Can Directories Rise Again? - The History of the Web

Google’s AI Hype Circle

Google has a serious AI problem. That problem isn’t “how to integrate AI into Google products?” That problem is “how to exclude AI-generated nonsense from Google products?”

“the secret list of websites” - Chris Coyier

Google is a portal to the web. Google is an amazing tool for finding relevant websites to go to. That was useful when it was made, and it’s nothing but grown in usefulness. Google should be encouraging and fighting for the open web. But now they’re like, actually we’re just going to suck up your website, put it in a blender with all other websites, and spit out word smoothies for people instead of sending them to your website. Instead.

I concur with Chris’s assessment:

I just think it’s fuckin’ rude.

Gas Town and Bullet Hell – Petafloptimism

Matt has some smart reckons on the relationship between time and technology:

The factory bell, the railway timetable, the telegraph wire, the always-on smartphone — each imposed a new temporal discipline, each produced its own characteristic form of exhaustion, and each was eventually (partially, imperfectly) domesticated through a combination of regulation, design, and collective action.

It’s Not AI. It’s FOMOnetization.

FOMO is a feeling. But it’s also a business model—and increasingly, one of the more successful ones. Fear, in general, makes people much easier to separate from their money. It’s perfectly suited to this moment of ubiquitous grift, where everything feels like a lottery ticket or a multi-level marketing scheme.

It’s even more perfectly suited for “the age of AI,” which squeezes economic FOMO from both sides. AI could make you wildly rich (the first person to start a billion-dollar company with zero employees!) or leave you hopelessly destitute (part of the looming “permanent underclass”). Which one do you want to be? Smash that like button, sign up for my online course, and use my new AI-powered business platform!

Progress Without Disruption - Christopher Butler

We’ve been taught that technological change must be chaotic, uncontrolled, and socially destructive — that anything less isn’t real innovation.

The conflation of progress with disruption serves specific interests. It benefits those who profit from rapid, uncontrolled deployment. “You can’t stop progress” is a very convenient argument when you’re the one profiting from the chaos, when your business model depends on moving fast and breaking things before anyone can evaluate whether those things should be broken.

We’ve internalized technological determinism so completely that choosing not to adopt something — or choosing to adopt it slowly, carefully, with conditions — feels like naive resistance to inevitable progress. But “inevitable” is doing a lot of work in that sentence. Inevitable for whom? Inevitable according to whom?