For its entire history, whatever its crimes and sins, Google Search performed one basic benevolent function: it sent our attention from Google to some source that most likely helped resolve a question or indulge an interest. You typed a query, and the company’s ranking algorithm—proprietary, opaque, contestable, but ultimately effective and useful—served up a list of doors onto the wider web. You clicked, and you left Google’s house to visit someone else’s. That mere act of departure, unglamorous as it sounds, was the thread connecting search to the older ideal of the public sphere. It was the residue of an Enlightenment premise: that citizens benefit from encountering a plurality of sources, weighing them, and forming judgments amid the friction of disagreement. Or, at least, Google wanted us to believe that. Many of us did.
Google has now severed that thread. Type a query into Google today and more often than not you are met with a pile of slop: a synthesized paragraph, stitched together by an LLM, that purports to answer your question so directly and bluntly that you have little reason to go anywhere else. Google calls these paragraphs “AI Overviews.” A more expansive version, “AI Mode,” dispenses with the pretense of links altogether and simply converses with you. By 2025, AI Mode had reportedly surpassed a billion monthly users, with Google boasting that query volume was doubling every few months. The infrastructural imperialism I described in 2011—the steady, unaccountable extension of one company’s dominion over the mechanisms by which we find things out—has entered its final and most totalizing phase. Having organized the web, Google now proposes to replace it.
titsay
kianamaiart
turnnoffyourmind
yousharknotpass
dailybridgerton
