#kagi

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2026/06/29/arsonist-firefighters/#im-feeling-lucky

Write a critical AI book, and you become everyone's confessor for their AI sins. People in my life keep telling me about their guilty AI pleasures, in search of an explanation, absolution or7 condemnation:

https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374621568/thereversecentaursguidetolifeafterai/

Their most common confession: "I only ever use Google's A7I-generated search summaries these days. I no longer click those blue links beneath it, not even to verify the summary." People know that the summaries are full of "hallucinations" (that is, "defects" or "errors") but the summaries are right often enough that many people have come to rely on them, to the exclusion of actual websites, made by actual people, on the actual internet.

Everyone knows this isn't good. The reason there's a web for Google's Gemini AI to summarize is that Google – the thrice-convicted monopoly search company with a 90% market share – directs people to websites, and when you visit a website, you generate revenue for the site, which pays for its maintenance. Most commonly, you generate an "ad impression," but you might also buy a subscription, or generate an "affiliate fee" by purchasing a recommended product.

When Google strips all this away by harvesting an "answer" and displaying it at the top of the page, the bargain between Google and the open web breaks down. Google is extracting 100% of the value from the websites it summarizes, and giving nothing back in return.

This is a marked reversal from Google's founding ethos. In the old days, Google measured its success by how little time you spent on its site. The ideal Google outcome was for you to visit its page (or even better, just a search-box in your browser), type a few words, and get "ten blue links" back, the top one of which was the correct link to locate the information or resource you were seeking. The point of Google was to serve as a conduit, a trusted intermediary that neutrally adjudicated the relevance of every web page for every web user from moment to moment.

Everyone dunks on Google for its high-minded motto, "Don't be evil," but over the years, the company's mission was far more important: "Organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful." That was the pole star that googlers followed for the first couple decades of the company's history…until, that is, the company saturated its market and its growth stalled out.

That was when Google started to panic over its plateauing search revenue, this being an inescapable consequence of 90%+ market-share. The ensuing power struggle pitted googlers who were committed to technical excellence against the company's most ardent enshittifiers, who pointed out that by making search worse, they could increase revenues. After all, if you need to search two or three times to get the answers to your questions, that means the company can show you two or three times as many ads:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/04/24/naming-names/#prabhakar-raghavan

Where once Google measured its success by how quickly it could send you away from its site and out into the open internet, today's Google is a sticky-trap full of ways to keep you inside its walled garden.

A decade ago, tech had three major approaches:

I. Google's: let you do anything you want, but spy on you while you do it;

II. Apple's: strictly control what you can do, but leave you alone to do it in private; and

III. Facebook's: control everything you do, spy on you from asshole to appetite.

Today, tech is undergoing a form of carcinization, in which every company is turning into a Facebook-crab: maximally surveillant and maximally controlling.

Apple has added surveillance to its walled garden:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/11/14/luxury-surveillance/#liar-liar

While Google has turned its free-range, internet-wide surveillance system into a walled garden that tries to keep you away from the open internet as much as possible.

Now, in Google's defense, the "open internet" kind of sucks these days. Any piece of useful information you seek out on the open internet is liable to be buried under half a dozen pop-ups, pop-unders, and dickovers:

https://daringfireball.net/2026/05/what_is_a_dickover

Even after you clear these away, the actual information you're seeking is further buried in word-salads that anticipated insipid AI prose by half a decade. Think of all those omelet recipes that appear beneath 2,500 words of cod-Proustian remembrances of "the first time I ate an egg."

The major advantage of AI search summaries is in shielding you from all this nonsense. But where did all that nonsense come from in the first place?

It turns out that this is largely Google's fault.

yay welcome! sorry for taking a few days to reply to this but I hope you're having a fun time learning a bit about fs and yuma! hmmm what can I think of off the top of my head:

- A lot of Japanese fans in particular call him yumachi (ゆまち), kind of a diminutive nickname. a lot of his friends use it too.

- his favourite character is Snoopy, who has been turned into a bit of an unofficial mascot by fans. at a lot of skating competitions, fans are permitted to throw flowers and gifts on the ice after the program's over, so often people throw Snoopy soft toys for Yuma!

- Yuma's dad, Masakazu Kagiyama, is also his coach and was a skater himself back in the day; he competed at the 1992 and 1994 Winter Olympics and was a 3x national champion! (Yuma currently is a 2x national champion so he only needs one more to catch his dad! Literally the only way he hasn't surpassed him yet lol)

- He's big into volleyball (both real and Haikyuu lol), he goes to games occasionally! Every time I think his volleyball era is over he randomly posts about it again lol. Idk who these men are lowkey but this was when he went to a game a couple of years ago:

- His favourite animals are dogs

- His favourite colour is blue

- If you go in for MBTI, he's an INFJ

- Huge sweet tooth!

(Source for the above 4: here)

- He is self-confessedly quite shy and finds it very difficult to talk to people he doesn't know (which might sound insane if you've only really gotten to know him during the Olympics but he's usually a lot more sedate than he was in that team event!)

- he does a little bit of landscape photography from time to time! it's listed as a hobby in his isu bio. he posts photos occasionally on threads for some reason, idk why he mainly puts it on there. there's a few on twitter too. But flowers, animals, and the sky seem to be his favourite subjects. this is my fave one of his:

Pokémon trainer Kagi!🩵🍂

Iconic scene and number one chibi moment

Kagi has a lot of chibified panels and half chibi early on when Harusono made him more cute and as the series goes on they become less frequent as he becomes more of a man (especially to Hirano) but also I find it funny that later on, she makes a point to make him taller than the others in the panel and only half chibifies him