Mastodawn

Catherynne M. Valente Jun 15, 2025

It’s hard to escape the dawning realization that part (or all) of the goal of Google’s AI Overview is to simply eradicate the concept of anyone else having any kind of website at all.

Why click on a link & explore when Google told you the answer & you didn’t know it was wrong?

Google’s long-con loss-leaders have been nothing but a ramp-up to replacing the entire internet with itself—& a single content creator they never have to pay.

Except in the energy of the whole planet.

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Olivier Roux (moose)Jun 16, 2025

@Catvalente @cstross except also that if websites go away, where will those AI get their fresh content from? It’s killing the golden goose.

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Charlie Stross Jun 16, 2025

@otolithe @Catvalente It's all about Line Must Go Up, though; nobody in the C-suite cares about the long term (by which I mean the > 90 day profit/loss term) because they might not get their bonus and then they'd be hit by truck-kun and isekai'd to a shard with no internet and a shitty System that insists their character class is "rogue (confidence trickster)".

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Olivier Roux (moose)Jun 16, 2025

@cstross @Catvalente which is why the Golden Goose is the chef’s kiss perfect metaphor for “modern” capitalism.

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Olivier Roux (moose)

@cstross @Catvalente the sad part is: until now, they’ve always found another goose to milk (🤔) and then kill… problem is: each goose they kill was actually feeding a lot of people.