Better Offline - How Managers Are Breaking The Internet

Episode Date: April 24, 2024

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.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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Another podcast from some SNL late-night comedy guy, not quite. Unhumor me with Robert Smygel and friends. Me and hilarious guests from Bob Odenkirk to David Letterman help make you. you funnier. This week, my guest, SNL's Mikey Day and head writer, Streeter Seidel, help an a cappella band with their between songs banter. Where does your group perform? We do some retirement homes. Those people are starving for banter. Listen to humor me with Robert Smigel and friends on the I-Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Your 20s can be so exciting, but they can also be really overwhelming, confusing, and honestly, just kind of lonely.

May is Mental Health Awareness Month and the psychology of your 20s is breaking down the science behind the biggest roadblocks we face. I was six years into my career, the 80-hour weeks and just the first one in, the last one out, and I ended up burning out. There was a large chunk of my 20s that I was just so

wanting to be out of that phase out of my skin and I just really regret not living in the present more. You don't need to have everything figured out right now. You just need to understand yourself a little bit better. Listen to the psychology of your 20s on the IHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. AllZone Media. Hello and welcome to Better Offline.

I'm Ed Zittron. This episode is the first of a three-part series about how the tech industry has been snatched 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. These 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 a motion trying to dismiss an FTC anti-monopoly lawsuit

that Instagram made an astonishing $32.4 billion in advertising revenue in 2021. That figure becomes even more shocking when you consider Google's YouTube only made $28.8 billion during the same period. I'd argue YouTube is significantly more useful. for. Anyway, Bloomberg reports that Instagram made almost 30% of META's entire revenue in the early part of 2022. 92. 96% of META's $40.1 billion, fourth quarter, 2023 revenue came from advertising, and it's made over $100 billion a year since 2021, a trend that's likely to continue based on the fact that the only thing these platforms care about is juicing as much revenue

from these apps. Google made $86.3 billion in the fourth quarter of 2020, with $48 billion of that coming from Google Search and its related advertising, up 13% from the previous quarter. According to Pew Research, in America, 83% of adults use YouTube, 68% of them use Facebook and 47% of them use Instagram. Each platform boasts over 2 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 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 Bluey, I have not watch Bluie. This was then followed by a post from a friend. Followed by another ad, followed by two posts from 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, followed by a person I followed posting something, and then another suggested piece of content. The first ad when I clicked my stories are 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 Evony that make millions of dollars offer these horrifying, annoying

micro-transaction heavy games. When I went to YouTube, my first result was for an 11-mobile, 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 fault for trying to show them to me. In fact, when I went around 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 what this happened. I can't read. I can only speak and read 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, 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 plain text list. The state of Google's very worrying. A year-long study from Leipzig University,

published last year and reported on by Jason Cogler of 404 Media, found that the quality of Google's search results has decayed at a remarkable rate. The incentives of content creators to search engine optimize their content based on standards published by 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 work,

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 you're unfamiliar with affiliate marketing, it's when outlets run pieces about something, say, top 10 speakers or top 10 laptops. And they have a bunch of links to like Amazon, or Walmart, or Best Buy, and they get a little bit of cash from the platform whenever someone clicks that and buys something, doesn't even have to be the thing that they were originally clicking on. This revenue model incentivizes sites to write lots of best-of articles that exist entirely to make you click things to make them 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 too. There are decent people doing this. 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 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 they're a people.

at Google who'll kind of nudge you in the right direction. They never really give full directions, but they're okay with search engine optimization. You think they wouldn't be. You'd think they'd want to fight for like standards and quality, but no, they actively help these people game 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 answers. algorithms to fight spam as only 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 2024, Google announced that it was making changes to its algorithm that would reduce spam and AI generated content by 40%, and very specifically said it would raise human-authored content 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 TechGate and Daily Good Morning Kashmir, wholesale steel articles and places like TechCrunch and Coin Telegraph. And at times, these stolen articles will rank above or in place 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 liaison for Google about this, and TechGate has now disappeared as of doing this. Daily Good Morning Kashmir has them. And indeed, there are multiple journalists I know that have said that 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, yeah, I know what to do about it. Danny's a good bloke. Danny used to run Search Engineland, I believe. And yet he's just part of the machine now, and it sucks. Danny's a bloke. I want to like Danny. But mate, Danny, if you're going to be the search liaison, it's time 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 a bloody excuse. Google, a company worth around $2 trillion is either unable or unwilling to fix the problem. But I think the truth might be 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 going to hear that name a lot in the next episode. 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 you into doing something or seeing something that's profitable for them. And yes, I realize 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. 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 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 half a decade destroying. And they've turned Instagram 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 the market's 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 choice. changes to search that made advertisements and sponsored 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 realize 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 this, emails from the antitrust lawsuit between them and the

Department of Justice. Episode 2. 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 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. I'm going to name the bastards responsible. Another podcast from some SNL late-night comedy guy, not quite. Unhumor me with Robert Smygel and friends. Me and hilarious guests from Jim Gaffigan to Bob Odenkirk to David Letterman, help make you funnier. This week, my guest, SNL's Mikey Day and head writer Streeter Seidel. help an a cappella band with their between songs banter. There's that worst singer in the group?

The worst? Yeah. Me. Is there anything to the idea that because you're from Harvard, you only got in because your parents made a huge donation. The group. The yard birds, right? That's the name.

The Harvard yard, but they're open to change. Do you have a name suggestion? We're open. Since you guys are middle aged. One erection. Listen to humor me with Robert Smigel and friends on the IHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. Human be, I need some jokes to make me seem funny.

Run a business and not thinking about podcasting, think again. More Americans listen to podcasts than ads supported streaming music from Spotify and Pandora. And as the number one podcaster, IHearts twice as large as the next two combined. So whatever your customers listen to, they'll hear your message. Plus, only IHeart can extend your message to audiences across broadcast. Radio. Think podcasting can help your business. Think IHeart. Streaming, radio, and podcasting. Call 844-844-I-Hart to get started. That's 844-844-I-Hart. Agency, the ability to know that we're the experts in our own body. On the podcast, cultivating her space, Dr. Dom and Terry Lomax create a space

where black women can show up fully and be heard. I wholeheartedly think, you know, you hit 30. You shouldn't have to share one with anybody. Mm-hmm. from navigating friendships and healing, to setting boundaries and prioritizing your mental health. These are real honest conversations. We don't always get to have out loud. Totally unreasonable with different parts of life, right? Like, oh, have all three meals and make sure you're mindful during all of them?

Absolutely not. During one meal, I'm standing. I'm standing and handing my children food. Because healing, empowerment, and resilience aren't just ideas, their practices. And this mental health awareness month, there's no better time to pour back into yourself. Listen to cultivating her space on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. Underpinning these profitable torture machines, it's an online advertisement industry built off the back of fucking advertisers and users alike. In the mid-2010s, Facebook mistakenly 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 writing team and shifting to short-form video in July 2017. Vocative did the same. The following month, Vice Media cut roughly 60 editorial roles

and expanded its video production capabilities in response to this so-called growth. Mike, a much smaller company than MTV News or Vice Media, but quite beloved at the time, slash 10 roles and shifted the rest of its output to video, 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 rolls were of course cut or vastly reduced when it was obvious that there really wasn't any engagement on these things. I have a whole episode on this. Please go back and listen to him. Meta is also currently the subject of a class action suit led by Metroplex Communications,

which claim that meta's inflated metrics lured 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-19 vaccine to the Holocaust or quack doctors with phony cancer treatments. Scammers selling counterfeit fishing 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 10,000 illegal investment ads across Instagram, Facebook, YouTube and TikTok in 2022 alone. a 1500% 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 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, or something in bio, or at the moment, quite literally just a picture of a fully nude woman, which is pretty funny until you realize that, according to John Herman at New York Magazine, these bots are a front for a series of very big, nasty online dating scams that lose people tens of thousands of dollars. Elon Musk choosing to change the blue checkmark from something that was given by Twitter to say that you were the real person into a thing that you buy for $8, has allowed cryptocurrency scammers, according 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 wallet, 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. Musk's desperation for ad revenue has even led Twitter to start pushing ads that don't actually say their ads, leading to an ad. 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, 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 unlabel ads for Mr. Beast videos so that Elon Musk can give money to Mr. Beast so that Mr. Beast will repost things from YouTube, allowing Elon Musk to pay him money. It's a very confusing thing. And Twitter's 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. 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 porno bots. 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, is only quasi-automated. Mehta also underpays, horribly underpays, I should add.

people in other countries like Kenya, they make as little as $2.20 an hour to view what Wyatt 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 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. should all be in a lot of trouble for this, and they never will be because no one ever holds them accountable. Much like every major tech platform, Meta is just half-assing 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. There should be a government body that stops them, 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 boosting spam content riddled with misinformation,

and they're sending hundreds of millions of impressions to pages that direct people to WordPress sites 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.com. A lot of good people work at IGN. I feel bad for saying this, but they have over 300 million views. And you go on there and you're immediately hit with two giant ads, one that fills the top 30 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 went on there earlier, I was hit with two giant ads. It took up most of my screen. And on opening a story about the new Fallout TV show, which is very good, I'll give them that. It then covered the top quarter of my screen with another order playing out.

It's so weird. It's so weird when you see this happening. I feel like more people should be talking about this. This feel, 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 were publicly traded multi-million dollar bill. business that dominates local journalism in the UK, and they hold basically monopolies in several regions and also own three newspapers. It's 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 the declining financial fortunes of one of the more loathsome companies in the world. If you open a local NewK 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 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, read by hundreds of millions of people. They host their own journalism, and they splice in spammy content 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 disinformation. 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 when a slot is close to hitting the jackpot or the best hearing aid. It's really strange to see this in between Pulitzer Prize winning journalists and, like, international conflicts. These chumbox 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 in and you just get money, even if it makes your product suck. And they're awful. They're super horrible.

They're ruining the web, and they keep making more money. In 2018, the late great podcast, Reply All, which, by the way, was killed by the rock economy. Fuck you, Spotify. Anyway, Reply All had an episode that centered around 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, an ad for the worst day of your life, was fitting.

and it was only until a massively popular podcast intervened that any of these networks banned the advert. These networks, outbrained tabula, evil companies run 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 CBD choose. I apologize. I'm 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, I just refuse. Another podcast from some SNL late-night comedy guy, not quite. Unhumor me with Robert Smygel and friends.

Me and hilarious guests from Jim Gaffigan to Bob Odenkirk to David Letterman help make you funny This week, my guest, SNL's Mikey Day and headwriter, Streeter Seidel, help an acapella band with their between songs banter. There's the worst singer in the group? The worst? Yeah.

Me. Is there anything to the idea that because you're from Harvard, you only got in because your parents made a huge donation. The group. The yard birds, right? That's the name. The Harvard Yard. They're open.

Do you have a name suggestion? We're open. Since you guys are middle aged. One erection Listen to humor me with Robert Smygel and friends On the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. Humor me I need some jokes to make me seem funny

Run a business and not thinking about podcasting, think again. More Americans listen to podcasts than ads supported streaming music from Spotify and Pandora. And as the number one podcaster, I hearts twice as large as the next two combined. So whatever your customers listen to, they'll hear your message. Plus, only IHeart can extend your message to audiences across broadcast radio. Think podcasting can help your business. Think IHeart.

Streaming, radio, and podcasting. Call 844-844-I-Hart to get started. That's 844-844-I-Hart. Agency, the ability to know that we're the experts in our own body. On the podcast, cultivating her space, Dr. Dom and Terry Lomax create a space where black women can show up fully and be heard. I wholeheartedly think, you know, you hit 30. You shouldn't have to share one with anybody.

Mm-hmm. From navigating friendships and healing to setting boundaries and prioritizing your mental health. These are real, honest conversations. We don't always get to have out loud. Totally unreasonable with different parts of life, right? Like, oh, have all three meals and make sure you're mindful during all of them? Absolutely not.

During one meal, I'm standing. I'm standing and handing my chest. I'm standing and handing my children food. Because healing, empowerment, and resilience aren't just ideas. They're practices. And this Mental Health Awareness Month, there's no better time to pour back into yourself. Listen to cultivating her space on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. The modern internet was built on a social contract that said the big tech gave her 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, 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 what you're going to do, you're going to barter with meta. And there were never conditions set for what can't be done to a user. what can be done with data. Look at Cambridge Analytica.

Look at all of the different ways that Facebook ads hurt people. None of that matters to them, because it doesn't have to. They don't care. There's nobody stopping them. The FTC 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 and are a form of bait-and-switch, which underpins Corey Dr. Rowe's very good. good but annoying to say in shittification theory, where platforms have built these massive monopolies based offering good, useful services, and then turn them into something terrible but very profitable. But as I've noted before, and shittification kind of misses one point. These companies are not doing this out of a lack 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 Dr. Rau has upgraded his theory to the inshittercy now and he has brought in some of these things. I think I'm just tired of people responding to the raw economy and saying in shittification, Cory Rocks. I'm going to have them on the podcast, Jesus. But seriously, though, it's not because they're suddenly left hat in hand. They've just kept turning the screw because who's going to stop them? What are you going to do? Not use Google, not use Facebook, not use Instagram.

Anyway, Charlie Worsall, who I've given a lot of shit, Charlie 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 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 trite 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 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, they 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. 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, or while making sure the conditions we created it under and posted it under were interesting and safe, something that I think we can all agree is no longer the case. The state of the internet is 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 are no longer built to show us things that we want to see. We no longer search Google but barter with this seedy little. search box to try and coax out a result that isn't either a 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 our experience

and interactions with others. Now Twitter is mostly ads and porno bots. 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 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, this leads to products that suck as they become more and more people. profitable because the machine they've built is a profit excavator dressed up as a goddamn 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 also the thing that makes Google money by searching Google is 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. 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 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 Sundar Peshayan, Google search lead, Prabhakar Ragavan, some of the greatest villains in business history. While one 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 Raghavan, the former head of 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 Raghavann himself. And I'm going to get into that in episode two, 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 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 and hardware, actual innovators, and replace them with this kind of zero-sum, McKinsey-esque 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 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 Prabhakar Raghavan, a man who has spent his entire life failing up, overseeing Yahoo during its period of terminal decline, jumping ship to Google in 2012. In 2019, Raghavan used his political influence to push out the head of search, a 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 a household name, Ragavan is emblematic of every single thing I've written and podcasted about. He personifies this horrifying decline and the short-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, Ragavans' influence times exactly with the deterioration of Google search as a product. After that, we're going to look at the manager. Algerial class more broadly and how some people, such as Instagram's Adam Messeri and, of course, Open AI CEO Sam Altman, have been able to disguise their true intent and ineptitude through the clothing of innovation and 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 listening to Better Offline. The editor and composer of the Better Offline theme song is Mattosowski. You can check out more of his music and audio projects at Mattosowski.com. M-A-T-T-O-S-K-I-com. You can email me at easy at betteroffline.com or check out betteroffline.com to find my newsletter and more links to this podcast. Thank you so much for listening. Better Offline is a production of CoolZone Media.

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