Get the latest tech news

The Toilet Theory of the Internet


Google is serving an audience that wants quick and easy results. That may lead to disaster.

I’m distracted just like everyone else: Sometimes I read deeply, but the majority of my nonwork surfing involves inattentively scrolling through clicky articles to find the morsel that catches my eye, or pecking out some typo-riddled phrase about a home-improvement product into Google while walking from the parking lot into Lowe’s and nearly getting hit by a vehicle. One lasting legacy of Facebook’s communities pivot is that it effectively helped connect large groups of vaccine skeptics, election deniers, and disinformation peddlers, who were then able to coordinate and pollute the internet with lies and propaganda. Watching Google roll out these tools, knowing full well the realities of how people will use the products in the real world, I struggle to find a logic beyond a cynical short-term profit motive (or a desire not to be seen as losing the AI race).

Get the Android app

Or read this on Hacker News

Read more on:

Photo of internet

internet

Photo of toilet theory

toilet theory

Related news:

News photo

Why does everything on the internet look the same now?

News photo

Google's shift toward AI-generated search results, displacing the familiar list of links, is rewiring the internet — and could accelerate the decline of the 30+-year-old World Wide Web

News photo

Someone connected Windows XP to the internet, and it didn't survive long