With the selection of Big Thinker Cory Doctorow this year ABA Techshow continued its practice of featuring brilliant keynote speakers. Longtime Internet users will recognize the pattern Doctorow described. AOL became worthless. Yahoo became irrelevant. The content-to-ad ratio on Facebook is overwhelming. Doctorow calls this predictable degradation “En****tification.”
Danielle Braff‘s article in ABA Journal has a summary of Doctorow’s key insights:
Initially, tech platforms are created to be good to their users, or else no one would use them, he said. They suck you in, Doctorow said.
Take Google, for example. It spent an unbelievable amount of money to snag users, offering them the opportunity to use Google to receive instant answers to searches in a way they had never experienced in the past. Google was magical, Doctorow said. . . .
As soon as the public was hooked on Google, the company began abusing the end users to attract businesses, such as advertisers and web publishers. This is when ads started popping up on Google, he said.
But by 2019, Google’s search engine had grown as much as it possibly could. So they rigged the ad market, making searches worse on purpose to reduce the system’s accuracy so users must try multiple searches to get the answers they need, he said. “We’re all still using Google,” Doctorow pointed out.
The Kennedy-Mighell Report podcast has more on Doctorow’s concept of “En****tification.”