Front Burner - The internet sucks now, and it happened on purpose

Episode Date: May 19, 2025

It's not you — the internet really does suck. Novelist, blogger and noted internet commentator Cory Doctorow explains what happened to the internet and why you're tormented by ads, bots, algorithms, AI slop and so many pop-ups. Spoiler alert: it wasn't an accident.In Understood: Who Broke the Internet, Doctorow gets into the decisions made by powerful people that got us here, and most importantly, how we fix it. More episodes of Who Broke the Internet are available at: https://link.mgln.ai/DkvHgc

There are two kinds of people in the world. Backward thinkers and forward thinkers. Forward thinkers have plans 15 minutes from now and 15 years from now. They're not just one step ahead, they're 1,000 steps ahead. And when you're a forward thinker, you need a platform that thinks like you do. Workday's AI illuminates decision-making and reimagines how you manage your people and money for long-term success. Workday, moving business forever forward. This is a CBC Podcast. Hey everyone, it's Jamie. You are probably familiar with this routine by now. On holiday

Mondays, we bring you the first episode of a podcast made by some of our amazing colleagues here at the CBC. Today is no different. It's the first episode of Who Broke the Internet? hosted by Cory Doctorow. You may have heard Cory as a guest on Frontburner in the past. He's a super smart and prescient tech and science fiction writer. This series is fantastic.

It looks at how the internet got so bad, why the quality of Google search fell off a cliff, why platforms like Amazon start off good for users and make a real heel turn. And it looks at this whole phenomenon of enshitification, a term Cory coined, as a set of decisions made by real people with real consequences. The first episode is about how Google decided to make search worse. If you like it, click the link in the episode description and you'll find episode 2 waiting for you. And make sure to follow the Understood feed.

There are a whole bunch of great seasons in the back catalogue, the FDX crypto collapse, the rise of Pornhub, a deep dive into India's Narendra Modi, and more. Okay, once more, follow Understood, enjoy Who Broke the Internet, and we will be back with a fresh episode tomorrow. It's February 5th, 2019, and at the Googleplex, that's Google's Silicon Valley headquarters, a man named Ben Gomes is about to get some bad news. He received emails saying, hey, look, we've got a Code Yellow. Code Yellow is a crisis of moderate severity, and they generally mean all hands on deck

to fix this. This is Ed Zitron. He's a tech journalist who covered this code yellow situation. The term code yellow doesn't come from a green, yellow, red traffic light metaphor. Rather, it's because of a yellow tank top that our former VP of Engineering used to crack out to rally the troops in emergencies, like the one Ben Gomes had just been emailed about. Hey look, we've got a code yellow for search revenue, because we have a steady weakness

in the daily numbers due to queries. Google calls your searches queries. When you query Google, it spits out a list of websites that Google promises will help you find whatever you're looking for. But also, you get ads. Those ads are Google's biggest source of revenue. And the mastermind behind this code yellow was Google's head of ads. Provogar Ragevan.

And Provogar's big emergency? Search query growth was significantly behind forecast. Not enough searches are happening, which means not enough ads being seen, which means not enough money is being made. This is why Ben gets tagged in. He was a search engineer that just rose to becoming head of search. The message from the ads team to the search team is, fix this, get more queries happening. Of course, Google already had plenty of queries. At that moment, when the code yellow went out in 2019, Google was the most used search engine in the world, in the history of the world.

It had a market share of about 90%. If you were looking something up, chances are you were looking it up on Google. And that remaining sliver of people who weren't using Google, they were making a conscious choice not to use it. They were like Google vegans. So getting more people searching, yeah, that was gonna be a tough one.

So several emails then bounced back and forth between Ben Goons and some of the internal people at Search and Discovery. Now Google is very hush hush about the inner workings of their search algorithm and any changes they make to it. But something must have made the bosses happy because the next thing you know, that code yellow was over. And there would be a big thread where people going back and forth saying thank you, we've

all done a great job. And then Ben Gomes said, well, good work, everyone. Okay. So now it's done, right? Problem solved? Nope. Ben gets an email from Prabhagar saying, no, you didn't fix this.

Despite all these changes, queries were still not increasing. Okay. Ben's an engineer. He builds things. He doesn't sell ads and he's uncomfortable with this whole thing. Soon he's responding to an email chain with the subject line getting ridiculous. Saying that he believed that search was getting too close to the money and that is a quote and then he ended it saying he was concerned that growth is all that Google was getting too close to the money, and that is a quote. And then he ended it saying he was concerned that growth is all that Google was thinking about. Because if they're gonna increase queries fast enough to make ads happy, there's really just one option.

In an email, one of Ben's colleagues lays it out like this. It wouldn't be about getting brand new users, but rather our existing users to search more. For Ben Gomes, this raised a problem, which, to paraphrase, was this. Hey, if we start optimizing to make people search more on Google Search, wouldn't that mean that Google Search has to get worse? Because if you make the search results worse, people will search again and again until they get a less bad result.

And every new search means you see more ads, which means Google makes more money. Ben and his team were feeling pressured to make Google search worse. On purpose. You read the emails and it's like, time to mess up the experience to the detriment of the user. It's just crazy when you read how brazen they are. It really like, it genuinely got to me. This whole thing, I call it in shitification. It's not just Google search,

it's happening to the entire Internet. Amazon sucks right now, Uber sucks right now, Netflix sucks, Facebook sucks. to the bullies. AI is basically going to destroy the earth for a bunch of tech crooks. Deep fake of the nationals, Ian Hanumancing, that seems to be selling cryptocurrency. Bro. Things are getting progressively worse.

Who is in charge of this? Say it with me, folks. Enshitification. Enshitification. Enshitification. Enshitification. Enshitification. Enshitification.

Enshitification. It Enchidification. Enchidification. Enchidification. Enchidification. Enchidification. Enchidification. Enchidification. Enchidification. Enchidification. Enchidification. Enchidification.

Enchidification. Enchidification. Enchidification. Enchidification. Enchidification. Enchidification. Enchidification. Enchidification.

Enchidification. Enchidification. Enchidification. Enchidification. Enchidification. Enchidification. Enchidification. Enchidification. Enchidification. I'm Cory Doctorow. I'm a science fiction writer, journalist and activist. For nearly a quarter century, I've been on the front lines of tech policy fights trying to save the internet. Over the next four episodes, I'm taking you back to the moments when the internet got inshitified. I'm naming the names of the people who did it and asking who will

take the internet back. On this season of Understood, who broke the Internet? This is episode one, Don't Be Evil. Good evening. I'm Laurie Brown. The amount of hype surrounding the internet has reached epidemic proportions. The internet started with a handful of visionaries back in the 50s and 60s who thought that computers could be used not just for calculating stuff, but for communication. By the 1980s, there was a nascent internet that crisscrossed the planet, linking up government agencies, universities, and military contractors.

Then, in the early 1990s, the internet became available to the public. And who was there to usher in this new internet age? Joining me now is Cory Doctorow. Cory Doctorow? I'm Cory Doctorow! He's been working with computers since he was seven, and now he's an independent computer consultant and programmer. In 1994, I was 23 years old and had a job

helping people figure out how to wire up their small businesses and connect them to the internet. I suppose that's why I was asked to go on national television to explain this whole thing to the people of Canada. Okay, Corey, let's get our feet wet. Show us how to surf the net. Okay, well, when you're talking about playing around on the internet, you're talking about

one of two things, playing with yourself, playing with other people. Playing with yourself, more or less. Wow. Where is this available? On the CBC. Oh, wow. You guys have everything. I showed this clip to my friend Eric Corley.

He's the publisher of 2600, an iconic hacker magazine he launched in 1984. Eric's better known by his hacker handle, Emmanuel Goldstein. Emmanuel was an early adopter of the internet too, and he remembers what people were saying about it at the time. This is the equivalent of fire, of the discovery of fire. It's not the printing press, it's not the car, it's fire. And Emmanuel was primed for it, because in the 80s, he was involved in what was then the cutting edge of communications technology, telephone networks. I think it was just for me the fun of connecting to people in far away places.

Because as as phone freaks, which is the telephone side of computer hackers, we would always be engaged in ways of making free phone calls. We would take great joy in connecting people together ourselves. We'd have these massive teleconferences and we'd call a random number in Australia and have a nice friendly chat with them and then connect them to a relative of theirs in the UK and everybody would have a great time. Emmanuel doesn't have any recordings of himself doing it, but this is Joey Ingressia, aka Joy Bubbles, a blind freaker who could whistle tones through the network to make free calls, like with his mouth.

Let's see if I make it this time. This is really hard to do. It sounded like all the tones were present, so the phone should be ringing about now. One of the reasons for doing that was because phone calls were just too damn expensive. It was long distance for me to call my grandmother in Queens from Long Island. You can drive there in 40 minutes. So we were always trying to figure out ways of tricking somebody into connecting you to Queens from Long Island. You know, you can drive there in 40 minutes. So, you know, we were always trying to figure out ways of tricking somebody into connecting you to somebody else.

It seems such a radical concept at the time to be able to talk to somebody who was not nearby. And how dare you try to do that and not pay a huge price? Well, the internet was a way of doing that. And the place where it was all happening online, Usenet. The next big thing is the Usenet. And the Usenet is a collection of thousands and thousands and thousands of groups of people talking about different subjects. Picture it like a giant cork board marked off with

tape into squares, each of which has a title. You can go up, I can go up, write a note down, scribble it up, post it to the board, someone else can come by, have a look at it, and post their response. Except millions of people do it. It's said that somewhere on the Usenet, someone has the answer to every question you've ever heard of. You just got to find the right place to ask it and ask it in the right way. So if you wanna find out if Mikey's stomach exploded when he ate Pop Rocks and drank Coke,

this is the place to go. Baby Cory asking the big questions. By the way, nope, Mikey's stomach did not explode when he ate Pop Rocks and drank Coke. But now, this was something you and thousands of your closest friends could find out together, easily, on the Internet. I think one of the things that was so fascinating about the early internet was it showed how there is this hunger for people to talk in an enthusiastic deep way about the things in their life that mattered to them, whether that's culture,

whether that's politics, whether that's their lives, and that you could connect with these other weirdos who actually cared about the same stuff. It was so soul stirring. It was so much fun. This is Clive Thompson. And I'm a writer who focuses on technology, culture, and how those two things collide. The internet was changing everything, how we communicated and connected, how we shared art and ideas.

Most importantly, it was changing where the power lay. That was one of the things I was most excited about back in 1994. It's changing the way we distribute music and so if you're an independent band like Apollo Creed from Seattle you can send them your press kit, your logo, your music, your bio and all I have to do is come here and click a button and down comes your single. So it's getting rid of record companies and marketing and promotion? Exactly, it means that no longer do bureaucrats control the means of distribution

and production for this stuff. At the moment, at the moment of the mid-90s, all this stuff seemed possible. It was a real ferment of excitement about possibilities, I think. That's the main electricity that I felt sort of coursing through everyday culture. And that's what the internet was like. Exciting, electric, small, pluralistic, and profoundly anti-commercial. You know, if the internet had been started by big

corporations, you would have to pay for every email that you sent, just like every phone call you would have to pay for it. But the early internet wasn't like that at all. There was this minor explosion when a couple of lawyers decided to mass-post onto a bunch of Usenet groups an advertisement for their law firm. And this was so scandalous to everyone back then that there was just, you know, weeks and months, really years of debate about whether or not this should be tolerated. Should these people be kicked off these newsgroups? Should we have rules that say like, we don't want people selling things on the internet.

Or as I told the CBC back then, the internet isn't owned by anyone. The internet is bits of it and pieces of it are owned by different people, universities, governments, municipalities, phone companies, cable companies, you name it. So, how did the internet go from this democratic ideal, this repository of all human knowledge, a space for hope and human thriving to something so, well, shitty? I don't think there's a single inflection point that I could point to that would help us understand how we got from an early internet that was pretty open and had enormous possibility that offered a lot of control and offered a lot of competition. I couldn't point to a single moment in that journey where you could say okay this is all changing. Why all

that wonderful promise and autonomy leaked out of the balloon was because there was no pop. There was just a bunch of little things that kept on happening. And one of those little things happened to Google search. Eventually, the internet got too big for people to know where everything was, so waves of clever people created search engines. Early search engines just looked for pages containing the words you typed, giving priority to pages that contained more of those words. This worked okay, but when it failed, boy did it ever fail badly.

If you wanted your page to rate high on the search results for a query like Mexican food, you could keyword stuff it by adding the words Mexican food a thousand times in tiny white on white type to the bottom of the page. The primitive search engines would count these all up and conclude that your page was the most important Mexican food resource in the world, which is useless because most hungry people aren't looking for a site that just has the words Mexican food a thousand times. To weed these bad hits out of your search results, you'd have to master all kinds of arcane search engine syntax so you could exclude words and phrases, putting minus signs in front of the kind of junk that was typical of spam sites.

It took forever, but those search engines were all we had, so we kept using them. We were using really awful search engines that we thought were pretty good. You saw Google and all of a sudden, the film cleared from our eyes. We thought, wow, you could actually find what you were looking for on the internet right away, bang.

This is Stephen Levy. He wrote the canonical history of Google in the Plex, how Google thinks, works and shapes our lives. Back in the early 90s, Stephen was Newsweek's tech reporter, and he knew right away that Google was a story. When I first saw the Google search engine, my mind was blown. So he tracked down their PR person. I called her up.

I said, I've got to meet these guys. These guys being Google's founders, two Stanford grad students named Larry Page and Sergey Brin. So Stephen booked a ticket from New York to San Francisco and flew out to meet them. It was near Halloween. Everyone was dressed in a Halloween costume. So Larry was dressed like a Viking

and Sergey was dressed like a cow. He had these big plastic udders coming out from his chest. So the Viking and the cow took me into a little room and explained how PageRank works. PageRank is the algorithm behind the magic, a new way that Google had developed to deliver its search results. It was totally audacious. And I say audacious because of the way they were able to locate the best result for your query was by basically, not basically, literally downloading the whole web, all of it, which some people thought was ridiculous, but Larry Page understood this could be done.

All Larry and Sergey needed to pull it off was big, powerful servers, which they could get. Because they had access to servers at Stanford, and they would literally hijack them as they came in the loading dock meant for other departments. With all this yoinked power, they set up their first server, building the case for it out of LEGO. Yeah, LEGO, because it was cheap and cool and colorful, like the eventual Google logo. And then they would do math, which was like Sergey's specialty, to analyze all the links that

happened between websites and figuring out what important websites linked to other sites, so what important websites link to other sites, so that way you can filter out which were the perfect answers for the queries you put into the search field. And that turned to be just a quantum leap better than the previous things. The early internet wasn't perfect. Google came into existence because the search landscape sucked. But the point is, Google could come into existence. There was oxygen and sunshine that reached the forest floor so new things could grow. If you could code, if you had some money, a computer or two, a couple of bins of Lego,

you could. You were allowed to build something new that made the web better. Clive Thompson again. They start off by having a really good search engine, the best search engine. And the reason why it's so good is that they are in ferocious competition with like 12 different search engines and they have to be better than everyone else. They have to fight to the top, and they do that. Just be the best, make the best product, and people will switch. And we did. We all switched to Google because it worked.

And that mattered to Google in their early days. And there's the very famous motto that Google had, which don't be evil, which was coined by an engineer when someone from HR had a meeting. And so we do, what is our motto? What is our about being our value? And one guy said, what are you talking about? Just like, don't be evil.

That's it. So back in 1999, Stephen wrote that first story for Newsweek. And he kept writing about Google. Google's world was our world. Things didn't exist, but it wasn't on the web. It's like when Google did well, we all did well because we all did well, because we could find the stuff we were looking for.

Right, and that came into play even more when they came up with their first big successful business product. That was ads. Yeah, yeah. When Google met advertising, everything changed. They're not just one step ahead, they're 1000 steps ahead. And when you're a forward thinker, you need a platform that thinks like you do. Workday's AI illuminates decision making and reimagines how you manage your people and money for long term success. Workday moving business forever forward.

Hey, how's it going? Amazing. I just finished paying off all my debt with the help of the Credit Counseling Society. Whoa! Seriously? I could really use their help. It was easy! I called and spoke with the Credit Counselor right away. They asked me about my debt, salary, and regular expenses, gave me a few options, and helped me along the way. You had a ton of debt and you're saying Credit Counseling Society helped with all of it?

Yep! And now I can sleep better at night. Ha ha ha! Right on! When debts got you, you've got us. Give Credit Counseling Society a call today. Visit nomordebs.org. The introduction of ads to Google marked a major shift. Emanuel Goldstein again. Google in their early days, you didn't have ads on the front page, it was relatively fast, and they just seemed like cool people inventing cool things.

Larry and Sergey actually hated advertising. In the paper they wrote talking about PageRank, they had a little thing in the hand saying, boy, we hate advertising. It's terrible. Stephen's talking about an article the Google founders published in a journal in 1998. And in it, they explicitly wrote that, quote, advertising income often provides an incentive to provide poor quality search results. But they had to make money. So then they figured, well, maybe there's a way to do ads that wouldn't be terrible.

So in 2000, the founders assigned an engineer to figure this out, one of Google's first eight employees. And he came up with something. It was called AdWords. So what it would do was when you put a query into the search engine, it would start an auction instantly. And your search term would be auctioned off to advertisers who wanted to sell a product that was related. If you search for Mexican food on Google back in the early aughts, the results would have been the most linked to websites for Mexican restaurants in your area and reviews from local blogs and newspapers.

And now with AdWords, ads would appear in a colored bar atop the normal page-ranked results. You know, you get the same results, but you get a little extra little, you know, set of possible results that actually might even help you if you were looking to buy something related to the search term, and the advertisers would get an audience which was primed to buy something, and it worked for Google, it worked for advertisers, and most of all, it worked for users. That is, until it didn't. Yeah, well, then it got worse. And that takes us back to tech journalist Ed Zitron

and the story of the fallout of the Code Yellow in 2019. When last we heard from them, head of search Ben Gomes and VP of Ads Prabhagar Raghavan were sending around flurries of tense emails about whether they were going to make search worse to make more money off of ads. But Team Search pushed back. One wrote, there was a good reason our founder separated search from ads. Another team member brought up the impact any changes would have on user experience,

asking quote, what cost is acceptable? But then, Vice President of Advertising Jerry Dishler laid down the law with an email that put the debate in the starkest possible terms, writing, the question we are all faced with is how badly do we want to hit our numbers this quarter? And he requested scrappy tactical tweaks that he would know will increase queries. And he said, and this is crazy, this is a natural quote, I also don't want the message to be we're doing this thing because the ad steam needs

revenue. That's a very negative message. But my question to all of you is, based on the above, what do we think is the best decision for Google overall? I am becoming the Joker in real time every time I read these things. It's so brazen. It's so obvious. So, wanna guess who won? Within weeks, Google started making changes that undid improvements that had been made to search under Ben Gomes watch a year before.

They took away things that would stop spamming or useless results being in there and started moving stuff around so that Google perhaps didn't make it harder to search, they just made it harder to find things on search, which is effectively the same thing. Ed says they even removed an update from 2012 that had specifically targeted spammy search results. According to a report from SEO company Systrix, 75% of the websites that got a boost from this update were sites that had previously been downranked. Now a few months later, in May 2019, they'd roll out a redesign of how ads were shown on Google search, changing them from this bright green ad thing and a URL color that was different.

Instead, it was now a tiny little thing that said ad in bold, and then otherwise it would look identical to regular search links. And I quote the Verge's John Porter here who said it made Google's ads look just like search results now. So, what I'm describing here is that changes were made to increase queries and increase The Verge is John Porter here who said it made Google's ads look just like search results now. So what I'm describing here is that changes were made to increase queries and increase revenue that made search worse. We asked Google for an interview about all of this, including interviews with Prabhagarh

Raghavan and Ben Gomes. Google didn't make anyone available to us. So we sent them a detailed list of questions. We asked if they made Google search worse on purpose in order to show more ads and increase advertising revenue. They did not directly answer this question. But in their response, they said, quote, the changes we launched to search

are designed to benefit users. We only launched changes to search after rigorous testing to confirm that a proposed change will be helpful for real people using search. We sent them some of Ben Gomes' emails, the ones we've been referencing throughout this story. They pointed us to his testimony in a court case where he was asked about the same emails. Here's a summary. He said that at Google, ads and search are not in conflict with one another, that quote, there is no difference in what our incentives are, unquote.

So Google is constantly trying to increase both the quantity of searches and user satisfaction, and different people search in different ways, So changes to search are in service to making Google work for more kinds of people. So how does it work now in 2025? Well, every time I tell someone I'm making this podcast, they got an anecdote. I have a colleague, she's a vintage collector. She Googles specific old things, but all she gets back are sponsored posts for new things or you know, dead links. But when she skips Google and searches directly on dozens of individual resale sites like

eBay, she finds exactly what she's looking for using exactly the terms she'd fed to Google. What is the point of a search engine that can't retrieve pages on major websites containing the exact phrase you searched for? Clive Thompson says he just adds Reddit to anything he types into Google now. If you want to get any results that are worth reading,

because Reddit to its credit has remained kind of like Usenet, an area that's focused on subjects. Look, I get it. Google's job has certainly gotten harder as the internet itself has gotten so much bigger and so much more polluted with garbage. But even when I ask Google questions about Google, like how to turn off Gemini, its maddening AI assistant, its instructions are wrong. Google, I swear, used to not be this chaotic, but it's such a bizarre place to be. It's so strange. Ed has noticed a whole other phenomenon.

How even when you get what seems like reasonable results, under the surface, something strange is going on. Ed's in his apartment in Brooklyn. We're on a video call. So I'm going to Google.com and I'm going to type in, top 10 Mexican NYC. Yeah, Ed's the reason I keep bringing up Mexican food. This is what happens when you interview people at lunchtime.

Anyway, here's what Ed gets. There is just a series of different, like, YouTube's, another YouTube, another Facebook video post. Facebook, I think, is probably the worst place to watch video other than through someone's window. So he scrolls down past the videos and actual websites start showing up. And then top Mexican restaurants in New York City offer TripAdvisor.

Now, it then in the corner pops up asking me to sign into TripAdvisor with Google, something I will never be doing. And as I scroll down the page changes and there's more ads and there's more things popping up. And now there's just the thing that says ad removed. I have no idea why that's happening. There is a American songbook singers outsider ad and then a giant ad at the top for TurboTax. Ed navigates back to the search results, tries another website.

On offer is another listicle, naturally. You click through to the Instagram pages of a few of these and most of them are dead because these websites are not actually kept up with. These are SEO, they're built specifically so that they rank highly on Google rather than actually telling you what the best New York Mexican food might be. He scrolls some more, clicks on a link that appears to be for a restaurant, but it goes through to OpenTable, which is a website that takes a cut of every single time someone books through it. But what's funny is, it's not available on OpenTable. So on top of this being this incredibly insidious series of ads and stuff. This isn't even useful.

These links don't goddamn work. You take until halfway down the second page to find an actual link to a Mexican restaurant. I feel like I'm in hell. So in the aftermath of all this, what happened to Ben Gomes? He went on to lead Google's Learning and Sustainability Department.

After nearly two decades of building and then eventually running Search, why the move? We asked Google. They didn't answer. And what happened to Prabhagarh Raghavan? Google would make Prabhagarh Raghavan the head of Google Search. This was in addition to his role as the head of ads. Google didn't answer our question about his job change either. But after taking over in 2020,

Raghavan went on to run Google Search for the next four years. And it was around 2020 that Google Search started to collapse. To be clear, Ed's talking about the quality of Google Search. Because Google's revenues certainly didn't collapse during any of this, their ad revenue growth soon climbed to almost twice what it had been before the code yellow. And over the next five years, the overall amount of money the company was bringing in more than doubled. All this stuff, this kind of thing is why I coined my dirty little word. Say it with me folks, enshitification.

And isn't that kind of just the perfect word to describe 2024? Well, apparently it was. Words of the year being crowned from all corners of the dictionary world. Today we have another word so perfect and so lewd that I'm only allowed to say it once. The Macquarie Dictionary has announced

that enshitification is the word of the year for 2024. Is that making something shitty? Kind of. Enshitification describes the widespread decay of the platforms we all rely on for so much. It's a three stage process. In stage one of enchantification, a platform is good to its users, but finds ways to lock them in. The more locked in they are, the harder it is for them to leave when we get to stage two. That's when platforms screw

their users to make things good for business customers. But those business customers, they aren't the final beneficiaries of this process, the platforms and their shareholders are. Because once these businesses, sellers, publishers, advertisers are locked in, we get to stage three of intensification, when the platform knifes them too, bleeding them out so that all the value is shifted

to the platform's investors and executives. That's in shitification, a tragedy in three acts, and you experience this every day with every interaction you have with the internet. I think that one of the biggest mistakes in particular of internet culture reporting is to separate the internet from real life. We experience our lives, our romantic lives, our social lives, our professional lives in a digital way. Our real lives are on the internet.

We go on these services and are harassed immediately. And as a result, your connection with the world is flawed. So yes, I believe this creates a genuine social malaise. And it's just, it's disgraceful because nothing had to be this way. These companies could fold their damn arms and just be like, no, no, we're not gonna make it worse. But they choose to, because they can.

But why can they? Why can these companies do whatever they like to you? The Internet doesn't suck because Silicon Valley CEOs all caught the tech bro mine virus. If you were to replace all of these founders and CEOs and professional middle managers tomorrow, the Internet wouldn't suddenly disin-shitify itself. The people in shitifying our tech are downstream of other people,

policymakers whose choices created the fecund and shitogenic environment that lets the people running tech companies convert their worst impulses into vast fortunes. Powerful people who made terrible decisions about how the internet should work. Next time on Understood. You had Congress saying,

we're going to make it illegal for you to write a certain type of software. The next thing the conference attendees knew, he had been arrested by the FBI. What do we want? Free Dimitri! When do we want it? Now! And that was just the beginning of the bad stuff they had in mind.

Understood, Who Broke the Internet is written and produced by Matt Muse, our showrunner AC Rowe, and me, Corey Doctorow. In this episode, you heard clips from CBC and Mr. Who's the Boss, Buzzfeed, FirstPose, The Project, Australian Community Media, Jena Turkova, This Is Important, Evan Dorbel, and CBS News. Roshni Nair is our coordinating producer, mixing and sound design by Julian Uzielli. Our story editor is Veronica Simmons. Our executive producer is Nick McKay Blokos. You can follow Understood on whatever inshitified app you're using to listen to me now. And check out our previous seasons like The Naked Emperor, a deep dive into the fallen Bitcoin king Sam Bankman Fried. Okay, hope you enjoyed that first episode of Who Broke the Internet.

Click the link in the description and follow the Understood feed. Episode 2 is there right now if you want to check it out. Talk to you tomorrow.