How do we survive the media apocalypse? (part 2)
More scenes from a somewhat absurd apocalypse
Happy Thursday Searchers,
We have a new one for you.
Last week, Google announced a fundamental change to how the site will work, which will likely have dire effects for the news industry. When you use Google now, the site will often offer AI-generated summaries to you, instead of favoring human-written articles. We talk to Platformer’s Casey Newton about why this is happening, why publishers are nervous, and about a secret new internet you may not have heard of, a paradise to which we may all yet escape.
The Board Meeting is next week, on Zoom!
As we mentioned on the episode, we are right heading towards the end of Season 1 of Search Engine. And so, we are hosting board meeting with all of our paid subscribers on FRIDAY, MAY 31ST to discuss show business. Friday, May 31st. At 1pm Eastern Time.
We’ll be sending out a Zoom link to join, week-of.
This is only for our paid subscribers, people who are members of Incognito Mode. If you’re not signed up, there’s still time. Go to searchengine.show.
Further reading from the episode
Search Engine - How do we survive the media apocalypse? (Part 1)
Platformer - Google's broken link to the web
404 Media - Why Google is Shit Now
404 Media - Google Search Really Has Gotten Worse, Researchers Find
Decoder - Google CEO Sundar Pichai on AI-powered search and the future of the web
Google’s I/O Presentation (You can see the full DJ set here)
Tiny programming note
For those who keep close track, we were actually set to publish a double episode this week, but we had to move it. The double episode will appear, and we’re very excited to share it. But, it’s gonna air sometime in the future. Very mysterious…
That’s it for us this week. Thank you, as always, for listening.
PJ
The best explanation of the fediverse I've heard is that it's like email. No one cares if you're on a gmail or yahoo or aol or some company's email system; you've got an email address and it can send and receive to any other email address. The underlying protocol allows all the different systems to interact with one another. The fediverse wants to do that same sort of thing with other units of content (i.e., whatever a tweet is called now, a video, a photo, a blog post, a podcast, etc.). It doesn't matter where exactly that thing is posted within the greater fediverse, you can view it within its own system (i.e., just on Mastodon for tweet-like bits) or however you like to interact with the fediverse (you've got a client that will pull in all of the different sorts of content regardless of where they're posted).
I thought you guys were saying “feta-verse” 🧀