"The most serious vulnerability that Trump has is that a large part of his base really hates Silicon Valley and is not interested in being replaced by machines. So it’s a monumental bait-and-switch that Trump has done with this immediate alignment with the billionaire class in Silicon Valley, and if the left can’t exploit that, then we’re doing something wrong."

-Naomi Klein
https://prospect.org/culture/2025-05-13-moment-of-unparalleled-peril-interview-naomi-klein/

"Who Broke the Internet?" is a new podcast from CBC Understood that I host and co-wrote - it's a four-part series that explains how the enshitternet came about, and, more importantly, what we can do about it. Episode one is out this week:

https://www.cbc.ca/listen/cbc-podcasts/1353-the-naked-emperor/episode/16144078-dont-be-evil

--

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this thread to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/05/08/who-broke-the-internet/#bruce-lehman

1/

If you remember the Google Plus days, you'll remember that every Google service you interacted with had some important functionality ripped out of it and replaced with a G+-based service. To make sure that happened, Google's bosses decreed that the company's bonuses would be tied to the amount of G+ activity each division generated. In companies where bonuses can amount to 90% of your annual salary or more, this was a powerful motivator.

12/

Those people's portfolios are extremely heavy on their employer's shares, and they stand to disproportionately lose in the event of a selloff. So they are *personally* motivated to keep the growth story alive.

That's where these growth-at-all-stakes maneuvers bent on capturing an adjacent sector come from.

11/

Managers of growth companies know how jittery their investors are, and they do everything they can to keep the growth story alive, as a matter of life and death.

But mass sell-offs aren't just bad for the company - it's also *very* bad for the company's key employees, that is, anyone who's been given stock in addition to their salary.

10/

Anyone holding growth stock knows that there will come a day when those stocks will transition, in an eyeblink, from being undervalued to being grossly *overvalued*, and that when that day comes, there will be a mass sell-off. If you're still holding the stock when that happens, you stand to lose bigtime:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/03/06/privacy-last/#exceptionally-american

So everyone holding a growth stock sleeps with one eye open and their fists poised over the "sell" button.

9/

For a company like Google, the promise of these bubbles is that it will be able to double or triple in size, by dominating an entirely new sector. With that promise comes peril: growth must eventually stop ("anything that can't go on forever eventually stops"). When that happens, the company's stock instantaneously goes from being a "growth stock" to being a "mature stock" which means that its P:E is way too high.

8/

But for Google - and other tech giants - the most enduring and convincing growth stories comes from moving into adjacent lines of business, which is why we've lived through so many hype bubbles: metaverse, web3, cryptocurrency, and now, of course, AI.

7/

For example, in 2019, Google intentionally made Search less accurate so that users would have to run multiple queries (and see multiple rounds of ads) to find the answers to their questions:

https://www.wheresyoured.at/the-men-who-killed-google/

Thanks to Google's monopoly, worsening search perversely resulted in increased earnings, and Wall Street rewarded Google by continuing to trade its stock with that prized high P:E.

6/

Google isn't going to appreciably increase the number of searchers, short of desperate gambits like raising a billion new humans to maturity and convincing them to become Google users (this is the strategy behind Google Classroom, of course). To continue posting growth, Google needs *gimmicks*.

5/

This means that a growing company can outbid their rivals when acquiring other companies and/or hiring key personnel, because they can bid with shares (which they get by typing zeroes into a spreadsheet), while their rivals need cash (which they can only get by selling things or borrowing money).

The problem is that all growth ends. Google has a 90% share of the search market.

4/

Growth is a heady advantage for tech companies, and not because of an ideological commitment to "growth at all costs," but because companies with growth stocks enjoy substantial, material benefits. A growth stock trades at a higher "price to earnings ratio" ("P:E") than a "mature" stock. Because of this, there are a *lot* of actors in the economy who will accept shares in a growing company as though they were cash (indeed, some might *prefer* shares to cash).

3/

These traps for the unwary aren't accidental, but neither are they placed there solely because tech companies think that if they can trick you into using their AI, you'll be so impressed that you'll become a regular user. To understand why you find yourself repeatedly fatfingering your way into an unwanted AI interaction - and why those interactions are so hard to exit - you have to understand something about both the macro- and microeconomics of high-growth tech companies.

2/

Have you noticed that all the buttons you click most frequently to invoke routine, useful function in your device have been moved, and their former place is now taken up by a curiously butthole-esque icon that summons an unwanted AI?

https://velvetshark.com/ai-company-logos-that-look-like-buttholes

--

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this thread to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/05/02/kpis-off/#principal-agentic-ai-problem

1/

Epic, makers of the wildly popular Fortnite video-game, have waged a one-company war against the "app tax" - the 15-30% rake that the mobile duopoly of Apple/Google take out of every penny we spend inside of apps.

--

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this thread to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/05/01/its-not-the-crime/#its-the-coverup

1/