Elf Sternberg

I’ve encountered two perfect examples of enshittification in the past 24 hours, both related to Google. And let’s just start off with this: Google has a monopoly on search. Sure, there are others, like Microsoft Bing or DuckDuckGo, but for all intents and purposes Google is everywhere: email, maps, search, translate, the list of features Google provides to you, and from which Google extracts information to sell to advertisers, creating for Google a loop so “virtuous” (in Capitalist-speak) that Google can now do whatever the hell it wants with search and there’s nothing you can do about it.

Professionally useless

I was writing documentation at work, and our current product is a browser-based single-page application. This means that when you navigate around the system, instead of going from page to page, just parts of the page change; it’s a subtle difference that means a lot to web developers and probably not much to everyone else. At my last job, we called the main part, the thing you care about, the “page” and the whole thing the “frame,” but that didn’t sit well with me. I wanted to know what terms designers used for those things.

I asked Google, and I asked Bing. “Glossary of Single Page Application terms,” “Term for the main part of a single page application,” “Glossary of web design terms.” I was getting desperate, because every single one of those queries gave me the exact same useless answers.

Google’s AI gave me the definition of a single page application.

The replies were equally worthless:

• (Wikipedia) Single Page Application


• What is a Single Page Application?


• Anatomy of Single Page Application


• What is a Single Page Application?


• Pros and Cons of a Single Page Application?


• Single Page Applications: What They Are And Why You Use Them

All of this beginner level dreck that’s only tangentially related to the question I asked, and despite that “anatomy” response, none of these actually answered any of my questions. And the Google page was so damned cluttered it bewildered the hell out of me.

Finally, after about half an hour of this, in desperation I went went to ChatGPT.

Me: In web design, a page contains a single, semantic unit of information. When someone clicks a link, that link takes them to a new page with a different semantic unit. In a Single Page Application, the “page” doesn’t change, only the important part, that semantic unit. Is there a common industry term for that semantic unit?

ChatGPT: Yes, in the context of Single Page Applications, the part of the web page that changes dynamically without requiring a full page reload is often referred to as the “view” or “viewport.”

Armed with this information, I was able to find not just other pages confirming this, but including whole glossaries of industry-standard terminology.

I shouldn’t have had to ask ChatGPT. Google says it knows enough about me to advertise to me effectively; if that’s so, it should also know that I’m not a friggin’ beginner when it comes to web development, or even SPA’s. So why hand me all the dreck?

Worse yet, that answer came from somewhere. Someone else wrote it, ChatGPT just barfed it up. I would like to know who they are, and what else they know, and give them the kudos they deserve. I’m not interested in reading ChatGPT and don’t want to read something no one bothered to write. By erasing the credit for creating this answer, ChatGPT decentivizes people from creating their own answers.

Personally useless

We just got back from a two-week vacation and there’s not a lot of food in the house, so this morning I decided I wanted Cream of Wheat. That’s an actual brand name; in fact, in the US it’s pretty much the only brand name known for the breakfast cereal known as [farina](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Farina_(food). It’s a staple, and it’s estimated that as many as 1 million Americans eat it for breakfast at least once a week or so. There’s also a standard base recipe for the three main ingredients: milk, farina, and salt.

I couldn’t remember the amounts of each. So I searched: “Cream of Wheat Recipe.”

I got back a page full of recipies for “Things you can make with cream of wheat.” Pies. Cakes. Complex desserts using fruits and whipped cream. I tried “Cream of Wheat Base Recipe.” The brand page didn’t appear on the first page of Google, but it didn’t matter: Their recipe page doesn’t have the base recipe either!

Finally, I hit on the right term: “Cream of Wheat ratios.” That got me what I wanted, but then it lacked the recipe cook times! At least with a couple of those terms I was able to find that next.

Good Grief. I’m trying to imagine my mother, who’s in her mid-80s now, trying to navigate such a terrible, terrible experience just to make something really basic. Unlike the above problem, where I had an advanced question and Google gave me really basic answers, this was where I had a really basic problem and Google gave me advanced answers. Imagine anyone who’s not completely web-savvy trying to navigate this, and you’ll start to imagine the scale of the problem.

Professionally dispiriting

Google CEO Sundar Pichai recently said that Google is planning for “the post-search world.” Pichai believes that most search will be replaced by “summarization machines,” these AIs that suck in all the knowledge we’ve been putting on the Internet and summarize it into some kind of coherent explanation.

This makes me furious. Everything I’ve done over the past 30 years isn’t just free material from which Google can make a profit and leave me with nothing. A world like that gives me no reason to write anymore, if Google can take my reputation along with my knowledge.

“Pretend that I’m nine years old. In Ru Paul’s voice, explain to me how derivatives of regular expressions can be made to work in a language without a garbage collector.” Like, NO, Fuck You Google, that is my work and my discovery and you may not just steal it from me and treat it like it’s universal knowledge. Point people at me, let them learn from me, but don’t fucking pretend the discoverer doesn’t deserve to be recognized alongside the discovery.

Closing off the future

Cory Doctorow points out that platforms “enshittify” by going through three stages: First, they provide services to their users, connecting them to resources. Then, they slowly evolve systems to get more out of the users, making their lives worse as they deliver more and more to the resources, because it’s the resources that pay the bills. And finally, once they’ve sewn up enough users that the cost of switching to a different platform would be unimaginably painful, they start to abuse the resources.

Google’s vision is the final step: kill everything. Nobody will want to produce new intellectual content and put it on-line, because Google will just suck it up and make everything awkward, endearing, vituperative, argumentative, or entertaining about it just disappear. It’ll just be the facts. No new jokes, no new music, no new and interesting stories. Just machine-generate summaries of them, the humanity completely polished off, leaving a glittering machine world we don’t belong in.

"The government should be run like a business!"

For eight years, we had a government run like a business. A business's mission is to make a profit before everything else, but a government's mission is different. A government's charter is to provide the foundation on which its citizens and businesses can thrive. You know, "To provide for the common defense, promote the general welfare, and secure the blessings of liberty."

To succeed, both require exceptionally talented, exceptionally detail-oriented people making the best decisions they can, always with both eyes on the mission, with the best information they can possibly get.

We had that.

We're about to find out what it's like when we don't.