I'm on tour with my new novel The Bezzle! Catch me TONIGHT in SALT LAKE CITY (Feb 21, Weller Book Works) and TOMORROW in SAN DIEGO (Feb 22, Mysterious Galaxy). After that, it's LA, Seattle, Portland, Phoenix and more!
A funny thing happened on the way to the enshittocene: Google – which astonished the world when it reinvented search, blowing Altavista and Yahoo out of the water with a search tool that seemed magic – suddenly turned into a pile of shit.
Google's search results are terrible. The top of the page is dominated by spam, scams, and ads. A surprising number of those ads are scams. Sometimes, these are high-stakes scams played out by well-resourced adversaries who stand to make a fortune by tricking Google:
But often these scams are perpetrated by petty grifters who are making a couple bucks at this. These aren't hyper-resourced, sophisticated attackers. They're the SEO equivalent of script kiddies, and they're running circles around Google:
Google search is empirically worsening. The SEO industry spends every hour that god sends trying to figure out how to sleaze their way to the top of the search results, and even if Google defeats 99% of these attempts, the 1% that squeak through end up dominating the results page for any consequential query:
Google insists that this isn't true, and if it is true, it's not their fault because the bad guys out there are so numerous, dedicated and inventive that Google can't help but be overwhelmed by them:
It wasn't supposed to be this way. Google has long maintained that its scale is the only thing that keeps us safe from the scammers and spammers who would otherwise overwhelm any lesser-resourced defender. That's why it was so imperative that they pursue such aggressive growth, buying up hundreds of companies and integrating their products with search so that every mobile device, every ad, every video, every website, had one of Google's tendrils in it.
This is the argument that Google's defenders have put forward in their messaging on the long-overdue antitrust case against Google, where we learned that Google is spending $26b/year to make sure you never try another search engine:
Google, we were told, had achieved such intense scale that the normal laws of commercial and technological physics no longer applied. Take security: it's an iron law that "there is no security in obscurity." A system that is only secure when its adversaries don't understand how it works is not a secure system. As Bruce Schneier says, "anyone can design a security system that they themselves can't break. That doesn't mean it works – just that it works for people stupider than them."
And yet, Google operates one of the world's most consequential security system – The Algorithm (TM) – in total secrecy. We're not allowed to know how Google's ranking system works, what its criteria are, or even when it changes: "If we told you that, the spammers would win."
Well, they kept it a secret, and the spammers won anyway.
A viral post by Housefresh – who review air purifiers – describes how Google's algorithmic failures, which send the worst sites to the top of the heap, have made it impossible for high-quality review sites to compete:
https://housefresh.com/david-vs-digital-goliaths/
You've doubtless encountered these bad review sites. Search for "Best ______ 2024" and the results are a series of near-identical lists, strewn with Amazon affiliate links. Google has endlessly tinkered with its guidelines and algorithmic weights for review sites, and none of it has made a difference. For example, when Google instituted a policy that reviewers should "discuss the benefits and drawbacks of something, based on your own original research," sites that had previously regurgitated the same lists of the same top ten Amazon bestsellers "peppered their pages with references to a ‘rigorous testing process,’ their ‘lab team,’ subject matter experts ‘they collaborated with,’ and complicated methodologies that seem impressive at a cursory look."
But these grandiose claims – like the 67 air purifiers supposedly tested in Better Homes and Gardens's Des Moines lab – result in zero in-depth reviews and no published data. Moreover, these claims to rigorous testing materialized within a few days of Google changing its search ranking and said that high rankings would be reserved for sites that did testing.
Most damning of all is how the Better Homes and Gardens top air purifiers perform in comparison to the – extensively documented – tests performed by Housefresh: "plagued by high-priced and underperforming units, Amazon bestsellers with dubious origins (that also underperform), and even subpar devices from companies that market their products with phrases like ‘the Tesla of air purifiers.’"
One of the top ranked items on BH&G comes from Molekule, a company that filed for bankruptcy after being sued for false advertising. The model BH&G chose was ranked "the worst air purifier tested" by Wirecutter and "not living up to the hype" by Consumer Reports. Either BH&G's rigorous testing process is a fiction that they infused their site with in response to a Google policy change, or BH&G absolutely sucks at rigorous testing.
BH&G's competitors commit the same sins – literally, the exact same sins. Real Simple's reviews list the same photographer and the photos seem to have been taken in the same place. They also list the same person as their "expert." Real Simple has the same corporate parent as BH&G: Dotdash Meredith. As Housefresh shows, there's a lot of Dotdash Meredith review photos that seem to have been taken in the same place, by the same person.
But the competitors of these magazines are no better. Buzzfeed lists 22 air purifiers, including that crapgadget from Molekule. Their "methodology" is to include screenshots of Amazon reviews.
A lot of the top ranked sites for air purifiers are once-great magazines that have been bought and enshittified by private equity giants, like Popular Science, which began as a magazine in 1872 and became a shambling zombie in 2023, after its PE owners North Equity LLC decided its googlejuice was worth more than its integrity and turned it into a metastatic chumbox of shitty affiliate-link SEO-bait. As Housefresh points out, the marketing team that runs PopSci makes a lot of hay out of the 150 years of trust that went into the magazine, but the actual reviews are thin anaecdotes, unbacked by even the pretense of empiricism (oh, and they loooove Molekule).
Some of the biggest, most powerful, most trusted publications in the world have a side-hustle in quietly producing SEO-friendly "10 Best ___________ of 2024" lists: Rolling Stone, Forbes, US News and Report, CNN, New York Magazine, CNN, CNET, Tom's Guide, and more.
Google literally has one job: to detect this kind of thing and crush it. The deal we made with Google was, "You monopolize search and use your monopoly rents to ensure that we never, ever try another search engine. In return, you will somehow distinguish between low-effort, useless nonsense and good information. You promised us that if you got to be the unelected, permanent overlord of all information access, you would 'organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful.'"
They broke the deal.
Companies like CNET used to do real, rigorous product reviews. As Housefresh points out, CNET once bought an entire smart home and used it to test products. Then Red Ventures bought CNET and bet that they could sell the house, switch to vibes-based reviewing, and that Google wouldn't even notice. They were right.
Google downranks sites that spend money and time on reviews like Housefresh and GearLab, and crams botshittened content mills like BH&G into our eyeballs instead.
In 1558, Thomas Gresham coined (ahem) Gresham's Law: "Bad money drives out good." When counterfeit money circulates in the economy, anyone who gets a dodgy coin spends it as quickly as they can, because the longer you hold it, the greater the likelihood that someone will detect the fraud and the coin will become worthless. Run this system long enough and all the money in circulation is funny money.
An internet run by Google has its own Gresham's Law: bad sites drive out good. It's not just that BH&G can "test" products at a fraction of the cost of Housefresh – through the simple expedient of doing inadequate tests or no tests at all – so they can put a lot more content up that Housefresh. But that alone wouldn't let them drive Housefresh off the front page of Google's search results. For that, BH&G has to mobilize some of their savings from the no test/bad test lab to do real rigorous science: science in defeating Google's security-through-obscurity system, which lets them command the front page despite publishing worse-than-useless nonsense.
Google has lost the spam wars. In response to the plague of botshit clogging Google search results, the company has invested in…making more botshit:
Last year, Google did a $70b stock buyback. They also laid off 12,000 staffers (whose salaries could have been funded for 27 years by that stock buyback). They just laid off thousands more employees.
That wasn't the deal. The deal was that Google would get a monopoly, and they would spend their monopoly rents to be so good that you could just click "I'm feeling lucky" and be teleported to the very best response to your query. A company that can't figure out the difference between a scam like Better Homes and Gardens and a rigorous review site like Housefresh should be pouring every spare dime it brings in into fixing this problem. Not buying default search status on every platform so that we never try another search engine: they should be fixing their shit.
When Google admits that it's losing the war to these kack-handed spam-farmers, that's frustrating. When they light $26b/year on fire making sure you don't ever get to try anything else, that's very frustrating. When they vaporize seventy billion dollars on financial engineering and shoot one in ten engineers, that's outrageous.
Google's scale has transcended the laws of business physics: they can sell an ever-degrading product and command an ever-greater share of our economy, even as their incompetence dooms any decent, honest venture to obscurity while providing fertile ground – and endless temptation – for scammers.
If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
i honestly don't really understand why "some people prefer watching gameplay online rather than playing games themselves" is treated as such a taboo when being a spectator is considered a pretty mundane way to engage with most sports, game shows, reality tv or even just like. chess.
like the usual arguments are "not everyone can afford video games or have the software to pirate" or "you can be a fan of a game's story, but not it's gameplay" but also some people just have more fun watching other people be really good at starcraft or speedrun super mario 64, i don't think that's a particularly out of the box way to engage with the medium.
Had someone reference COVID as if it was some past event and not an ongoing public health crisis today and I'm feeling very evil about it. "Oh yeah during COVID it was-" WAS? WAS? You're in my house in a mask because you pose an active threat to my health. What do you mean "was". 😭
It’s sooooo interesting that they keep studying the topic rigorously and writing piece after piece on what the cause could be but they never want to address the fact that America is not a good place to have a child. Even though the birth rate is falling across the board, they have to find some reason to make it a problem of the individual, a matter of selfishness or distraction instead of a greater societal struggle.
Currently trying to apply for disability allowance and one question was ‘do you struggle with showering’ and I was getting a friend to help me and I said to them ‘no cause I sit down while doing my hair and I always shower at night so I can lie down after so it doesn’t affect me too much’ and they said ‘but if you showered during the day?’ and I said ‘oh. Yeah I wouldn’t be able to function for 3+ hours.’
it’s just so funny to realise what things are so engrained in my day that I don’t even know they’re not normal, like of course I can’t shower during the day, that’s fine?
god 50 years ago you really could go see a trashy b-movie and it still had gorgeous cinematography, lighting and set design, fun costumes and makeup, and now a hollywood production could have 80 million dollars thrown at it only for it to look like a drawn-out tv commercial for laundry detergent
no-dopamine baddies approaching every single list of tasks like "which of these things will cause the most amount of personal suffering to me if left undone"
hey this is really insightful. do you have any advice about identifying the linchpin task? i mean obviously "think about it really hard" might be all there is to it. basically i think this concept is good and would welcome more commentary from you, if you have more to add
the trouble is that Thinking (or at least applying the Talking Brain to the task) is counterproductive here, because that's the voice going "we need to clean the kitchen, why aren't we cleaning the kitchen??" and in these circumstances, giving that sector of the mind more oversight won't help.
it is necessary instead to sit down and kinda try and quiet that voice, and then start with considering my physical needs, kinda mentally run through the maslow's pyramid from bottom to top as if I'm dealing with a little kid throwing a tantrum. like, did we sleep last night? have we had lunch? am I lonely? should I call my aunt? do I want to finish the book I've been reading? do I want to boil chicken bones today? what's bothering me? I'll then try out a couple of things that seem likely and while they may not be The Thing it's useful to build momentum anyways.
but like, if I give it space, the answer will float upwards into view and it's usually something I've been putting off for a long-ass time.
and it'll sound So Stupid to the Talking Mind, who has important tasks that it's trying to get done, but we're going to tell that voice that the kitchen will wait while we take down the Christmas tree, fold the laundry that's been in the basket for a week, sketch the idea, call my aunt, whatever it is, and inevitably the Linchpin Task will take about half an hour, and once it's done I can feel the weight lifted off my shoulders.
Linchpin Tasks are sometimes that it's time to deal with The Emotions At The Bottom Of The Pile, which is when a pile of stuff builds up to cover whatever is at the bottom being emotionally fraught. (letters, the shirt I wore the day my grandpa died, y'know, The Emotions)
I've gotten better at identifying when those piles are starting to accrete and dealing with them before they get bad, but like, you gotta be able to identify the pile of stuff your eyeballs keep slipping off because it feels too emotionally difficult to deal with right now, and like, learning to ignore the part of the mind that wants to assign task priority levels is a counter-intuitive way to get things done.
I hope this makes sense. basically, when it comes to doing stuff, do the thing that's most emotionally fraught first, especially if you can come up with a bunch of excuses to not do it.
image description: tags reading #I tend to go for "which of these tasks is the secret task my subconscious has decided is the linchpin of my productivity" #sometimes that task is not something that's actually urgent in a normal sense but if I don't do it first I will put myself in waiting mode #and like I don't want to be waiting on myself to do a thing that I'm specifically not doing because it's not important
What is up with lefty types pushing to learn practical skills (sewing/gardening/etc whatever) as like "you'll need to know this after The Revolution:tm:" and not, like, "this is a useful skill to help yourself & others in your communities Right Now". You all sound like doomsday preppers and it's weirding me out. We don't have to prep for communist rapture maybe thee revolution starts with helping your neighbors
For those who don't know, this piece is titled 'Unfinished Painting', by Keith Haring. He painted it about a year before his death of AIDs. I believe he actually finished other pieces between this one and his death. He left the majority of the canvas blank to represent his life and art career cut short due to HIV/AIDs. This was a deliberate choice and commentary about all that we lose (both personally and culturally) by ignoring the AIDs crisis at the time (1989). He was devastated he didn't have time to make more art. 'Finishing' Unfinished Painting is straight up spitting on Haring's grave and shows no understanding to the meaning behind the art. The AI interpretation doesn't even follow his extremely recognizable shape language and symbols. This is why people are angry about AI art. All commerce images and no meaning or humanity
Satire which is indistinguishable from that which it intends to satirize is shitty satire.
If the "ragebait" post is indeed intentional ragebait and not just another instance of AI dipshittery, it's not "masterful," it's just... shitty. In order to be understood as satirizing completionist slop, it has to be able to be distinguished from it.
The original ‘We’ve invented the Torment Nexus from the famous novel Don’t Invent the Torment Nexus’ joke wasn’t punctuated by the poster actually inventing the Torment Nexus, the joke ended on the obviously satirical punchline.
In this case, it doesn’t matter if the original poster did or didn’t understand how outrageously fucking disrespectful it would be to ‘finish’ Unfinished Painting with AI, because regardless of their knowledge, and to all appearances, they have literally done so.
You can’t claim to be satirizing cannabalism while munching on somebody’s severed calf. If they wanted to make the joke, it should have stopped at ‘With the power of AI, we can even complete works such as Unfinished Painting by Keith Harring!’
Even that would likely be an irresponsible joke to make towards general audience due to the fact that most AI bros, upon reading it, wouldn’t take a second to do some research and figure out why trying to complete the work with AI is worthy of mockery, they’d just respond with ‘@Grok generate a completed version of Unfinished Painting by Keith Harring’ or some shit.
Also, I’m damn near sure that the post with the ‘finished’ painting is AI anyways, so any interpretation as satire falls dramatically flat regardless.
So funny story actually. One of my friends was hooking up with this girl, they were friends with benefits. She needed a date for some work party so he agreed to go with her. Turns out her dad owns like 3 dental practices and she worked as the business manager for one of them.
Anyway my friend had some not so nice teeth and during dinner the father of his fwb was like “you work where you work, you sleep with him and his teeth look like that? Get him an appointment.”and then bounced. So his fwb made him an appointment at the practice she managed and my friend ended up needing like 3k worth of dental work and his friend with benefits just gave it to him for free.
So that is the story of how my friend not only got sex, but dental out of the friends with benefits deal.
[ID: Six screencaps from Taskmaster. Kumail Nanjiani says, "Sharks predate trees, that is true. By, like, hundreds of years." Alex Horne makes a tiny pinching gesture with his finger and thumb, saying, "It's 150. It was very close at the beginning. 150 years." Surprised, Kumail says, "Is it really 150?" Alex replies impatiently, "No! It's... It's millions. Millions and millions." End ID.]
Also there's a 95% chance that celebratory month already exists. Every single time someone says "but what about (x), don't they get a month?" while complaining about Pride, that month already exists.
Military month? May and November.
National family month? October (even has an act of congress from 2003) and unofficially the 5 weeks period between mothers and fathers day.
National Mens month? It's also June! That's going on right now! Stop yelling about Pride on X The Every Thing App(tm) and go organize your parade!
Make stuff or play stuff? @pseudonymtumbler - Tumblr Blog | Tumgag
