In Yesterday's IO Keynote Google declared war on the remnants of the Web.

While they packaged it as a lot of "AI" talk what their whole approach of decontextualizing information, of taking away links to sources and instead producing some LLM generated response means is that they want to establish a new abstraction layer on the web. Where Zuckerberg with his Metaverse failed Google is starting the next attack: Your website, your work no longer matters.

Well it matters as (unpaid) raw material for their synthetic text extruders but not as cultural artifact you can share with others.

This is a literal revolution but one against the participatory web, against us: The goal is to take away the web and guide people into Google's abstraction on top of it. An abstraction they control and moderate. It's about monopolizing access to information.

If you care about the web, about people's ability to participate in it as more than mere passive consumers, this needs to be taken seriously. De-Googlifying your mental apparatus becomes more urgent today. Find other search engines, don't use their browser. Or wake up in a slopified AOL kind of environment.

@tante ok so we're at war with ... (checks notes) Google? Not Meta? Not Microsoft? Not Amazon? Not Oracle? Not Palantir? Not Apple? Not Tesla? Not X?

@codinghorror why not all of them? ;)

This is not a "just google is bad" kind of thing. It's just that the one company that structures most people's access to the web decided to change the contract unilaterally. I think that that specific thing needs highlighting while also burning Meta and X and all them to the ground. We can contain multitudes (of ways of defending access to information, expression and connection)

@tante why not all of us? aren't humans the original mistake?
@codinghorror I don't follow that train of thought to be honest. Where does this "humans are the problem" angle come from? I am talking about a specific move by a monopolist and a) the ways that people might try to protect themselves and b) ways of using collective power (as in politics) to protect the greater good
@tante @codinghorror you can't analyze this as a specific move by a monopolist in isolation from everything else happening
@callin @tante you guys wake me up when you've killed Meta off, then we'll talk turkey.