In Yesterday’s IO Keynote Google declared war on the remnants of the Web. (See longer description on their website.) TL;DR: They are pushing Search more into the “here’s your processed answer” direction that “AI Overviews” have established (you know, those AI snippets in current Search that are wrong about 10% of the time). So they are mostly giving up on the paradigm of providing links to information.
While they packaged it as a lot of “AI” talk and “agentic” and whatnot, what their whole approach of decontextualizing information, of taking away links to sources and instead producing some LLM generated response means is that they want to establish a new abstraction layer on the web. Where Zuckerberg with his Metaverse failed Google is starting the next attack: Your website, your work no longer matters. The web is being fully hidden behind a Google-controlled surface. And I am not even talking about their browser monopoly.
Your work, your writing or art do matter a bit still: As (unpaid) raw material for their synthetic text extruders. You get to work for free so Google can have tight control on the flow of information and make sure that the responses people get are in line with what they need them to be. But your work is no longer seen as an important cultural artifact you can share with others.
This is a literal revolution but one against the participatory web, against us: The goal is to take away the web and guide people into Google’s abstraction on top of it. An abstraction they control and moderate. It’s about monopolizing access to information. A true Metaverse unbound by open standards and your ability to build your own corner of the web according to your needs and desires. Which – given how strong Google’s influence is on web standards – will change the shape of the standards for the technological landscape we are building the web on.
The next step will be Google or other companies in that space developing and deploying a new derogatory term for the web marking it as unclean, unruly, dangerous, bad (similar to “the Dark Web”) and making their abstraction the “safe” web.
If you do care about the web, about people’s ability to participate in it as more than mere passive consumers, this needs to be taken seriously. De-googlifying your mental apparatus becomes more urgent today. Find other search engines, don’t use the Chrome browser. Or wake up in a slopified AOL kind of environment where your access to information is limited to what Google’s synthetic text extruders deem relevant.
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