There are two types of cultures in most organizations — the memo culture and the power point culture. This is not an idea original to me, but I cannot find the original reference, so my apologies to whoever expressed this idea so clearly. In memo cultures, writing and distributing memos and whitepapers is the pre-cursor to meetings. People are expected to absorb the information and be ready to discuss it in some detail. Power point cultures, on the other hand, rely on in meeting presentations that are often short of details and most people don’t get to see beforehand. Much critical thinking happens afterwards, and this can lead to people either not spending the requisite time on the issue or a bit of a clown show as decisions are altered as reality introduces information not in the power point.
You can probably tell that I prefer memo culture, even as I admit that most business and departments within them run on power point culture. Most people do not like to read or produce long form writing, even as long a decently thought-out memos or their equivalent. But I have found that such a culture encourages thinking up front and good, solid discussions. And, as a result, better plans and products. You don’t have to produce a formal memo, of course, but any artifact that encourages detailed thought serves the same purpose. Blindly following along to a power point that either has limited relevant information or so much information that you can barely read or comprehend it in the tiny slide it’s been crammed into does not.
The web used to be part of memo culture. You used to be able to find deep analysis, well thought out reviews, long discussions about almost anything you wanted, either in text or video format. Yes, there was a lot of nonsense, but even the nonsense generally had to try to adhere to the rules of memo culture if it wanted to convince. It was not perfect, but the slow eroding of that culture — the death of long form writing and personal blogs, the shortening of videos, the dominance of social media with its short, dashed off comment — has made the internet both less interesting, in my opinion, and driven more by emotional manipulation and trolling than in the past. We are all poorer for that change, I think, and Google’s new “AI” driven search is likely to come close to destroying what remains of memo culture on the internet.
Google is going to change its search so that you now see summaries of answers rather than direct links to answers. They want to keep you on their pages, regardless of your needs, and so intend to drive their imitative search results into your life. Short summaries to replace links to pages, scraping reviews and recommendation data so it can serve them up to you wholesale without you needing to actually read the reviews for yourself, determining an itinerary that is largely like all the other itineraries (remember, generative AI calculates what it thinks should come next, so these things even when they function well tend toward the average)instead of sending you to pages or people who can help you personally. No long form search for you!
This is bad in multiple ways, of course. Put aside the fact that imitative AI still has a massive hallucination problem (meaning it just makes shit up since it actually has no model of the world to judge truth or false by), even if it worked perfectly, it would still be bad for the internet and for internet users. Websites are already seeing massive drops in referrals form Google just from it’s limited beta of these features. They are justifiably concerned about what happens to them when Google stops emphasizing links and starts emphasizing its own regurgitation of the data it has scraped from them? Many of these websites will not survive. Google promises that this will not hurt quality content, but we have already seen that not to be true. Why believe them now?
Even more important, to me, is that links and exploration are going to be de-emphasized. These summary answers will only show links at the end, and some UI elements show the links hidden under “read more” style buttons. Google is encouraging people to accept short, sharp declarations as information rather than linking to and encouraging people to explore the information for themselves. Not only are the shortsightedly attacking the basis by which they get information to power their search (and thus their ads) they are hastening the change to power point culture. Even their promise to summarize emails for you is a symptom of that same rush to avoid complexity and deep though. Yes, many emails are crap. But many emails contain important detailed information that you may need to think about. No one should be too busy to think.
But that is the world Google and its ilk are encouraging. Spend time with them and only them, digesting only the most facile of information in the process, so they can make more money, at least in the short-term. Another away from exploration, discovery, and thought. Another step toward power point poisoning for all of society.
