The only pushback I’ve gotten is… here? Almost all of the replies on Bluesky were positive. My email is overflowing with people appreciating the piece.
Interesting that you're mainly seeing pushback from people who are on the actual open web.
The decline of search engines was a self-inflicted wound by sales/marketing departments that would rather show people more ads than filter out the SEO chaff, because really filtering out chaff takes too much effort, but if you filter just enough to keep people from giving up, they'll scroll through more pages on your site and see more ads.
The same departments are pushing "AI" chat as a replacement. And making money off of the SEO people who use LLMs to generate more slop sites, which further degrades search indexes, which pushes more people to AI queries, which will eventually get poisoned by the slop sites too, but that just means they'll spend more time feeding questions to the panopticon, which can show them more ads.
To me, being "Pro-America" includes acknowledging our faults and our past mistakes, believing we can and should do better, and trying to do so.
I don't think that's what Carr means, either.
I hope you've pointed this out with Bluesky's continued support of Jesse Singal. Choosing to allow transphobia and dismiss complaints about it in the name of neutrality (and further insisting that "this person keeps saying I shouldn't exist" is on the same level as "I prefer pancakes to waffles") is exactly the same scenario.
...is that even in real marketplaces, advertising/propaganda can be stronger than quality. A while back I was thinking of the old "never underestimate Microsoft on the marketing" aphorism and realized we should have seen it coming that the "marketplace of ideas" would be dominated by the loudest, not by the best.
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The decline of search engines was a self-inflicted wound by sales/marketing departments that would rather show people more ads than filter out the SEO chaff, because really filtering out chaff takes too much effort, but if you filter just enough to keep people from giving up, they'll scroll through more pages on your site and see more ads. The same departments are pushing "AI" chat as a replacement. And making money off of the SEO people who use LLMs to generate more slop sites, which further degrades search indexes, which pushes more people to AI queries, which will eventually get poisoned by the slop sites too, but that just means they'll spend more time feeding questions to the panopticon, which can show them more ads.
To me, being "Pro-America" includes acknowledging our faults and our past mistakes, believing we can and should do better, and trying to do so. I don't think that's what Carr means, either.
Bluesky and Transphobia
I hope you've pointed this out with Bluesky's continued support of Jesse Singal. Choosing to allow transphobia and dismiss complaints about it in the name of neutrality (and further insisting that "this person keeps saying I shouldn't exist" is on the same level as "I prefer pancakes to waffles") is exactly the same scenario.
The other problem with the "marketplace" metaphor...
...is that even in real marketplaces, advertising/propaganda can be stronger than quality. A while back I was thinking of the old "never underestimate Microsoft on the marketing" aphorism and realized we should have seen it coming that the "marketplace of ideas" would be dominated by the loudest, not by the best.