5 ms·

> The company just made too much money from search Do you mean ads?

by mportela 3y ago

hermitcrab 3y ago
They are pretty much one and the same thing at this point.
- mportela 3y ago
  Yeah, but I think ads is bigger than search given that they reach people in other products (e.g. YouTube and things like Chromecast). I was going to say I didn't have any data to back this up but I just took a look at their annual earnings report [1] and they bundle these things as "Google advertising". [1] Page 2, https://abc.xyz/assets/95/eb/9cef90184e09bac553796896c633/2023q4-alphabet-earnings-release.pdf https://abc.xyz/assets/95/eb/9cef90184e09bac553796896c633/20...
- aisenik 3y ago
  The problem isn't search, though, it's the financialization of attention and the utter perversion of search into a mass-manipulation and surveillance economy. Plenty of people, perhaps with a belief that advertising is fundamentally immoral, prophesied the decline of freedom and agency that the capital-capture of tech in the post-millenial period would yield. And now we have new gods, far worse than the old ones, promising comfort and excess for the privileged-few willing to prioritize their simian self-interest and acquisitive avarice in exchange for developing these anti-human systems. It was easy to see in the 90s that the growth of networked multimedia would fundamentally change society. Perhaps it was futile to dream that we could loosen concentrated-capital's grip on culture and build a post-scarcity society through the collective strength universal access to information and communication could engender. What is the value of life in a world which perpetuates misery to maintain a society of serfs and slaves in a paradoxical fugue of hypervigilant pursuit of a neurochemical facade that poorly replicates the stability, agency, and creation our wondrous biological machines crave? We possess, as human animals, the ability to envision and build a societal organism that is driven by more elevated principles than "kill or be killed" and "got mine, fuck you." The notion that we can evolve beyond suffering as the default state, and that we should, is in conflict with the structures we built to reward the preferential displacement of suffering from those whose small, myopic desires of individual aggrandizement and domination drives their delusions, to those who would toil in search of survival through shared humanity. There's still hope but I increasingly believe that humans can only survive long-term by removing our simian impulses from the control loop. When we reach that point, will we build a casino or a garden?

> The company just made too much money from search Do you mean ads?

hermitcrab 3y ago

They are pretty much one and the same thing at this point.

mportela 3y ago
Yeah, but I think ads is bigger than search given that they reach people in other products (e.g. YouTube and things like Chromecast). I was going to say I didn't have any data to back this up but I just took a look at their annual earnings report [1] and they bundle these things as "Google advertising". [1] Page 2, https://abc.xyz/assets/95/eb/9cef90184e09bac553796896c633/2023q4-alphabet-earnings-release.pdf https://abc.xyz/assets/95/eb/9cef90184e09bac553796896c633/20...
aisenik 3y ago
The problem isn't search, though, it's the financialization of attention and the utter perversion of search into a mass-manipulation and surveillance economy. Plenty of people, perhaps with a belief that advertising is fundamentally immoral, prophesied the decline of freedom and agency that the capital-capture of tech in the post-millenial period would yield. And now we have new gods, far worse than the old ones, promising comfort and excess for the privileged-few willing to prioritize their simian self-interest and acquisitive avarice in exchange for developing these anti-human systems. It was easy to see in the 90s that the growth of networked multimedia would fundamentally change society. Perhaps it was futile to dream that we could loosen concentrated-capital's grip on culture and build a post-scarcity society through the collective strength universal access to information and communication could engender. What is the value of life in a world which perpetuates misery to maintain a society of serfs and slaves in a paradoxical fugue of hypervigilant pursuit of a neurochemical facade that poorly replicates the stability, agency, and creation our wondrous biological machines crave? We possess, as human animals, the ability to envision and build a societal organism that is driven by more elevated principles than "kill or be killed" and "got mine, fuck you." The notion that we can evolve beyond suffering as the default state, and that we should, is in conflict with the structures we built to reward the preferential displacement of suffering from those whose small, myopic desires of individual aggrandizement and domination drives their delusions, to those who would toil in search of survival through shared humanity. There's still hope but I increasingly believe that humans can only survive long-term by removing our simian impulses from the control loop. When we reach that point, will we build a casino or a garden?