The platforms will never stop hungering

All Internet platforms eventually devolve into a mess of advertisements, algorithms, self-dealing, and bloat. An iron law of the Internet: If a product or service depends on advertising to fund itself, it will make increasingly selfish decisions until it manages to ruin itself.

Facebook rode this arc from a small social service for college students to a globe-spanning shit-fest. Instagram went from a neat tool to share tinted photos to whatever you might call the algorithmic shambles that it is today, desperate to try anything and everything to retain commercial relevance.

Google, too. The search giant was deep into the process of turning its originally clean, and useful search tool into an overly-optimized tool that wanted to keep users hostage before AI arrived.

Over the decades since its birth, Google managed to become the opposite of its early form. It traded simplicity for complexity. It swapped a strong results-advertising divide for better click-through rates. It stopped being a launching point for the Internet so that it could become an increasingly sticky trap, keeping users stuck fast so that it could show them more advertisements.

Thanks to the never-ending project of Mountain View to extract more dollars from Google in the near-term, the search service was starting to attract startup competitors in recent years. That’s such a wild statement that it’s akin to saying that some young companies wanted to attack the Sun.

Then generative AI went from academic concept, to fascinating technology, to mass-market weapon in a hurry. And search, deep in the senescence of its second age, found a third wind.

Generative AI is not going to save you

Will the current AI boom and changes that it is already bringing to search return Google to what it was — a place where Internet users could enter a query and get routed to the most fitting place on the Internet? No.

Generative AI may make for a fine search tool. But it seems incredibly doubtful that neo-search techniques that we see from Bing and Google are going to increase the number of folks they send to external websites. Those days are behind us.

Indeed, it seems instead that major AI tools have instead done the opposite, consuming the Internet for free so that they can spit it back up to users on command, sans the need to usefully cite sources or share traffic with third-party websites. For Google and friends, this is a dream come true. All the user attention, with no content creation costs? It’s perfect.

For writers and other folks who have unknowingly spent decades writing the stuff that wound up being ingested into the great AI maw, the situation is a bit depressing. I had hoped that when Google was finally disrupted by a younger, simpler service it would return us to the days when search was a way for folks to find other websites. And then my writing might again have the same shot at an audience as anyone else’s, provided that I wrote things that were interesting and useful.

That is not going to happen. Search is instead being rewritten into a question-and-answer tool, a way to ask for a discrete bit of information instead of a method of searching for it.

The same iron law will apply to generative AI-powered search in time. Google and Bing will make it worse from a user perspective so that they can extract more revenue as time passes.

By now we should have learned our lesson. The platforms, while willing to share some surplus with creatives early in their lives, always wind up eating more of the pie over time. The only winning move is to treat digital platforms as temporary camps and not home. They are fine to visit, and perhaps even enjoy for a short period of time. But stay long enough, or grow roots deep enough, and you might find yourself stuck in someone else’s biome that also, coincidentally, wants to eat you.

This should make the generative AI search moment not a surprise. It is more variation on a theme than a new composition. If we recognize that fact, we can do something beautiful and break the cycle.

Bring Back Blogging

If you are a writer, any distribution method controlled by any single company is suspect. And any platform that wants to own your audience is no ally. This leaves just two methods of online creativity safe from meddling. For now, at least:

• Your own website. For writers, this means blogging on your own website and domain.

• Distribution via email.

Are we being silly by advocating for personal websites in an era when search is becoming something entirely self-contained? Nope. We simply need to break out of our current habits and get back to following individuals and their work by hand.

If we bring back blogging, the Internet could get pretty cool again. Indie writing! Weird art! Niche commentary! Blistering fights in the comments! We lost all of that because we left our small homes for rented spaces on massive platforms that seemed like they wanted us there, offering bigger audiences faster in exchange for eventual subsumption.

I wrote all this down because I needed to tell myself that if I don’t work on building up my own audience, owned by myself and apart from any service that holds the fine folks who want to read my little words for themselves hostage, I am giving up on my dream of writing for life. Currently I work for TechCrunch, but the publication could fire me tomorrow and I would only have the audience left that I had built and retained. And if that’s entirely on, say, Twitter, I am all but dead already.

So, here’s to writing more on these pages. Here’s to trying to recapture the spirit of blogging. And here’s to not being beholden to any single platform out there.

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A corollary: The moment that Substack starts to restrict the ability for users to take their email lists with them, I’m out. If the company has been freed from venture expectations as possibly evidenced by its recent crowdfunding round, it may manage to avoid becoming trash over time. We’ll see.

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The featured image on this post is via Benjamin Sow on Unsplash.