8 Clicks from Nowhere ䷀

Dispatches ⌂

Tag: search engines

Chapter List

  • Worth It

    We’ve all done it. We all should do it, at least occasionally. I do it ever few months, in fact.

    I Googled myself.

    For years, the result has been a modest list of links, many to my own websites, but often to a variety of articles from old jobs and public feeds from old accounts. It’s been a trip down memory lane.

    When I Googled myself the other day, though: I was greeted with an AI summary of my digital footprint, and a generated outline of who the search algorithm thought I was as a person.

    It wasn’t completely wrong, but it wasn’t a hundred percent accurate, either.

    As a guy who spends his free time in the pursuit of creative public expression I gotta admit: I’m a little frustrated that all the work I’ve put into building profile and connections online in the last twenty years has amounted to a couple paragraphs in an LLM.

    Search and social, after all, were the bridges between the stuff I was putting out there and the rest of the universe—but lately, not too many people are crossing it.

    “Keep making stuff.” I tell myself. “People will find it. And if it entertains just one person, inspires one other human to keep the spark alive… maybe it was worth it. Right?”

    This is a cross post from Of Poets & Processors.

  • Artificial Audience

    I’m writing this on the day that Google died.

    I know, I know. Google is a thriving company with years of profitability ahead of them. I should probably also disclose that I own exactly 0.0209 shares of Google currently valued at approximately eight American dollars. So, I get it. Google is probably not dead, at least not in the strictest sense of the word.

    But the company was founded on the idea of democratizing the internet by helping average people find websites built by other average people, people like me building websites like this, and as Google switches over to an AI-forward search engine that mostly summarizes answers and, as an afterthought only just might send one of those average people into a click… well, the idea of getting readers from search is basically dead in the water.

    I bring it up here and now because like most creative people who create things, we do it with the idea of sharing those things with average people. 

    If you are reading this it’s now unlikely that Google helped you find it.

    And as we increasingly commodify creativity and ever more turn to AI to be the gatekeeper of what is seen and known, it is a difficult distraction to overcome as a creative human being wondering what it is even the point of making stuff.

    It’s not wrong to feel that way. I have felt that way a lot lately.

    All I can say is that I also feel it is worth it to keep making stuff, sharing stuff, and looking past the gatekeepers of what was for a moment—but is no longer—the most democratic creative outlet humanity had ever built.