Absolute banger this week in Ed Zitron’s newsletter:
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 problem with a capitalist society, the internet has become dominated by powerful forces that don’t contribute to the product that enriches them. As a result, they have either no concept of nor interest in “quality,” just “more,” making them extremely poor arbiters of what “good” looks like. This inevitably leads to products that suck more as they become more profitable, because the machine they’ve built is a profit excavator dressed as a service. I’d argue that this makes Google, and by extension executives like Sundar Pichai and Google Search lead Prabhakar Raghavan, some of the greatest villains in business history. While one can’t forget about the damage done by Meta and Mark Zuckerberg’s failure to maintain an honest platform, allowing Google Search to decay so severely for any reason — let alone a profit-centric one — 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 sounded a “code yellow” about Google’s advertising encroaching on search results.