Skip to content

April 3rd notes

ending term with a look at google - fears over computer access and fraud + the real world consequences - enshittification of everything

Slide - earliest screenshot of google (1998) - copyrighted by standford U - organizing information online

  • 1990s vs 2020s web experience

  • GOOGLE

    • in search of ways to exist on the web
    • larry page begins google as a dissertation on the mathematics of the web
      • inspired by the way academic literature has backlinks (citations)
      • "if i can operationalize that, the backlinks that point to what's important"
      • sets up webcrawler
      • the idea of surfacing important information from a structural perspective rather than keyword approach
    • originally AGAINST advertising
    • dot com boom journalism*
    • auctions for keywords + advertising
    • early friendship between yahoo + google (stock in exchange for dropping a lawsuit)
    • Famously has to bring in parental supervision for 2001 CEO, Page.
    • in 4 years (1999 -> 2003) the amount to buy google goes from 1 million --> 3 billion
    • dot com boom has crested by 2004
    • google has its ipo by 2004, valued at 52 billion by 2005.
    • yahoo, the early darling of the internet, fixes to build their own search engine (2004/2005)
    • web 2.0, instead of building a site you are logging in to someone else's
    • 2008 click fraud is a big problem
    • google is using cookies to track individuals by 2008 (trying to mitigate the ad fraud)
    • by 2010s google buys up other services or launches similar services to kill off competititors and keeps bad news under wraps.

  • the web as history vs history of the web

    • communication studies / theories of mass communications
    • John Thompson: “mass communication” -> “the institutionalized production and generalized diffusion of symbolic goods via the transmission and storage of information/communication." (1990)
    • search engines can fit into this definition, but they dont produce narratives or stories.
    • 2006, "google is simply an aggregator of information" (eric schmidt)
    • they created the lens in which we view the web "i got it off of google"
    • search engines do not access the whole web - things that are not accessible to the web crawler. favouring certain types of content.
    • kremlinology
    • tech is intertwined with the social, political, and economic context in which is arises. (E van couvering, 2008)

  • network science (hot in the early 2000s!)

    • how to get value out of the web

  • the problem for someone putting stuff online - attention scarcity

    • sitting in the spot of intermediation between our eye balls and where we wanna go
    • Stop shitting in the well
    • trusting results is a problem

  • early google webcrawlers

    • travel the links on a webpage
    • popular hub websites vs millions of low ranking websites
    • this process was framed as democracy in its early days
    • google = democracy (links are a type of vote)
    • well linked pages are more prominent
    • mainstream voices are reproduced and reinforced
    • how we know google now vs. then
    • original goal of organizing the worlds data has mixed motivations
      • stay on their site, but click on the advertising
    • paid placements (links within search results) as a move away from banner ads
    • advertisements blended in with actual content
    • birth of search engine optimization

  • Safiya noble -> hypervisibility as a means of rendering black women and girls invisible. TECHNOLOGY IS NOT NEUTRAL

    • structurally and algorithmically we are pushed towards the status quo.
    • studies google from a perspective based in black intersectional feminism
      • the way that different identities intersect, particularly online
    • searching white girls vs. black girls showing racially charged pornography for the latter.
    • google responded instantly so that they could not replicate these searches.
    • our own identity as we intersect with google (and culturally with the search engine) shows how all these horrible currents are pushed to the surface

  • recently firing of ethics researchers

    • 2007 a company called metaweb launched a project called freebase - an open databasa that expressed data not in relational data, but as a graph.
    • power of network analysis to traverse the graph to surface answers (triples)
    • google buys this in 2010, contextual clues aiding in search engine results.
    • announces knowledge graph in 2012 -> web on top of a web.
      • drawing on wikipedias materials without attribution (reducing use of wikipedia)
    • annotated vision of the world --> core data for large language models.
    • take in everything they can without attribution or recompense.
    • ethical researchers are fired for pointing this out (breaking copyright, don't be evil, etc.)
    • too much money to be ethical

  • aaron swartz (rip) and his influence, work, and impact

    • "Aaron's act was undoubtedly political activism, and taking such an act in the physical world would, at most, have a meant he faced light penalties akin to trespassing as part of a political protest. Because he used a computer, he instead faced long-term incarceration." - EFF
    • this brings us into the last decade-ish

  • Last basic concept, the enshittification

    • term coined by cory doctorow
    • we are seeing how platforms die.
    • Make a platform attractive, hold users hostage, abuse business customers to claw back the value for themselves.

  • Amazon for example!

    • Sells goods and ships below cost, website is clean.
    • get big fast
    • locks you in with ebooks and audiobooks
    • making it hard for original users to leave (cost switching)
    • amazon prime is "free shipping" so why leave?
    • amazon marketplace = trapping businesses by subsidizing their costs
    • can't buy them anywhere but amazon, though
    • amazon traps businesses and consumers
      • preferred placement = extra fees
    • surpluses directed to users, then once locked in they go to suppliers, once locked in they go to shareholders.

  • Facebook's enshittification ("'They trust me. Dumb fucks' - Zuckerberg")

    • originally created to creep on girls
    • early log in data was used to try and breach harvard crimson student reporters
    • facemash inspires facebook but without the hot or not feature
    • you can't take your social graph out of facebook
    • shoving posts from companies/accounts you don't follow onto your feed
    • readers don't go to the publications, completely dependent on facebook
    • facebook & google have an illegal agreement where FB gets an illegal advantage in advertising auctions in exchange for FB canning its own service.

  • end-to-end principle (the idea that networks should be designed so that willing speakers' messages would be delivered to willing listeners' (doctorow)

  • Give things away, make it hard to leave, give you away.

    • "Advertising funded search engines will be inherently biased towards the advertisers and away from the needs of consumers" (Page and Brinn 1998)

difference between content creators and writers/artists - perhaps the difference between the relationship with the tool - sharing ideas and monetization - platform receiving monetization (pushing content) / making money FOR a platform

  • Drawing class to a close around the 2012 mark
    • break throughs in neural networks and the emergence of convolutional neural networks for image classification leading to improvements in performance.
    • ai is scary.

We made it to the end!

  • Wednesday will be building elements for final memex
  • themes and intersections
  • head start on final journey
  • easter monday = contractually obligated to be in class (we only come if help needed!)