Adwords killed the web

The real villain here is Google. Google found one of the very best business models of all time, skimming all the surplus profit off of the entire free open internet. This is the natural end state of that process.

The internet has enabled a truly distributed and multidirectional network, in which any node can be a content creator, broadcaster, and consumer. Any two nodes can have a 1:1 relationship; as a whole, the model can be described as many-to-many (M2M). However, despite the possibility of 1:1 relationships between producer-broadcasters and their audie... See more

It’s a real doozy. Everything we do online to create content these days is reliant on Google, the company, as an arbiter of what makes content “good”, which is really the decision of maybe a few hundred PMs and developers (now at home) in California, and entirely dependent on what’s going to continue to make Google profitable instead of what’s actu... See more

Unfortunately, advertising has been ingrained into the internet as the basic model for so long and to such an extent that it’s hard to envision online life without the systematic manipulation of attention and all its evils. So we’re bound to wind up here, at the bitter end of “content.” Which is a good excuse to withdraw deeper into books, movies,

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