Worth reading even for those who already read the NYT review, as it nicely explains the timeline of how we got into this situation.
Fully agree that Google and Facebook are mainly to blame. As an example, Google's success in surveillance and pacifying critics through open source trinkets almost definitely convinced Microsoft to try its hand at the same game. And now the two biggest operating system developers are spying on their so-called customers.
Do you see Google and Facebook as equals in terms of badness?
Honestly, I’ve always perceived Google as less insidious than Facebook. To me FB is more in your face, channeling your behavior. Google seems more passive and delivers more utility.
Google has far more reach online than FB. The risks and harms with FB are largely social. Google is scary because of the type and amount of data they have and the amount of influence they have over the direction of the internet.
Both companies scare the hell out of me but for different reasons.
Google is the Internet's black hole, sucking everything in. So massive that it bends everything towards it. And imo that's all it takes to be evil, being so powerful that you will always get your way.
Google's surveillance system has more reach that Facebook's. Both are extensive, but it's pretty common to find webpages that contain no facebook tracking but do contain google tracking. In fact it's pretty rare to find websites that don't contain any google tracking. And I can avoid Facebook's gaze by using email, but if I use email almost inevitably somebody I want to email will be using gmail, meaning any messages sent necessarily go to google.
In my view, Google is far worse. The company took entire internet and bent it to its advantage. It has monopolized search and delivery of information, and it has monopoly on digital advertising. It’s actually destroying creation of content online, because there is no money left to creators, such as journalists, bloggers, etc. There is a reason why The Guardian has donate button under its articles: it’s one of the many outlets that is struggling because of the unethical black hole called Google.
PS I just came back from CES as a journalist. Tried to get in touch with Google folks, and they are literally behind the walls, unavailable for interviews. It’s all hush hush. Security at Aria suites where they were present. No access whatsoever. Their main booth at LVCC was staffed by temps hired in Las Vegas, whose only job was to jump and shout Hey Google! Truly dystopian.
When were "journalists, bloggers, etc." ever making money by creating content online? I don't think Google has anything to do with them having a big problem doing this successfully.
Can you back that up instead of repeating a slogan? I happen to largely agree with you but just saying “X is good” leaves out a lot of details with regard to what is X, how is good defined, etc
Journalists are professional and have to be paid. And they are not being paid, because Google is an unethical business. And that's why your local newspaper is struggling and why content is not created on internet and why there is no VC investment in the media and content. That's the answer.
You still have not explained how Google is responsible for the failure of online newspaper business models. If google did not exist, what would these newspapers be doing differently that would keep them profitable?
Journalists are important. My sardonic quip was not aimed at saying they aren't, but that they are suffering from a structural defect in how we currently implement news, leading to a quality control issue, manifesting as the Gell-Mann Amnesia Effect. If I'm aiming at any entity, it is probably a capitalism that has stalled its progress in the past near-half century at gradually obsoleting itself (which I hold should be prescriptively the real goal of capitalism).
Embedded as journalists are within a capitalist system, they must earn sufficient capital to live upon. Or find alternative means of support, like some form and/or degree of self-sufficiency. Really good journalists seem to be uber-networkers of a sort: they have a highly-honed networking skill cutting across many societal boundaries unlike most networkers, and seem to mostly not parley that network into a monetizing scheme to retain their impartiality. But that impartiality seems to come at a cost too steep for many to pay.
This leads to a vicious cycle. Structurally, the most proven way to currently get advertising income (primary business model supporting most journalism) is essentially create click bait content, or maintain some form of distribution monopoly (Elsevier-like, Bloomberg-tie-in-like, or Clear Channel in US radio) or distribution oligopoly (old newsprint companies). The Net is eroding the latter two delivery channels, driving more journalists towards facile coverage at best, crude exaggeration at the median, outright sensationalist falsehoods at worst.
This gives a short- to medium-term boost to advertising income, but erodes factual coverage, at the worst moment possible: just as civilizational complexity is accelerating. Long-term, I'm seeing the echo chamber tendency many have talked at length about here (I hypothesize as technology exposes more people to more of the Gell-Mann effect, more notice, and they start to turn inwards on news sources to defend themselves? dunno.). There are some nuggets of gold out there, but they're very difficult to find. Confounding this is good journalism with actionable information on complex topics is expensive as hell. Good journalism these days sometimes is mistaken as buy-side analysis, which doesn't help (capitalism is blind to many issues that buy-siders don't cover).
It also doesn't help that there are many instances where journalists actually analyzing an issue of great substance get their friends and families threatened (which costs even more money to defend against) and in many cases are outright killed [6], or like Assange, relentlessly persecuted by the resources of a nation-state or large corporate powers.
So the easy way out for many "news businesses" seems to reward low-effort, high-volume content, and as a byproduct we experience the Gell-Mann Amnesia Effect. Quipping about it is my exasperated, tongue-in-cheek response to what I perceive as a highly complex, interconnected set of problem spaces.
We've discussed the "good journalism" conundrum many times here on HN [1] [2] [3], and various aggregation platforms [4] [5] have been proposed, but the problem to me seems to be much larger than "journalists aren't paid enough", or "where has all the good journalism gone to". To even start on "the journalism problem", I suspect we have to admit the tough truth that the current status quo as envisioned, implemented, supported and championed by various elites around the world is simply not delivering progress for significant sectors of civilization. Aggregate measures are improving, but trotting that out is cold comfort for those affected. Sure, The Net might be great and snazzy, but in the meantime journalism as a profession appears to be slowly bleeding to death.
Don't look to me for any solutions though, I'm just an outside bystander missing the old, incisive writing in newsprint I grew up with and see in newspaper morgues at libraries, and I have zero interaction with journalism as a profession or business. I'm just stabbing in the dark here at what the problem even is, and welcome others who operate on the business side to shed some light.
Any and every for-profit business in the internet space would/does "bend the internet to its advantage" as far as it possibly can, limited only by its competency and influence.
There's nothing particularly wrong with that. The onus is on society/government to set boundaries.
Google is pretty scary - but imagine a world where google never existed and instead companies like AT&T, Comcast, or even Microsoft had filled that market void instead? (And guess what? They are all trying desperately to get there.)
Not the parent commenter, but wanted to chime in on this – it’s two different evils / bad… however I feel that google is more bad because they have spent years trying to convince the world they are good and trustworthy, many people have come to believe that ‘googling it’ is truth – and yet there is so much censorship with google that many people will not find the truths they are seeking.
At least with fbook it’s fairly transparent – we are cramming ads down your throat, and people are sharing shit that is not necessarily true but it makes you feel the ‘others’ are bad, and your tribe is better, and we make it easy to like and share.
There are many other reasons for the bad things these companies do that could weigh in on who is worse for the world, who is worse for democracy, etc -
Sure facebook might be able to cause more damage to more people more quickly – easily being weaponized and helping people spread dangerous messages around the world, it’s fairly transparent that it’s random fake people being fake, and advertisers are trying to sway you to do things you would not be doing otherwise.
however Google is more evil, as it purports itself as the arbiter of truth – yet it hides so much from the world and is opaque in so many ways, the truths it shows are not counter balanced by others who have similar access to show the other side of whatever story.
Google is unfair to it’s users and webmasters. Thing is, many people may never know it. That is more badness imho.
Personally I think Facebook is beyond saving. They are toxic for democracy, their core business is invading people's privacy and I wish they go bust as soon as possible.
Google on the other hand ain't that bad. They do deliver a lot of value, they have some extraordinary products. They are also pretty unlucky in business (most of their products are failures plain and simple).
I think that for Google it is just a phase and they will soon wake up and realize that being part of surveillance capitalism is harming the company and diminishing its value.
> Google seems more passive and delivers more utility.
Google delivers no utility beyond the companies that it acquired, and its monopolies due to size and control over so many handsets allowed it to push out the competition that would force it to improve what it does offer.
Youtube and Maps, at least, have a worse, more intrusive interface than they did 10 years ago. It's completely a subjective statement, but for me their search results are far worse in comparison to 10 years ago, and in obvious ways, like every link on the first 5 pages of any search trying to sell me something or repeating the same wikipedia copy.
To estimate the utility of Google, you have to compare it to the ecosystem that you would expect to have existed if Google didn't exist, not to the ecosystem you would expect if search engines, streaming video lockers, and an alternative to iOS on mobile didn't exist.
The only two nice things that google ever did for me was 1) count backlinks to give me better search results, and 2) create a culture of less intrusive ads through their monopoly power. The SEO people killed innovation 1), and google pretended that they were going to use magic AI to beat them but secretly gave up. 2) would have been done anyway by the rise of the adblockers, and google ruined all goodwill by innovating on a culture of intrusive tracking and behavior monitoring and profiling on the internet that has become a threat to its very existence.
Facebook is just filling a need that governments should be filling: providing an organized way for individuals to communicate with each other over the internet. Extracting rents is what companies do when they take over functions for absentee governments. Facebook doesn't seem to care much about what is outside facebook, other than how it helps them extract more rent from the people inside facebook.
Google is actively spreading over everything, and making it worse.
a need that governments should be filling: providing an organized way for individuals to communicate with each other over the internet
This is bizarre and wrong. The purpose of the internet is communication. If it exists, communication does. It supports a multitude of communication modes with varying levels of "organization" (whatever you mean by that), and none of them rely on government to function. Of those that have seen improvements (e.g., better spam filters for email), none of those improvements have come from government.
Of course, Facebook is just about the worst of all the modes of communication supported by the internet, so if you like how bad that is maybe you really just hope government could make it worse...
Google collects far more personal data than FB. The one thing that saves them from all the backlash that FB faced is that they don't seem to share those data with 3rd parties.
> Let’s not ignore the complicity of their users. You can live without Google and Facebook.
How, when your work place often requires that you use their products? They expect you to be on Slack, then you got to have a phone and laptop and use the company blessed authentication portals (also handled by Google and the likes) to log in.
And not just work, also simply living in your city will require it. Who calls a cab by voice anymore? At some point I am sure there will be no way to do it. I have never seen a cab radio device in my city for many years.
Not to mention that your friends will have you in their contacts, images, comments and emails, which are hosted on
Google and FB whether you like it or not.
There was no informed consent; users were completely failed by both governments and journalists.
Governments didn’t think any of this was important until recently. By the time they did, Silicon Valley outspent wall street 2:1 on lobbying in the US.
Most journalists found understanding technology boring and difficult (beyond eagerly regurgitating spec sheets) and have little interest in understanding businesses beyond reporting a citable stock-price fluctuation. Most of the reporting during the ascent of surveillance capitalism has simply been “look at the boy genius nerds! A tshirt in the boardroom!”.
Fully agree that Google and Facebook are mainly to blame. As an example, Google's success in surveillance and pacifying critics through open source trinkets almost definitely convinced Microsoft to try its hand at the same game. And now the two biggest operating system developers are spying on their so-called customers.