Most of my readers are probably familiar with the neologism “enshittification”, coined by writer Cory Doctorow in 2022; Wikipedia describes it thus:
Enshittification is a re-prioritization pattern where online product and service providers experience a decline in quality over time. It is observed as platforms transition through several stages: initially offering high-quality services to attract users, then shifting to favor business customers to increase profitability, and finally focusing on maximizing profits for shareholders at the expense of both users and business customers. This…results in a significant deterioration of the user experience…
Doctorow has also referred to the phenomenon by the less-colorful term “platform decay”, similar to the term “link rot” (which refers to a different, but not unrelated, form of internet decline). There’s little point in my discussing enshittification in a broad sense, because there’s already plenty on it online (especially by Doctorow himself); this is just a gripe stemming from one specific example, described by Wikipedia thus:
…Google Search…became dominant through relevant search results and minimal ads, then later degraded through increased advertising, search engine optimization, and outright fraud, benefiting its advertising customers…Doctorow…cites Google’s firing of 12,000 employees in January 2023, which coincided with a stock buyback scheme which “would have paid all their salaries for the next 27 years”, as well as Google’s rush to research an [ML] search chatbot, “a tool that won’t show you what you ask for, but rather, what it thinks you should see”...
When my blog was young (2010-14) it grew by leaps and bounds via Google, largely because I was writing about things virtually nobody else was, and my blog therefore stood out in search results. But once Google became the dominant search engine, it began to “downrank” results that led to my blog because I talk about bad, dirty, nasty sex, and Google had to protect its puritanical advertisers from having icky adult discussions of such topics show up near their precious ads. As a result, traffic reaching this site via Google dropped off to a shadow of its former volume. My personal use of Google, though, didn’t change all that much because I tend to use very specific searches and scroll down past the ads without even looking at them. In the past few years, however, it’s become harder to find any decent results from the engine, especially since the aforementioned machine learning systems were rudely inserted between my keyboard and the actual information I’m trying to find. If there’s a way to turn this irritant off, I certainly don’t know about it; the concept of “consent” seems foreign to the company whose slogan was once “Don’t be evil”.
But Google doesn’t limit itself to nonconsensual search interference, oh no; now it’s also fucking with my actual writing process. As I write, Google repeatedly “corrects” words that aren’t incorrect in the first place, thus changing the meanings of phrases and sentences (often from sense into nonsense). In one recent and especially-annoying example, I was typing the verb “trumps” (in the sense of one factor overriding a less important one, a metaphorical reference to the card game mechanism), only to have Google change it automatically and without my permission to “Trump’s” (it did it just now, but I left it this time). It’s not the first time I’ve seen this; my phone similarly capitalizes common nouns which happen to also be the names of tech corporations, as though normal people used those names more often than the common noun. But in the past, it only annoyed me while using voice to text on my phone, rather than slowing me down and requiring an extra proofreading stage in my post or tweet writing. I’ve searched online and there are no real solutions to the problem that I can find; every post claiming to have the solution is either ineffective or tells me to go to menus which don’t actually exist in the version of Chrome that appears on my computer. So this is, as I said above, mostly a gripe; it is, however, also a warning that should you see some idiotic phrase that makes absolutely no semantic sense in one of my essays, it isn’t that I’m growing senile; it’s just that I failed to catch one of Google’s “improvements” before the essay posted.
