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 is there an alternative to google scholar out there? unsure if they will do anything to that imminently but that's where I find journal articles
@bluebells @tante
Check out https://openalex.org/ too. The interface is a bit clunky but it's the major open source of scholarly data.
(I used to recommend it unequivocally, but unfortunately their CEO and dev are all in on vibe coding so I have less confidence in their data. Still at least as good as the alternatives, though)
OpenAlex

@peter_mcmahan @bluebells @tante I just checked what OpenAlex knows about me, and apparently I work for the Ministry of National Defense of the People's Republic of China.

I didn't know that. Although, the constant bureaucratic control and surveillance that I'm subject to in #Ecuador feels like the popular conception of China.

@tuomov @bluebells @tante
Ha. Yeah author disambiguation on openalex still has some issues. It's actually one of the things that feels like it has gotten worse as the openalex team has relied more and more on slopcoding

@peter_mcmahan That's really sad. I've been loosely following OpenAlex since it started after Microsoft Academic shut down, sucks to hear they've gone down that path.

@tuomov @bluebells @tante