Google's ultimate undoing will not be some grassroots Web3 uprising, but something we can sum up in one word: content. And the content crisis has already begun.
Are you watching? If you've blinked at all since the summer you might have missed at least part of Google's desperate, ongoing quest to recover some semblance of quality in its search results. In recent weeks we've seen an unprecedented series of major updates to Google's search ranking algorithms, and it looks like the Californian behemoth is not stopping until the results pages start looking like someone gives a hoot.
AI WOES
The problem of the moment? Among other things, artificial intelligence. AI is now so clever and widely available that spammers can simply scrape the Internet, automatically re-word what they find, and mass-publish it without any worries about plagiarism or duplication.
It's been a PR catastrophe for Google.
As weighty, SEO-pumped domains have jumped onto the AI bandwagon, we've seen content written by robots outranking content written by humans, and this is set to get worse. The open-source release of Stable Diffusion means that if Google can't come up with ways to reliably recognise and downrank AI content, we may soon see robot-manufactured images pushing human-made work out of the search results too.
The ethics of AI content-production are a major debate in themselves, since robots with no brains cannot innovate. They can only copy, revise and create mashups. Many artists are already campaigning against Stable Diffusion and other art mashup software on copyright grounds. Google, conversely, has spent more than two decades opposing copyright protection and cheering on plagiarists from the back seat of a car driven by its co-opted, nonprofitalist army of shills.
But the tech giant is now starting to see the consequences of its actions. The public don't necessarily regard individual pieces of AI-generated content as glaringly awful, but they do quickly tire of the general stagnation it causes.
Google has strangled content innovation and destroyed the World Wide Web. The one shaft of positive light is that it can't reach its endgame without also destroying itself.
And this is only the first generation of AI content. We're currently seeing bots informed by humans. But as the generations advance, we will see bots informed by bots, and bots informed by bots informed by bots. Eventually, nothing progresses at all, and consumers are fed an endless diet of re-composited tedium.
Some may say that serious online publishers would never let that happen, but everything we've seen so far tells us they would. We're seeing supposedly reputable media organisations spamming AI dross into search. As long as they get away with it, and it lines their pockets, they don't care.
For capitalists, it's never been about the content. It's about the money. Just the money, and nothing but the money. No piece of content marketing was ever written because the author was burning with passion to make that statement. It's bait. One giant tub of maggots.
I've met the people who publish it. Worked directly alongside them. Listened to their brains ticking over. The ONLY thing that lights up their faces is an upward line on an economics chart. That's it. You can show them the most brilliant piece of art in the world, and they won't give a flying stuff until someone drops a monetary value onto it and tells them it can convert x,xxx sales.
So within capitalism, the economics of AI will always trump the quality of human creativity. Google's problem is that it too is only interested in capitalism. The people it wants to showcase in search are the very people who are most strongly incentivised to create shitty, low-effort content; to cheat, to mass-produce, and to cut corners. Because the content is not what matters to them. It's only about the money.
If Google were not compelled to showcase capitalists it could end its current nightmare tomorrow, simply by classing every site with a marketing association as spam. Take away the money and the production line grinds to a halt - leaving only the content created through love and enthusiasm. But Google is by nature compelled to showcase capitalists, and that means it's locked in a prison it can't escape.
Google no longer even recognises artistic concepts, comedy, fiction or satire as content. You can produce content about those things, because that's consumerism. But if you want Google to visibly present your work in its search results, you can't produce those things, because that's the product. And giving people the product leaves them nothing to buy.
HOW GOOGLE IS TRYING TO SOLVE THE AI PROBLEM
Because it can't simply blitz everyone who's using content for marketing purposes, and it's too lazy to distinguish good content from bad, Google is using its trademark punishment system in a bid to modify site admins' behaviour.
One of this summer's punishments downranks a whole site if any portion of it is considered to be "unhelpful". "Unhelpful" content, in Google's eyes, is anything that falls outside the category of consumerist information. "Helpful content" excludes humour, satire and other artistry. So if you have a site that's 75% top quality, rigorously-researched and painstakingly-crafted information content, but there are also experimental posts on the domain, Google is now going to push the top quality info out of the visible results in order to punish you for not being 100% dedicated to consumerism.
And its message to those who protest? Delete the parts of your site that don't fit Google's ideals. That really is what they're saying - and they're even providing guidance on tHe BeSt WaY tO Do It. I mean, if that's not the worst kind of censorship...
The EFF is blaming the victims for putting up an umbrella rather than blaming its Silicon Valley associates for pissing on them for the past two decades.
Google is, I remind you, the company that blew a fortune campaigning for "net neutrality" - the concept of a Web with zero bias, zero throttling, and zero punishment. They've done nothing but throttle and punish everyone who doesn't bow to their edicts ever since. Look at this...
That's Google refusing to crawl (and thus make searchable) a page because it's not encrypted and gatekept by the surveillance industry. The punchline? The page IS encrypted and gatekept by the surveillance industry.
But even if I had been a naughty boy and failed to suck Google's Webmaster Advisories, there's absolutely no need whatsoever for openly published information to be encrypted, other than to benefit the surveillance industry's data monopoly. It's public. The whole point of it is to be seen by everyone. And running billions of pages through unnecessary encryption and certification processes, wastes a mass of energy too. But the self-styled pRoTeCtOr Of OnLiNe FrEeDoM doesn't care about that. All hail the Google philosophy...
"You can do anything you like on the Internet as long as it's what we tell you to do."
There's a separate punishment for sites that have multiple niches. Yes, your whole website now has to be about the same thing. If it's not, you lose search visibility, because apparently, oNlY AI bOtS pUt vArYiNg SuBjEcT mAtTeR oNtO tHe SaMe SiTe. Of course, the real world effect is that AI spammers just divide their rapid-grow empires into perfectly niched, separate domains. They've already done it! Since the summer! That's the point of AI. It's FAST. And Google is wondering why after several updates in machine-gun succession, the search results are still full of abject crap. Allow me to enlighten...
Hey, Google... Actual humans DO NOT HAVE TIME to rebuild their entire fucking website every time you have some hare-brained whim and crack your SEO whip. You are requiring actions that ONLY automation can achieve, and then wondering why users of automation are winning the battle.
SEO should not even be a thing. I know I've said this before, but it's highly relevant, so...
"It should not be possible, in the 2020s, for PR companies who have nothing to do with writing content, to increase the visibility of that content in the web search results."
But it is possible. Even when the author of the content is a blob of brainless software. So now the AI bots are busy plundering all sites with multiple niches for content to spin, because their owners know that shitty, low-quality spins on single-niche domains, will henceforth outrank the high-quality original work on the multi-niche sites they're plundering. Outcome: search results get even worse.
Whether Google is too stupid to anticipate obvious outcomes like this, or knows that they will happen and is basically just hoping the quality of AI content will improve in the process, is immaterial. The fact is that this spew of AI trash is now unstoppable under a monopolistic, anti-competitive evaluation system no one's bothered to re-design since the mid 1990s. A sticking plaster every few months (or every two weeks as it's become of late) is not going to change what's now a whirlpool of decline.
And public tolerance is finite. So this can't last.
THE CONTENT CRISIS
The content crisis is more than just a cataclysmic rise in bot-manufactured dronery. Silicon Valley's trampling of, and theft from creators has fostered a reluctance to create for the open Web. Posts of genuinely valuable, brand new, original content to the open Web have sharply dropped, because creators do not wish to be slaves to the richest cartel in the world. They know that Silicon Valley will cherry-pick and appropriate all of the value from their work, then effectively suppress the original content whilst the silo-lifts and capitalist-spins prevail.
AI has hugely worsened this trend, and we're now seeing creators not only withholding content from public channels, but actively withdrawing it. Seriously, what is now the point of an artist publishing a beautiful visual creation that took a week to prepare, if a bot is just gonna scrape it, rehash it and then outrank it? You might as well lock it all down and gate the access. Why wouldn't you do that?
For years, the tech cartel's recourse has been to pretend the content-slowdown wasn't happening. But as the pace and scale has increased, the public have begun to notice, and now Google's pet puppet the EFF has commenced bleating out complaints about content withdrawal. But as usual, it's blaming the victims for putting up an umbrella rather than blaming its Silicon Valley associates for pissing on them for the past two decades.
Meanwhile, rather than better respecting creators as a means to restore confidence and stimulate a new flow of dynamic and fresh human work, fellow cartel member the Internet Archive doubled down. First it withdrew its means for publishers to opt out of having their content stolen by... Sorry, "aRcHiVed on" IA... And then it got itself served with lawsuits by print publishers for pirating their books. There's one in motion as we speak. And yes, it IS piracy. It is NOT "tHe LiBrArY of friggin' AlExAnDrIa", as the shill army has amusingly tried to claim.
Indeed, the very reason why Internet Archive has started dipping its light fingers into value from the offline world is that the stream of online value is fast drying up and, very soon, the only online content left to "archive" will be marketing spam.
HOW DOES THIS END?
Companies like Brave would love the public to believe that Web3 will be the force that finally teaches Google a lesson, and supersedes Google's 'Classic Web'. But Google's 'Classic Web' will prevail over Web3, if for no other reason than that Google has value to governments and Web3 threatens them.
Google's real nemesis will come in the battle for content-stewardship. TikTok has already subordinated Google Search for traffic, so we know that Google is not indestructible. We can look at Google's empire - especially YouTube - and conclude that as a network, it's too strong to defeat. But much of the empire depends on the search engine in order to dominate. It looks like a monopoly. But beneath the facade we find a house of cards. If one wall should fall, the whole thing comes down.
And if that house of cards does cave down a couple of levels, the strategic funding budget will enter a crisis of its own. Google's strategic funding budget is all the $billions it pays other major entities to be its friend. The hush money. The breathtaking figures it spends lobbying for its own interests. The cash it blows on fines that arise from a business model built on breaking laws. Once profits can no longer sustain that dizzying financial firehose, the crumbling walls give way, and it's all over.
People online care about human authenticity. They do not want AI listicles. That's why last year more people used TikTok than Google Search. It's why journalists and people with critical information requirements search with Twitter rather than Google. It's why a vast number of Web searches are now claused with "site:reddit.com". Google can no longer hide the fact that its search engine is overrun with automated content and spam, and it now faces the battle of its life to restore a real sense of human authenticity.
Its successor will be both the best steward of content, and (importantly) steward of the best content. The first platform to crack the nut of ensuring that users retain real control of their content will draw in the best creators rather than just sucking in the proxied theft or AI rehash of their work. For the consumer, that's like going to live concerts rather than listening to a record on repeat. There's a theme. There's spontaneity. There's interaction. Participation. It's a different world.
Google and its cronies have brainwashed and trained the public to be angry with writers and artists who claim their intellectual property rights. What the public doesn't realise, is that it's the brainwashers, rather than the creators, who have turned the Web into a hellscape of AI regurgitation.
No serious author or artistic creator would ever put a line of six AI listicles at the top of your search results. It's Google who endlessly dishes up that crap. And yet it's writers and artists everyone's mad at. That's some brainwashing campaign. Mind you, it did cost billions of dollars, so I suppose it should be.
Google has strangled content innovation and destroyed the World Wide Web. The one shaft of positive light is that it can't reach its endgame without also destroying itself.