening. Better Offline is a
production of cool Zone Media. For more from cool Zone Media,
visit our website cool Zonemedia dot com, or check us
out on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you
get your podcasts.
More Zone Media. Hello, and welcome to Better Offline. I'm
at Zetron. This episode is the first of a three
part series about how the tech industry has been snatched
(00:23):
from the hands of people who actually build things using
software and hardware by a bunch of managers that have
little or no interaction with the products they're actually profiting from.
The same managers also don't appear to do much work,
and today I'm going to walk you through exactly how
bad things have gotten as a result. In early April,
Meta revealed in Emotion Training to dismiss an FTC anti
(00:47):
monopoly lawsuit that Instagram made an astonishing thirty two point
four billion dollars in advertising revenue in twenty twenty one.
That figure becomes even more shocking when you consider Google's
YouTube only made twenty eight point eight billion dollars during
the same period. I'd argue YouTube is significantly more useful anyway.
(01:07):
Bloomberg reports that Instagram made almost thirty percent of Meta's
entire revenue in the early part of twenty twenty two.
Ninety six percent of Meta's forty point one billion dollar
fourth quarter twenty twenty three revenue came from advertising and
It's made over one hundred billion dollars a year since
twenty twenty one, a trend that's likely to continue based
(01:29):
on the fact that the only thing these platforms care
about is ducing as much revenue from these apps. Google
made eighty six point three billion dollars in the fourth
quarter of twenty twenty three, with forty eight billion dollars
of that coming from Google Search and its related advertising,
up thirteen percent from the previous quarter. According to Pew Research,
(01:51):
in America, eighty three percent of adults use YouTube, sixty
eight percent of the meuse Facebook, and forty seven percent
of the mew's Instagram. Each platform both over two billion users,
and over the last three years, Meta and Google have
made over a half trillion dollars in revenue from these platforms.
I now want you to go to Facebook. I want
(02:12):
you to scroll down, and I want you to see
how quickly you hit an advertisement or a sponsored content thing.
In my case, after a single post from a friend,
I was immediately hit with a suggestion for me to
join a group for adult Bluey fans. I do not
watch blue I have not watched Bluey. This was then
followed by a post from a friend, followed by another ad,
(02:35):
followed by two posts and friends, followed by a suggestion
to join a group called Aviation Meme Lords, followed by
another ad. On Instagram, I saw one post from a
person I followed, followed by an AD for a game,
followed by a suggested video, followed by something from someone
I followed, followed by a suggested video, followed by an
ad of followed by a person I followed posting something,
(02:59):
and then another yested piece of content the first ad.
When I clicked my Stories, a totally different and even
more confusing part of Instagram that's mostly just a rip
off of Snapchat, I got an ad for a game
using footage that isn't actually in the game itself, an
outright bait and switch employed by mobile game developers like
those who make Ebony, that make millions of dollars off
(03:22):
of these horrifying, annoying, micro transaction heavy games. When I
went to YouTube, my first result was for an eleven
minute long Taiwanese news video of some sort. The next
one was a video that appeared to be in Chinese.
I don't speak these languages. That's my fault, not theirs,
but it is kind of YouTube's wort for trying to
show them to me. In fact, when I went around
(03:45):
and I scrolled through, it was all in Chinese. So
I went to Google and I typed, why are my
YouTube videos in Chinese? The first result was a Reddit
post where several users were, for whatever reason, being served
random videos in Chinese. There was actually no conclusion to this.
I still do not know why this happened. I can't read.
(04:06):
I can only speak and read of like in English,
and I can barely do that. I'm very sorry anyways,
Google though, is especially annoying because while researching the beginning
of this podcast, it took me about half an hour
to get the basics for the beginning because every time
I googled something like, say, what percentage of web traffic
goes to Google? Which I really was not able to find.
(04:27):
I kept being given these so called authoritative sources like
Forbes Advisor, which to be clear, is not Forbes magazine.
It is an affiliate marketing arm of Forbes. It's very deceptive.
The sources inside the Forbes Advisor piece I found ranged
from things from blogging wizard to a literal list of
website names with no links. I'm talking about just a
(04:48):
plaintext list. The state of Google's very worrying. A year
long study from Leipzig University published last year and reported
on by Jason Kobler of four or four Media found
that the quality of good Google search results has decayed
at a remarkable rate. The incentives of content creators to
search engine optimize their content based on standards published by
(05:10):
Google has filled search full of crap, with higher ranked
pages that are on average, more optimized, more monetized with
affiliate marketing, and featuring predominantly lower quality text. To make
matters worse, the researchers found that only a small portion
of product reviews on the web use affiliate marketing, but
the majority of search results raised by Google do. If
(05:33):
you're unfamiliar with affiliate marketing, it's when outlets run pieces
about something, say top ten speakers or top ten laptops,
and they have a bunch of links like Amazon or
Walmart of best Buy, and they get a little bit
of cash from the platform. When everyone someone clicks that
and buys something doesn't even have to be the thing
that they were originally clicking on. This revenue model incentivizes
(05:56):
sites to write lots of best of articles that exist
entirely to make click things to make the money. To
be clear, this is actually a perfectly normal business model
in the right hands. The Wirecutter has done a great
job of monetizing affiliate marketing while providing very thorough recommendations.
The Verge has two there are decent people doing this.
(06:16):
The majority of them are not decent though, Just so
we're abundantly clear. To quote the study, search engine optimization
is a constant battle, and we in this case the
study people see repeated patterns of review spam, entering, and
leaving the results as search engines and SEO engineers take
turns adjusting their parameters. So in Layman's terms, Google is
(06:39):
in this battle with the people writing search engine optimized content. Now,
to be clear, this content, the search optimized stuff, is
done so with Google's approval. And there are people at
Google who'll kind of nudge you in the right direction.
They never really give full directions, but they they're okay
with search engine optimization. You think they wouldn't be, you'd
(07:00):
think they'd want to fight for like standards and quality,
but no, they actively help these people gain the system.
So what Google will do is they will update Google
and then these people will change their means to beat Google,
and then Google will maybe update again. And that's kind
of the problem. You see. The Leipzig University researchers refer
to tweets to these algorithms to fight spam as only
(07:22):
really having a temporarily positive effect, and that search engines
always seem to lose the cat and mouse game that
is seo spam now. In March twenty twenty four, Google
announced that it was making changes to its algorithm that
would reduce spam and AI generated content by forty percent,
and very specifically said it would raise human authored content
(07:43):
to the top of Google. Everyone in the press was
gleeful about this. They're saying how good it was and
that Google was finally doing something. It's been a month,
nothing's happened. Things still suck. Scammy outlets called things like
tech Gate and Daily Good Morning Kashmir wholesale steel articles,
and places like tech Crunch and coin Telegraph, and at
times these stolen articles will rank above or in place
(08:08):
of the original articles, depriving journalists and publishers of traffic
and revenue. It's insane. I briefly sparred with Danny Sullivan,
who is the he's the search liaism for Google about
this and tech gate has now disappeared as of doing
this day. The Good Morning Kashmir has them, And indeed
there are multiple journalists I know that have said that
(08:30):
their articles are regularly outpaced by these spam shops. And
seemingly every time I talk to anyone on the Google
side about this, they say, ah, I am I done.
I want to do about it. Danny's a good bloke.
Danny used to run search engine land, I believe, and yeah,
he's just part of the machine now and it sucks.
Danny's a good bloke. I want to like Danny. But mate, Danny,
(08:51):
if you're gonna be the search liaison, it's art to
liaise with the search engine, it's time to promote the
journalists saying oh, mate, we don't know how to fix
the machine is not aloody excuse. Google, a company worth
around two trillion dollars, is either unable or unwilling to
fix the problem. But I think the truth might be
(09:11):
just a little simpler. There's just no incentive for it
to make things better, as Google Search remains one of
the most profitable businesses in the damn world. In episode two.
By the way, I'm going to tell you the people responsible,
and they're led by a fellow called Prabhakar Ragavan. You're
gonna hear that name a lot in the next episode.
(09:32):
I'm not going to say it another time. I've been
thinking and saying it a lot though. Anyway, this is
the state of the modern Internet. Ultra profitable platforms outright
abdicating any responsibility toward the customer or even the wider
digital ecosystem. They're not offering a service or a portal
or an app or a useful thing, but they're finding
as many ways to interrupt you, the user, to push
(09:55):
you into doing something or seeing something that's profitable for them.
And yes, I really I am describing modern business. But
if you look at Facebook or Instagram right now, can
you really tell me that's a service. Can you really
tell me you are getting to see your friends and
family on Instagram or Facebook. No, the whole thing's a mess,
(10:16):
a huge, big, ultra profitable mess. The greatest lie in
tech is that Facebook and Instagram are for catching up
with your friends, because that's not what they do, and
it's not what they've done for years. These platforms are
now pathways for this nebulous concept of content discovery, which
really means it's just a barely personalized entertainment network that
(10:39):
occasionally drizzles or dribbles things you choose to see on
top of crappy sponsored content, ads and groups that are
part of a relational database that has your name on it.
On some level, it's kind of hard to say you
even use these apps anymore. The term use suggests the
level of industry and user control that Meta has spent
over high for a decade destroying, and they've turned Instagram
(11:03):
and Facebook into tubes to funnel human beings in front
of those who either pay for the privilege of visibility
or have found ways to trick Facebook's algorithms into showing
you their crap. And it's all the direct result of
what I call the rot economy, a growth at all
cost mindset built off the back of immovable monopolies where
tech companies profitably punish you as a means of showing
(11:24):
the markets eternal growth. In practice, this means turning these
platforms into something that offers you a service into something
that drives engagement, which, in Facebook and Instagram's case, means
finding the maximum amount of times they can interrupt you
before you close the app entirely. In Google's case, it
means making changes the search that made advertisements and sponsored
(11:46):
links kind of impossible to tell the difference between for
most people, and making it so that users had to
make more queries on Google. Now I sound paranoid when
I say that I realized the idea that Google would
have a metric that said, we need people to search
for more stuff on Google. I am quoting Google saying
(12:06):
this emails from the antitrust lawsuit between them and the
Department of Justice. Episode two. I'm going to go into it,
don't you worry? And really it is kind of the
government's fault here. They've taken this optimistic, respectful and trustworthy
approach to tech. They've said, well, tech is providing something
for free, aren't they, so really can't be too much
(12:28):
of a bastard to them. And the result is we've
just got this Internet riddled with decay and pain. It's
an Internet that incentivizes mining human beings like veins of awe.
And in these next few episodes, I'm going to walk
you through how big tech turned the Internet into a
multi trillion dollar social experiment. And I'm going to name
(12:49):
the bastards responsible underpinning these profitable torture machines. It's an
online advertisement industry built off the back of fucking advertisers
and users alike. In the mid twenty tens, Facebook mistakenly
(13:11):
told online publishers that their videos were receiving more engagement
than they actually did, leading to multiple publishers pivoting to video,
a disastrous industry movement that cost hundreds of reporters their jobs.
Led to a massive class action suit against meta media.
Companies based on Facebook's lies radically changed their operations, with
MTV News cutting its entire rating team and shifting to
(13:33):
short form video in July twenty seventeen. Vocative did the same.
The following month, Vice Media cut roughly sixty editorial roles
and expanded its video production capabilities. In response to this
so called growth, Mike, a much smaller company than MTV
newser Vice Media but quite beloved at the time, slashed
ten rolls and shifted the rest of its output to video,
(13:55):
going all in on a bet that, as you can guess,
failed catastrophically, with the company eventually being sold off the
Bustle Digital Group for a pittance. Those video roles were
of course cut or vastly reduced when it was obvious
that there really wasn't any engagement on these things that
I have a whole episode on this, please go back
and listen to it. Meta is also currently the subject
(14:16):
of a class action suit led by Metroplex Communications, which
claimed that metas inflated metrics lwered advertisers away from competing platforms,
something that has been sued for before. When all of
your incentives are aligned around bigger and more and growth,
you'll take just about anybody's money. In Meta's case, this
means getting advertisers who compare the COVID nineteen vaccine to
(14:40):
the Holocaust, or quack doctors with phony cancer treatments, scammers
selling counterfeit phishing equipment, scammers offering fake discounts for puzzles,
and of course, cryptocurrency cons An investigation from late last
year found that a third of advertisements on Facebook marketplace
in the UK were scams, and earlier in the year,
UK financial services authorities said it had banned more than
(15:02):
ten thousand illegal investment ads across Instagram, Facebook, YouTube and
TikTok in twenty twenty two alone. A fifteen hundred percent
increase over the past year, and as these platforms begin
to decay, things only get worse for the user. Elon
Musk's acquisition of Twitter and his obvious outright hostility towards
(15:22):
blue chip advertisers, and also his anti Semitic posts just
there's a lot of bad stuff with Elon. They've turned
Twitter into kind of the digital equivalent of Downtown Vegas.
Seemingly every post is replied to by a bot offering
nudes in bio, or pussy in bio, something in bio,
or at the moment, quite literally, just a picture of
a fully nude woman, which is pretty funny until you
(15:45):
realize that according to John Herman and New York Magazine,
these bots are afront for a series of very big,
nasty online dating scams that lose people tens of thousands
of dollars. Elon Musk choosing to check the blue check
mark from something that was given by Twitter to say
that you are the real person into a thing that
you buy for eight dollars has allowed cryptocurrency scammers, according
(16:09):
to Protos, to make millions by tricking users into connecting
their wallets to fund drain their entire thing like it's
somewhat technical, but you just click these websites and you say, yeah, sure,
i'll connect my whilet and then they take all of
your money. And it seems like they're even buying ads
on the platform to do so, using stolen credit cards
(16:29):
musks desperation for ad revenue has even led Twitter to
start pushing ads that don't actually say their ads, leading
to an advertising watchdog called check my Ads to file
a formal complaint with the FTC demanding that it investigates
Twitter and enforces its truth in advertising standards. Also, right
now on Twitter, there is something called the Creator program,
(16:49):
and if you have Twitter Blue, that's right, you have
to pay them to get paid. You can make a
little money off of advertising. When other Twitter Blue people reply.
The significance of this is right now, Twitter is posting
tons of unlabeled ads for mister Beast videos so that
Elon Musk can give money to mister Beasts, so that
(17:10):
mister Beast will repost things from YouTube, allowing Elon Musk
to pay him money. It's a very confusing thing, and
Twitter is really bad. I won't call it X. I
think X is a stupid name. It's terrible to search for.
It sucks. The whole site kind of sucks. I'm on
it until the end. It's like the Titanic. I can
see the iceberg coming, but nevertheless it's in a bad way.
(17:35):
Yet it's foolish to act as if the sorry state
of Twitter is really that different to the rest of
the web. Instagram is flooded with pornobots. It has been
for years, and what they do is they engage with
regular posts enough times through likes and replies as a
means of pretending they're real so that they can avoid
Meta's flimsy automated content moderation, and that, by the way,
(17:58):
is only quasi auto. Meta also underpays, horribly underpays. I
should add people in other countries like Kenya, they make
as little as two dollars and twenty cents an hour
to view what Wired referred to as the most hideous
content on the Internet. Because that's what's important to know.
Meta is doing something. They're stopping you from seeing literal
(18:19):
beheadings and child abuse and such, and they're doing that
by paying basically prison labor rates in other countries. This
is also something that open ai and AI companies do
with training data. It's a disgusting practice. They should all
be in a lot of trouble for this, and they
never will be because no one ever eld them accountable.
Much like every major tech platform, Meta is just half
(18:41):
fastening its approach to moderation, and they're committing human rights
violations to do so, so that they can spend the
smallest amount of money possible to stop the things it
needs to stop you seeing. They need to make sure
you don't see someone being stabbed to death on Facebook.
They don't really need to stop pornography or scams. They
should need to should be a government body that stops them,
(19:02):
but there isn't, so they don't. As you'd expect, these
standards have led to Facebook being flooded with generative AI
content spam, and a study came out of Stanford and
Georgetown that revealed that Facebook's algorithm is now boasting spam
content riddled with misinformation, and they're sending hundreds of millions
of impressions to pages that direct people to WordPress sites
(19:24):
crammed full of spammy and scammy ads. It's insane. It's
actually really crazy. When you really look into this, you
can see that the web is falling apart in front
of us. And yet the most obvious sign of this
decay is just visiting a website on your telephone. Go
to IGN dot com lot could people work at Igana
Feel bad for saying this, but they have over three
hundred million views and you go on there and you
(19:46):
immediately hit with two giant ads, one that fills the
top thirty page and auto playing videos. And this happens
on a lot of sites. ESPN also another third for this.
It's so weird. When I I went on there earlier,
I was hit with two giant acts. They took up
most of my screen, and on opening a story about
the new for that TV show, which is very good,
(20:07):
I'll give them that, it then covered the top quarter
of my screen with another or playing at It's so weird.
It's so weird when you see this happening. I feel
like more people should be talking about this. This field.
It's like if the road was just full of used condoms.
It's like if there was trash everywhere. This is the
web now anyway, Anyway, Reach PLC. They are publicly traded,
(20:31):
multimillion dollar business that dominates local journalism in the UK
and they hold basically monopolies in several regions and also
own three newspapers. Very depressing, they're notorious for this kind
of aggressive approach to monetization. Their websites have been described
as an over monetized mess and impossible to navigate with
a poor digital experience. Named as a partial contributor to
(20:53):
the declining financial fortunes of one of the more loathsome
companies in the world. If you open a local new
UK news website, especially one owned by Reach, with just
Safari on your phone, for example, you'll be met with
an endless deluge of page covering ads that appear in
the middle of articles as you're scrolling, and other ads
(21:14):
that redirect you to an external website without any warning,
or while you're on the page trying to read the
thing that you went to the website for. Even the
giants of journalism haven't resisted the temptation to fuck their
users over. CNN, one of the most influential news publications
in the world by hundreds of millions of people. They
host their own journalism and they spice in spami content
(21:37):
from something called a chumbox company. And these companies make
hundreds of millions of dollars driving clicks to everything from
just scams to straight up this information. And you'll find
them on CNN, you find them on NBC, you find
them in tons of major media outlets, and all of
them are these insane stories, like two steps to tell
(21:58):
when a slot is close to hitting the jackpot, or
the best hearing aid. It's really strange to see this
in the in between Pulitzer Prize winning journalists and like
international conflicts. These chum box companies. They're ubiquitous because they
pay well, and it makes them super attractive to cash
strap media entities because you can just plug this bollocks
(22:20):
in and you just get money, even if it makes
your products suck. And they're awful. They're super horrible. They're
ruining the web, and they keep making more money. In
twenty eighteen, the late great podcast reply All, which by
the way, was killed by the rot economy Fuck you
Spotify anyway. Reply All had an episode that centered around
(22:40):
a widower whose wife's death had been hijacked by one
of these chumbox advertisers to push content that, using stolen
family photos, implied she had been unfaithful to him. The
title of the episode and add for the worst day
of your life was fitting, and it was only until
a massively popular podcast intervene that any of these networks
ban the advert. These networks outbrain taboola, evil companies run
(23:06):
by evil people. They're harmful, They're harmful to the Internet,
They're harmful to users, and they're harmful to the news
brands that host them. If I was working for a
major news company, I'd be absolutely humiliated to see my
work put next to this nonsense, this celebrity bullshit, these
diet scams, these get rich quick schemes, Tommy Chong's fucking
(23:26):
CBD chews. I apologize swearing, but it's just so frustrating.
Are these outlets so unprofitable that they just have to
sell out like this? I refuse to believe that I
just reviews. The modern Internet was built on a social
(23:55):
contract that said the big tech gave us services for
free in exchange for some sort of nebulous concept of data,
which largely took the form of content and connections we
made between people and the things that we posted. As
a result, this social contract was both assumed and extremely
easy to enter into because all of these sites were free,
(24:15):
which meant that there was really never any attempt to
regulate the terms of it. There are terms and conditions,
but that's really it, and you what you're gonna do.
You're gonna barter with meta And there were never conditions
set for what can't be done to a user, what
can be done with the data. Look at Cambridge Analytica,
look at all of the different ways that Facebook hads
(24:37):
hurt people. None of that matters to them because it
doesn't have to. They don't care. There's nobody stopping them.
The FDC won't stop them, lawyers won't stop them. It's
very depressing when you say it out loud anyway. As
a result, these platforms were are a form of bait
(24:57):
and switch, which underpins coreytor else very good but annoying
to say in shitification theory, where platforms have built these
massive monopolies based off for in good, useful services and
then turn them into something terrible but very profitable. But
as I've noted before and shertification kind of misses one point,
these companies are not doing this out of a lack
(25:20):
of profitability or some sort of failure in their business model.
They're doing so because the Internet has become something between
a social experiment and a mining operation. They're doing it
because they can. Nobody's stopping them. And doctor Oo has
upgraded his theory to the insure to see now he
has brought in some of these things. I think I'm
just tired of people responding to the Rock economy and
(25:41):
saying in citification Corey Rock's I'm gonna have him on
the podcast Jesus. But seriously, though, it's not because they're
suddenly left hand hand. They've just kept turning the screw
because who's going to stop them? What's you're going to do?
Not use Google, not use Facebook, not use Instagram anyway,
Charlie Warsall, who I've given a lot of shit. Charlie
(26:02):
did a good thing there. He framed this well in
a recent piece in the Atlantic published in the middle
of April that described the overall techscape as a form
of hostage negotiation. Interactions with tech companies are no longer
a purchase or a two way contract, but kind of
a trade of information long after you've purchased the product itself.
Every interaction with tech now requires us to share our
(26:23):
email address or our phone number, to accept a kind
of subtle tracking. Don't worry it's anonymous, or of course,
to share your personal information that will probably be leaked.
It's try it at this point to say that human
beings themselves are the product, but it's kind of impossible
to avoid saying when you look at the state of
the Internet now. Tech companies have found every imaginable way
(26:46):
to monetize every imaginable thing we do, all based on
the idea that they're providing us with something in return,
and when you really think about it, haven't really provided
a service at all. Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Google. They're platforms
that only have as much utility as the content they host,
which is created by billions of mostly unsupported and unpaid users.
(27:08):
This kind of shitty trade off was meant to be
something that was rewarded, with these platforms creating and hosting
this content in a way that was easier to find
and use and to help either surface to a wider
audience or quickly get it to people we cared about,
all while making sure the conditions we created it under
and posted it under were interesting and safe, something that
(27:29):
I think we can all agree is no longer the
case now. The state of the Internet's now far simpler.
The cost of using free platforms is a constant war,
a war with the incentives and intentions of the platforms themselves.
We're constantly negotiating with Instagram or Facebook to see content
from people that we chose to follow. Because these platforms
(27:50):
are no longer built to show us things that we
want to see. We no longer search Google, but barter
with the seedy little search box to try and coax
out result that isn't either search engine optimized half answer,
or an attempt to trick us into clicking an ad.
Twitter in its prime succeeded by connecting real people to
real things at a time when the Internet actively manufactures
(28:10):
or experience in interactions with others. Now, Twitter is mostly
ads and pornobots. Great stuff, but the core problem lies
in the fact that these platforms don't really create anything,
and their only value exists in making an internet of
billions of people small enough to comprehend. Like seemingly every
(28:31):
goddamn problem with capitalism, the Internet has become dominated by
forces that don't contribute to the product that actually enriches them,
and as a result, they have no concept or interest
in quality. They only care about more, and this makes
them extremely poor. Arbiters of what good looks like. Inevitably,
(28:51):
this leads to products that suck as they become more
and more profitable, because the machine they've built is a
profit excavator dressed up as a god service. I know,
I hate the whole we're the product thing. I've always
thought it was very cheesy, but we are literally the product.
We are the content creator that makes Google money while
(29:12):
also the thing that makes Google money by search and Google,
it's very annoying. Look. By allowing and encouraging search engine optimization,
Google has handed matches to fucking arsonists and pointed them
on the most flammable parts of the Internet. The existence
of SEO is inevitable. People are going to try and
game any system. But Google should never have encouraged these people.
(29:33):
They should have terrified them. They should have set clear
standards about what to do and what not to do,
and heavily punished those who failed to comply. Except doing
so would mean less content on Google, because there'd be
less articles that say things like what time is the
Super Bowl or best televisions to buy. Google actually would
fully have the ability to make most of these problems
(29:55):
go away. They should treat SEO people like scam artists,
and they should run them out of town with pitchforks. Instead,
they pat him on the ass and they say, good job, buddy.
I'd argue that the state of search makes Google and
by extension, executives like Sundhar Peshaian Google Search lead Prabhakar Ragavan,
some of the greatest villains in business history. Well, one
(30:18):
can't forget about the damage done by Meta and Mark
Zuckerberg's failure, outright failure to maintain any kind of quality
standards on Instagram and Facebook. Allowing Google Search to decay
so severely for any reason, let alone one that involves profits,
is actively damaging to society and was an entirely intentional
act perpetrated by people like Ragavan, the former head of
(30:40):
Google's Ads division, who took over search not long after
his predecessor was burdened by the bullshit demands of the
ads department, led by Ragavan himself. And I'm going to
get into that in episode too, don't you worry. It's
not enough though, for me to just say how bad
the web has got. It's not enough. The web is
too bad right now for me to just sit here
(31:03):
and say, oh it sucks. It's so bad. You all
know that. I hope I've helped you find out a
little bit more about it. But this phenomenon, it didn't
come out of nowhere, and it has a cause, and
that cause is the rise of managers and the managerial
class in tech. These assholes have largely supplanted the voices
of actual technologists, coders, engineers, people who work in software
(31:25):
and hardware, actual innovators, and replace them with this kind
of zero sum McKinsey s loser, and all they care
about is profit. All they care about is growth, sometimes
growth that destroys profit, and they're actively hostile to workers
and consumers and the actual products they're making. In the
(31:45):
next two episodes, we're going to take a closer look
at these managers and how they're destroying innovation. And we're
going to start with the tale of Prabakar Ragavan, a
man who has spent his entire life failing up overseeing
Yahoo during its period of terminal client jumping ship to
Google in twenty twelve. In twenty nineteen, Ragavan used this
political influence to push out the head of Search, a
(32:07):
guy called Ben Gomes. A hero, a hero who fought
to protect Search from a man trying to turn it
into a growth machine even when it was still very profitable.
That's what's really crazy. While far from our household name,
Ragavan is emblematic of every single thing I've written and
podcasted about. He personifies this horrifying decline and the short
(32:30):
term thinking that's destroying the products we use every day.
He and people like him are destroying companies that we
used to respect. And as I'll explain, Ragavan's influence times
exactly with the deterioration of Google Search as a product.
After that, we're going to look at the managerial class
more broadly and how some people, such as Instagram's Adamisari
(32:53):
and of course open Ai CEO Sam Altman, have been
able to disguise their true intent and ineptitude through the
clothing of innovation disruption. It's a facade, one that doesn't
withstand even the slightest bit of scrutiny, and I can't
wait to tell you all about it. Thank you for
(33:19):
listening to Better Offline. The editor and composer of the
Better Offline theme song is Matasowski. You can check out
more of his music and audio projects at Matasowski dot
com M A T T O S O W s
KI dot com. You can email me at easy at
better offline dot com or check out better offline dot
com to find my newsletter and more links to this podcast.
(33:40):
Thank you so much for listening. Better Offline is a
production of cool Zone Media. For more from cool Zone Media,
visit our website cool Zonemedia dot com, or check us
out on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you
get your podcasts.
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