Pluralistic: When Google's slop meets webslop, search stops (15 Jul 2025)
Cory Doctorow on how Google are desperate to maintain a facade of being a "growth" company:
Investors have metabolized the story that AI will be a gigantic growth area, and so all the tech giants are in a battle to prove to investors that they will dominate AI as they dominated their own niches. You aren't the target for AI, investors are: if they can be convinced that Google's 90% Search market share will soon be joined by a 90% AI market share, they will continue to treat this decidedly tired and run-down company like a prize racehorse at the starting-gate. [...]
There's a cringe army of AI bros who are seemingly convinced that AI is going to become superintelligent and save us from ourselves – they think that AI companies are creating god. But the hundreds of billions being pumped into AI are not driven by this bizarre ideology. Rather, they are the product of material conditions, a system that sends high-flying companies into a nosedive the instant they stop climbing. AI's merits and demerits are irrelevant to this: they pump AI because they must pump. It's why they pumped metaverse and cryptocurrency and every other absurd fad.
None of that changes the fact that Google Search has been terminally enshittified and it is misleading billions of people in service to this perverse narrative adventure. Google Search isn't fit for purpose, and it's hard to see how it ever will be again.
(via Fergal)
Tags: google growth ai capitalism investors enshittification via:fergal