I’m, generally speaking, off social media. I’ve been quiet quitting it for years now, which is to be honest an utter nonsense statement that I just wanted to say, but what I really mean is that I quit Facebook in 2016 and since then have not remain actively engaged on any traditional social media platform for more than a year or so without needing to take a break, and have now more or less come to terms with the fact that I don’t think I ever will. I’m just not built for it - interacting with hundreds or thousands of people daily and needing to deal with the nuances of interpersonal communications, particularly ones where so many people feel empowered to be unfiltered assholes because no one else feels real to them because its “just online”, its all way too much for my autistic self to handle, so I quit Facebook, joined twitter a few years later to promote my Twitch stream, then I was banned from twitter for being too political and making an unwise joke, then I returned, then I quit it again, then I got my old account unbanned by claiming (falsely) I was targeted by the woke mob, which worked because Elon Musk had just taken over, then I quit again, then I stayed off for several years until I decided to join bluesky, which I was on for just long enough to start building a following when I decided, yeah, fuck this shit, I’m out for good. Since then I haven’t done more than post “I’m not dead” until just recently, when I started writing this blog and posting it to bluesky in hopes anyone who used to follow me sees it and decides to follow me here.
Now why am I recounting all this? Well, to make it clear that I’m a bit out of the loop. I don’t know what mainstream discourse is about… anything, because I am cut off from mainstream discourse. I’m also physically disabled and rarely leave the house, so I don’t get much in person. I am active in exactly three discord channels, one of my few remaining friends from when I streamed on Twitch, one of the streamer I currently watch whenever I feel like being on Twitch, and one for Kermitment, a muppet podcast I support via patreon. I also watch youtube videos and occasionally comment on them, but that is literally my entire experience with anything that could be construed as social media now.
So I don’t know how people are reacting to the recent news that Google is killing Search and replacing it with an AI powered question and answer experience. I hope the response is swift and negative and that Google reverses course and finally this several year madness of people pretending fancy autocomplete can replace human thought is over, but I don’t know. All I know is that if and when Google actually rolls this out, the primary way I have found reliable information for the past thirty plus years of my life will be effectively dead: the search engine.
My family was super early adopters of the internet. I had my own we site in 1992 at the age of 5. My dad helped me with the HTML - which is to say he taught he what the basic tags meant, but I did my own tagging, and I wrote a care sheet for Tiger Salamanders which he hosted for me with the free hosting we got as part of our ISP subscription. The very first email I ever received was someone thanking me for the helpful information. I’ve been using search engines for basically my entire life that I can recall, first Altavista, then Yahoo, then Askjeeves, then finally Google, which I switched to sometime in highschool. I’ve never lived in a world where I couldn’t potentially find an accurate answer to something with somewhere between a few seconds and a few hours of effort, but with the death of Google search, we might be looking at that world.
I mean, it has competitors. I think Bing still exists. I’ve heard that there is a pay search called Kaagi? But Google has been so dominant, that I think it remains to be seen whether this will just kill Internet search altogether or at least transform it into a niche service most people won’t bother paying for. As much as I value the ability to find accurate answers through a search, I honestly don’t know if I would pay for it - I certainly believe in paying for services, but I don’t have much disposable income and I’m not really sure I can put a dollar value on what is a reasonable price for such a service, let alone a price I can afford. Like I said, I’ve never lived in a world where such cost any money, it was simply at my fingertips.
Google seems to be assuming that the vast majority of its consumers do not want a traditional search and will be happy with AI agents doing the work for them, even at the cost of accuracy of the results. I certainly am not one of those people. I still haven’t adopted the use of phone assistants, let alone AI agents themselves whose output cannot even be relied upon. But are most people aware of these downsides, and even if they are do they care enough to abandon google and use a competitor, assuming there even is an AI free competitor in a year or two? I honestly do not know, I’m not active enough in culture as a whole to know. But I fear that they do not care enough, and as a result, reliable information will no longer be at everyone’s fingertips, but only at the fingertips of those who care enough, and can afford to pay for the privilege. And that sucks.
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