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- [00:01]
A
Support for the gray area comes from Fetch pet insurance. Are you a pet owner? Every six seconds, a pet owner in the US gets hit with a vet bill over $1,000. Always an unwelcome surprise. That's according to a study from a pet insurance company. That's where Fetchpet comes in. Fetch is the most complete pet insurance for dogs and cats. According to consumeradvocate.org you get paid back up to 90% of vet bills at any vet in the US and Canada, with claims paid in as little as two days. Go to fetchpet.com save right now for your free quote. That's fetchpet.com save.
- [00:46]
B
A lot of companies are investing in AI, but most only have a small group actually using it and an even smaller group who are really seeing the value. Superhuman fixes that. From the makers of Grammarly. Superhuman AI lives in every tool your team already uses for instant help with drafts, summaries and more. So habits and proficiency form naturally when every person on your team works at their best, that's when your AI investment starts to compound. See what Superhuman can do@superhuman.com. Welcome to the Gray Area. I'm Myles Bryan, subbing in for Sean Illing. My guest today is Ryan Broderick. Ryan's a journalist and a podcast host who's been covering the Internet for many years. Many years. I asked Ryan to come on the show to talk about Google Zero. That's a term for the day when Google search results may become 100% AI generated. Something that the businesses and communities that rely on Google to be found are pretty worried about. Ryan and I talk about how Google shaped the Internet, how the Internet changed to be more popular with Google, and why Ryan is surprisingly optimistic about our future online. Ryan Broderick, welcome to the Gray Area.
- [02:17]
C
Thanks for having me. Happy to be here.
- [02:19]
B
So you write a newsletter called Garbage Day. You host a podcast called Panic World. What do you cover?
- [02:25]
C
I tell people I cover Internet culture, but I don't know what that means anymore. I think that just is culture, sometimes politics, but all of it is through the lens of the screens we use and what powers those screens. And I've been doing that kind of coverage for close to two decades at this point, which feels crazy to say, but yeah, right now everything is everything. So I'm always covering a little bit of everything.
- [02:49]
B
I've been a huge fan of your work and you've been writing recently about how your beat your world. The Internet is undergoing sort of a a sea change that its architecture for the last quarter century is Shifting, maybe going away. Tell us what Google 0 means and what that might mean for the Internet.
- [03:07]
C
Sure. Google zero is the idea that in the future, someday, maybe soon, all of the traffic going to your website, websites in general, from Google will go to zero, largely due to AI. AI will just summarize all the links, and you won't get any traffic. And the assumption is that that's a very bad thing, possibly the end of the Internet, as you know, it's. And what I have been wondering recently is if that's true. What if it's actually a good thing? What if it's actually a way to break free from a Byzantine monopolistic nightmare that we've been living under for the last 25 years? So I'm nervous, but I'm actually kind of excited about Google zero.
- [03:43]
B
For people who aren't super concerned about Google traffic, who maybe are lucky enough to not know what the acronym SEO stands for, how might, you know, Google going to zero change their lives?
- [03:55]
C
Sure. I'm going to guess that the majority of people listening to this, watching this, have never experienced an Internet without what I would call the virtuous cycle of search engines and especially Google. Maybe you used AOL or yahoo in the 90s, but most of your life has been determined by Google sending people to your website and you doing or not doing certain things to get those people to look at your website, or if they. If you don't have a website. All of the websites you visit are being influenced by this virtuous cycle. So this is true for recipes, this is true for even people posting on Reddit. They're all doing it with the hopes of being seen. That is sort of how communication technology works. You want to be seen, you want to be heard, you want to be read. And Google still is the kind of largest arbiter of how that works. But if you remove the traffic or if you remove the ability to even pay for the domain that you're putting your website on, all that stuff starts to dry up. And AI is promising you, oh, you won't have to worry about that, because the AI will absorb everything. But AI doesn't fix this either, because if this is where you'd go, like, full corkboard, right? But it's like if AI starts now, and let's say it can see every single thing on the Internet and absorb it and spit it back to you as a chatbot, that's great. It's not sending any traffic back to those websites, but it's not going to send any traffic to New Websites, Right. So that's when you start to get into the death spiral of this, where it's like, okay, we're going to have a perfectly working AI in 2027 that knows everything up until 2027. But anything after 2027 will have no incentive to be put on Google or on the Internet if there's no way to pay for just the maintenance of your servers or something. Right.
- [05:49]
B
So
- [05:51]
C
if the companies like Google in particular, can't figure out how to pay for new information being added to these AIs, it's not going to work. And they have not come up with an incentive that is better than have a website, have people go to it, put ads on it or subscriptions or a tip jar or whatever. And if you can't find something to replace it and you are intent on replacing it, the whole thing breaks down. Wow.
- [06:14]
B
So you're describing a situation that sounds pretty scary. Like Google. Google was the concrete on the street that we've all been living on for the last quarter century. And we're heading towards a rapidly nearing future where that concrete's going to give way. That sort of the order that it's created is going to collapse or change. And it's unclear, like, how we're going to exist together on the Internet when that happens. But before we, you know, get into all the implications of that and like, whether there's anything that might. That might be gained coming out of it, can you kind of rewind the clock back to what the Internet was like before Google? I mean, there was an Internet before Google, right?
- [06:53]
C
There was the Internet kind of always had a way to find stuff, actually. Okay, like there were directories, there were early, what you would call social networks, things like Usenet. There were message boards, there were web rings where you would say, like, go to this blog, cause I like it. And then that blog goes, go to that blog, cause I like that. And you know, you'd trade links back and forth. You'd email stuff around. All that stuff has been there since almost the very beginning. In the mid-90s, you start to see the rise of both search engines and portals. AOL would be an example of like a portal. So you'd have an email and then there would be a homepage with the weather widget and Gilbert comics. Yeah. And then you had Yahoo arrive. And I'm spinning through this, you know, on a basic level. But basically Yahoo had an interesting thing where it didn't have what we would call like a search algorithm. It was sort of like just ranking websites Based on keywords over time. It was very simplistic and Google arrives in the late 90s.
- [07:58]
B
But. But before Google arrives, like you're describing how kind of proto search engines worked, but for people online, you know, from what I've read and from what I even remember, like they kind of interacted in small, you know, communities that just got lucky in finding each other. Right. Like sort of like a series of walled gardens or series of enclosed spaces and like, you know, rapid growth or like new people discovering your message board about, you know, hardwood floors or whatever was fairly rare, Right?
- [08:28]
C
Yeah. I tried to find like early examples of viral content pre Google and it is hard. There are some. But it was a lot of fandom communities. Like the X Files had like a pretty big Internet presence. Star Trek, like it, it. It's like the stereotypes were sort of true in that sense. You also had a lot of professionals just sending emails, a lot of email chain letters. I was trying to find like archives of those because my older relatives, you know, Comic Sans, fwd, ftwd, fwd, Re, re. You know, and there's a lot of that and a lot of communities sending communities to and from each other. Okay, this is a little later in the timeline, but like a notorious example is a bunch of users on the something awful message board got mad about a moderation decision and then they left and made 4chan and they left together.
- [09:23]
B
4chan being sort of a notorious kind of. Yeah, nihilistic forum that has a lot of people who've committed violent crimes on it.
- [09:34]
C
Just a lot of bad stuff, a lot of that. But that, that sort of migration was happening. Often you'd have a message board and then you'd have like a bunch of people who got banned for that message board, make their own and be like, I hate that message board. And then they're their own community. Yeah, you had a lot of like early video game communities. Game FAQs, I think was pretty early to the game. A lot of web cartoonists sort of appear in the late 90s and they start building communities. It's a lot of like, you don't have bloggers really until the two to late 90s, early 2000s.
- [10:01]
B
But these are like archipelagos of communities. Right. Like we're, you know, and they're spreading
- [10:06]
C
very organically, I should say.
- [10:07]
B
Was this how the people who were really excited and utopian about the Internet and its early days and iterations, how they hoped things would go, was this sort of like the kind of, you know, sort of achieving the kind of philosophical aims of the Internet in terms of bringing people together, or was this sense of, like. Was there a sense of like, oh, it's like, too difficult to, like, we're, you know, we're not sort of connecting people as easily as we'd like to be.
- [10:32]
C
So I have a friend, Jamie Cohen, who. He's a professor, and he has an actual PhD in what you would call meme theory. And he has a great bit on this where he's done a lot of work on, like, the early techno utopian movement. And his sort of joke is always, like, they came up with two things. One was teledildonics, or the idea of, like, having remote sex with each other. And they were very into that. And then they were very into the idea of, like, VR. Like, Timothy Leary was very interested in the idea of VR being digital acid. But my friend Jamie's joke is, like, the very first thing that somebody did with VR was build a simulator of an office.
- [11:12]
B
Huh.
- [11:12]
C
Which is, like, I think the entire promise and failure of the techno utopia movement in one idea. We've built this incredible technology. You can live inside the computer and it looks like your office, you know, but in terms of, like, actual social networking, yes, there were people who were very excited about it. It was very. I mean, it was very big in, like, academic networks, I should say. Like, you know, the earliest uses of email were happening in government, you know, governmental offices and academic spaces.
- [11:38]
B
You know, at what point does Google go from, like, another search engine, maybe a more popular search engine than what came before it, to kind of the thing that determines how we are on the Internet?
- [11:48]
C
What set it apart was that it was not just raw search. It wasn't just, here's a directory of links, and then you can search that directory. It had a very sophisticated way of not just showing you content, but ranking that content. And it was able to grow very quickly by the way it indexed websites. So the story that I had heard was, like, Yahoo. Was very manual. Google was much more limber about sort of absorbing the Internet and absorbing what was on Google. And so it was able to grow just much faster. The tech was just better.
- [12:24]
B
And how did that, you know, change the experience of. Of using Google or just. Or using the Internet at all?
- [12:30]
C
I mean, according to the research that I came across, what it did was it took everything that was happening, you know, in darker corners and just shined a flashlight on them. So, you know, a really good example would be, like, I tell you about the dancing baby on Ally McBeal last night. Wow, Throwback. Yeah. And then you go and you Google dancing baby. And then you find it and you put it in your email. And then people are like, I gotta know where that came from. And you Google dancing baby. And so it creates like this meme cycle. And, and there are early pieces of Internet culture that I think would absolutely qualify as memes, you know, happening because of that.
- [13:16]
B
And like, before, before Google, like, maybe fans of the 1990s legal procedural Ally McBeal who like, have their own message board and our friends, virtual friends, they might have discussed the dancing baby or posted pictures or whatever, but it would have like stayed there. And then in the Google era, suddenly this is something that, like, you know, your, your uncle, your grandma might find.
- [13:38]
C
Yeah, this is like, hard to wrap your head around. But, you know, there, there wasn't a way to search like dancing baby gif. Like, how would you do that? Like, there, there was no Google images until like, what, 2002 or three when JLo's dress dropped. So how, how would you. You'd have to go find a message board thread where someone had. You have. You'd have to be on a message board thread and see the dancing baby gif. Also, like, the average person back then couldn't have just easily made an animated gif. So like, if you think, if you really go through it step by step, you. You realize how like, crazy that is that like Internet culture had to be seen or sent to you or shared to you directly at that time. Google starts to change that by making things discoverable.
- [14:22]
B
Huh. And so does Google in it, like, enable the culture or does it like create shape the culture itself? You know, like, is it. Is the Google upstream of the culture or is it just sort of like the pipes that it's flowing through?
- [14:38]
C
At first it's the pipes or the flashlight. It's the. These conversations are happening now. You can find them. Okay, if you lose the thread that has the thing on it you want, if you remember some of the words, you can type it in, maybe find it, Then it starts to influence the culture. And that's true for every platform. It shows you what, according to them is already there. People are already doing this, we're providing a service. Then they start to tweak how you use their service, what you have to do to get access to their service, how you optimize for their service, how you are incentivized through Google AdSense or traffic or whatever. And then people start to change their behavior around those incentives. And that is true for everything.
- [15:17]
B
The infrastructure that we don't see, but that surfaces new things, allows things to become popular with a wide audience, and brings people to content and communities that they wouldn't have found otherwise. And you have written about how that's been incredibly good in a lot of cases. You called it the virtuous cycle.
- [15:36]
C
Right before the pandemic, I was sort of looking into like electronic music gear and I found some great blogs, sort of talking about different synthesizers and whether they were good or bad or whatever. And then I came back to that hobby during the pandemic, I think the way a lot of people came back to hobbies during the pandemic. And I tried to search again and those blogs were either broken or unusable or full of spawn con. And so I had to go to YouTube.
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B
Yeah.
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C
And I had to watch YouTube videos. And it's not nearly as fast or as easy to just scan a dude's blog and be like, okay, this is the right microphone. This is the wrong microphone for what I'm trying to do. The majority of what we're finding on Google now even are not mom and pop or single person websites full of information. They are giant corporate repositories of people providing that labor for free. So like a redditor is not being paid for their step by step walkthrough of how to deal with your air fryer.
- [16:33]
B
Right.
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C
But actually 15, 10 years ago, 15 years ago, that person actually could have had like an entire website full of like, I'm the air fryer maniac.net and here's my crazy air fryer ideas and I can put some ads there and maybe pay for the server space and then maybe, who knows, like, do whatever.
- [16:55]
B
And my favorite example you gave of this in your writing was recipe blogs.
- [17:00]
C
Exactly. So recipe blogs, I think are the best example of a community of people who used to write one way and now they write a very different way. Because Google wants them to write, you know, 500 or 300 whatever, unbroken words in one text field. And they want them to have page breaks here and there and images size this way and that way and have certain characters here and there. And you know, it drives people crazy because it, it has broken the form. But it, but anyone, everyone I've talked to who runs recipe blogs, whether professionally or as a hobby, is saying, we don't want to do this, but we're forced to do this because it's the only way people will find our recipes.
- [17:41]
B
So you're telling me when I open up like a pad Thai recipe And there's a 600 word essay about, you know, that the writers trip to Thailand and like how they fell in love with that particular, you know, brand of noodle. That's not something they want to do.
- [17:54]
C
I'm going to guess it would be a shorter essay about the trip to Thailand.
- [17:58]
B
Yeah.
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C
And maybe it would be at the
- [18:00]
B
bottom, right, Right after the recipe. You always have to scroll down and down and down.
- [18:04]
C
Like I'm going to guess, like a lot of things would be different if they didn't feel like they had to
- [18:09]
B
do that, you know. So the recipe thing is annoying. I think that's a fair one. That probably a lot of people agree with us is annoying. Maybe some people like the essays, but isn't there a case that, you know, it's good for people making stuff online to optimize it for Google, if that was going to bring it to a wider audience?
- [18:28]
C
I mean, the YouTube. Do you know the YouTuber Tom Scott?
- [18:33]
B
No.
- [18:34]
C
British guy. Great. He's been, he took a break, he's come back. He was doing an interview this week about YouTube and he's been on YouTube almost since the very beginning. And you know, he was asked, you know, do thumbnails matter? And he said, basically YouTube traffic is determined by your thumbnail and not the content of your video. And he said, if it was up to me, I would have a half hour long magazine TV show with four segments. And the third segment is just whatever I want it to be. And because you like the other three, you'll just sort of watch through it and learn something new. But he's like, I can't do that. I have to make my content into the YouTube shaped widget that fits into the YouTube shaped machine so it gets delivered to you. And he doesn't want to do it. Casey Neistat has actually been doing interviews recently where he's like, I don't know how to do this anymore. He's aware that like the standards are clearly changing for how content is delivered to a user. I'm not necessarily sure the user likes it that way, at least like consciously. But Google has the same problem that Facebook has that every platform has, which is scale. Like none of these companies can deal with the scale that they want, which, you know, we can get into like a larger conversation about monopolies. But like they are effectively running into the same problem that every business runs into when they get to a certain size, which is they cannot deal with the scale. And the quality at that scale is just impossible to manage. And so they have a lot of ways of getting around that. And you know, the way Google does it and the way actually kind of all of them do it is by putting it on the user. So. So if you think of Google as a marketplace, whether we're talking literally or a marketplace of ideas or a directory, whatever, they're making us have to adhere to certain standards and practices to use it. But those standards and practices do not necessarily make for a better experience for the person providing the information or the person receiving it. It is just to deal with the fact have a Google amount, this is a number, a Googleplex of websites to manage. And like, maybe that is wrong. Maybe we can say almost 30 years later we don't actually need to have the entire Internet in one place. And this is something that like, I think 10 years ago I would have been a little nervous to say, but a lot of my contemporaries who've been doing this work for the last 20 years as well are all beginning to say to each other, like, what if the marketplace of ideas was wrong? What if global Internet connectivity limitlessness is actually kind of the wrong way to do this? And especially when you put a company in charge of that, what if the whole way we've been thinking about this is wrong?
- [21:17]
A
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- [24:17]
C
It's on prime.
- [24:18]
A
Available in select areas. Terms apply.
- [24:29]
B
Okay, so if you know, reciple, blogs are a good example of how, you know, Google had by that point become kind of the plumbing of the Internet, its architecture. And people realize that and they start doing something that's rational individually, but maybe kind of warped the culture collectively, which is they started gaming the stuff they made to make it go viral on Google. Like how does that, you know, continue to play out? Like when does, when does the promise of Google as creating this kind of like virtuous cycle for communities to, to find each other and grow becomes something that feels like ickier and more, you
- [25:04]
C
know, artificial blogs is sort of the way to I think track this the best. So you know, there are a bunch of companies that are creating easy to use what we blog rules in the 2000s. Google has one as well. There's a whole bunch. And then we get the rise of aggregators. And these aggregators are figuring out that through email and through search traffic they can scoop up everything. Drudge Report is a great early example.
- [25:30]
B
Huffington Post, conservative blog and a liberal blog.
- [25:32]
C
Yeah, both of these blogs realize there's a ton of journalist and journalistic types using blogs. We can just package everything that they're doing and we can aggregate it and then we can get a lot of search traffic, you know, based off keywords and search terms then. But it, that is a very short lived moment in a really weird way because you get platforms like Facebook and Twitter saying, well, we can actually do that better. We can actually create a place where you can easily put information and, and we can create an ecosystem where people can find it much easier than searching for it manually. It'll just appear, especially Twitter. It's like, it's just a feed. The whole thing's there. So Google is like now in this arms race with social, huh, where they're trying to be better about servicing the right information. And then you get that stretch from like, I want to say like 2010, I'm spitballing 2010 to a few years ago where Google News is like this really prioritized thing. It also, you know, the much maligned death of Google Reader, an RSS app.
- [26:36]
B
This is like an app where you could save stuff to read later.
- [26:38]
C
RIP it was so great. Like the Google suite before the Google Doc, you know, stuff was a lot of different tools for surfacing information, sharing information. Gchat. I'm sure every millennial had the I'm using Gchat at work, but it looks like work, you know, experience in their early 20s. Like all of that was in my opinion a way to compete with social and social won in that regard. So Google had to figure out a different way to go. And that's when you start to get what Cory Doctorow calls and shit, Ification. This is where you get like search results that are full of spam or Spawn Con. This is why you get, you know, different Google apps trying to keep you in the app ecosystem even if they're not great. And then that is the groundwork for AI, you know, post pandemic.
- [27:34]
B
Yeah. And so if that takes us up to the rise in the last couple years of AI, I think that takes us to back to Google zero, which is this term, you know, that refers to a moment where all of the recipe blogs and digital media outlets like Vox and whatever, they're going to get no new audiences, no no one joining their community from Google anymore. Because when you go to Google something, you know, they're not going to come up what it's going to come up instead is what's already coming up now, which is an AI response, right?
- [28:05]
C
Yeah. And I, I don't, I don't know. Like, I'm beginning to wonder if these companies, like actually understand what is happening. Like, the thing that I keep coming back to is that both Meta and Google have proven that they are willing to make their own services worse in the immediate moment to chase the AI trend.
- [28:29]
B
Yeah.
- [28:30]
C
Like, Meta is happy seemingly to have Instagram and Facebook full of AI generated slop. So much so that Meta launched a TikTok style feed of just AI videos a few months ago. And they are adding in chatbots to WhatsApp and Instagram DMs and AI filters and all the rest. They're very focused on it. And Google, they did the most fundamental overhaul of the search homepage that they've ever done basically since the beginning where they are basically saying AI semantic search, the talking to it like an AI is going to happen, it's going to work, we're going to do it. And they've made Search worse. And search was already not great. And my fear is that there are a lot of young people coming online, you know, young adults using the Internet in a serious way right now that might not know that this is not how it has to work.
- [29:24]
B
Huh.
- [29:24]
C
Like, I cannot explain to you how awesome it was to discover a random weird thing on the Internet because at the time TV wouldn't allow that. You know, Like, I remember, I remember a friend of mine in high school being like, yo, Cartoon Network. Nothing good there. You gotta check out this website, Homestar Runner.
- [29:46]
B
Oh, man.
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C
And I was like, Homestar Runner was
- [29:49]
B
like a, was like a cartoon. I mean, I think we're close to the same age. So I remember this though. Like, it was like a website where you could watch cartoons of this little guy, the Homestar Runner, running around Strongman.
- [29:59]
C
And then there's Homestar Runner. And like, yeah, it was great, but it was, but it was like a
- [30:03]
B
little piece of culture that had no flash.
- [30:05]
C
Flash animation. Yeah. Made by two brothers and they had a whole series that they were just running on their website. And now you can watch it on YouTube, but. Which, you know, I'm hoping it's, you know, it gives them enough residuals that they can just sort of comfortably do whatever they want. I love them. But. Or like artists like Neil Serciega who would put, he put out an album called Mouth Sounds where it's just smash Mouth's All Star remixed into different songs over and over and over again. Like beautiful weird artists doing weird stuff and non corporate stuff.
- [30:41]
B
Yeah.
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C
And I've been asking different people sort of in the world that I'm in, like when did that culture die? And the consensus that we, I'm kind of coming to is like it was the end of SoundCloud was probably like the last, the last train out for that world. Like Basically since like 2018, 2019, the Internet has not been a place where a weird, interesting person can make bizarre, interesting art or content or whatever you want to call it. And then people will see it and like it.
- [31:20]
B
Before we get to like where this might all go in the medium to long term for the Internet, where are those people? Like there's. They're still. I mean, you know, there's still people making weird cartoon animation and like, you know, albums, musical albums out of sounds they make with their mouth that are strange. Like where are they? Like are they back in the walled garden?
- [31:38]
C
Well, two things. One, I want to be really clear. I am not rose colored glasses for that world. I don't think the Internet has ever been better or worse. It has kind of always been the same level of good and bad. Stormfront.
- [31:52]
B
These are different ways.
- [31:53]
C
Yeah, yeah. Stormfront, the largest neo Nazi message board you know of its era, started at the same time as all the good stuff we remember as kids. Like this has always been a problem.
- [32:03]
B
Fair enough.
- [32:04]
C
And for where those weird people are now, I keep tabs on a lot of them. They're making stuff. You're never going to see it.
- [32:10]
B
Yeah, I mean that seems bad.
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C
Yeah, I used to see that stuff.
- [32:13]
B
I remember.
- [32:14]
C
I remember stumbling upon still make stuff. I.
- [32:18]
B
So where are they? Where are they doing it?
- [32:19]
C
I mean, you'll see it on YouTube Music. Sometimes they'll just put it on Spotify, but if it's really weird, they'll put it on Bandcamp. If they're cartoonists, a lot of them have decamped to Blue sky and they're using Patreon and they've just sort of, you know, packed up their stuff and went home and now they've put themselves behind a paywall. Yeah, substack. All of these different places, they look and feel like the walled gardens of before, but the connectivity is not there because the companies don't want it. So substack, for instance. Fairly closed ecosystem that you can share a substack link. Although if you share it on X you'll be deranked. You can't share it on Instagram because Instagram doesn't want links. You can do it in a story and you can add one to your bio, but no one's going to click it. TikTok doesn't really support links either. Facebook has basically decentivized the sharing of links. So you might have a link, but you have nowhere to put that link. Blue sky is fine with links, except culturally. Their users don't seem to click on them. They just. Because I think they're trained from from Twitter not to click on them.
- [33:36]
A
Introducing Meta Glasses.
- [33:39]
B
Hey, Meta, any last minute tables for two tonight?
- [33:43]
A
Sure, there's a great Italian restaurant 15 minutes away.
- [33:46]
B
Hey, Meta, where's the nearest flower shop?
- [33:50]
A
Five minutes away, straight down Broadway, past the bodega. Their lilies are trending on Instagram. Just saying.
- [33:57]
B
Hey, Meta, am I forgetting anything else?
- [33:59]
A
How about setting a calendar reminder for next year? Meta Glasses. Available in more than 20 styles. This episode is brought to you by Facebook. So you were scrolling on Marketplace and there it was, the bike you'd been searching for. You sent a message and it turned out the seller was super chatty, kind of funny, and an avid cyclist. The next thing you know, you're in a cycling crew. Well, a community cycling group. The thing about Facebook, you might find more than what you're looking for. From a browse to a bike ride this summer. Find more on Facebook.
- [34:36]
C
Best thing that's ever happened to you, financially.
- [34:38]
B
Go easy.
- [34:39]
C
Sold my car on Carvana. Amazing offer, really. I hit 200 on the scratcher. Did the scratcher come to your house and hand you a check?
- [34:46]
B
No.
- [34:47]
C
How many scratchers did you hit to get that? I hit a button on Carvana.com once. Okay, that's fair. It's like the lottery, except you always win.
- [34:56]
B
Not like the lottery at all, actually.
- [34:58]
C
Exactly. Inexplicably good offers worth bragging about. Sell your car today on Carvana.
- [35:04]
A
Pick up.
- [35:05]
C
Fees may apply.
- [35:13]
B
Earlier in our conversation, you said you're optimistic about some things. Like what are you optimistic about and why?
- [35:18]
C
I think. I think the hardest thing that has to be done to change things is actually currently happening, which is that people are beginning to question how this stuff works. They are willing to take a risk on reading a substack post or paying for a substack. Like, that's interesting, right? Like, people are subscribing to platforms like Nebula or Dropout, which are subscription video platforms that are kind of like Netflix, but for your specific thing, you know, for the first time. Like the 2000 and tens. To me, actually, I look back on them as a bit of a lost decade. I've sort of been thinking of them as a black hole for millennial labor, basically, just like all these corporations took all of our labor and sort of disappeared it. There's missing archives of writing and all these social platforms that convinced us to make ephemeral content just to chase trends and algorithms that nobody cares about anymore unless you're in a Vine compilation, Right? But there is an actual cultural shift that you can see and you can measure of people who wanna support their favorite creators, their favorite musicians. Oh, and that is new. That is profound.
- [36:30]
B
I see what you're saying. People are saying. People are kind of waking up and saying, you know, connection, community. This stuff that maybe we took for granted in an earlier period of the Internet has been taken and is not coming back without us trying to do it intentionally.
- [36:42]
C
And I'm willing to do that. I'm willing to, like, go out of my way to pay for it and evangelize for it. And then you also, you know, it was much discussed a couple months ago of, like, if the band Geese is a psyop. Right? But I actually think that moral panic is good. The fact that there are so many young people going, why am I seeing this on my feed?
- [37:03]
B
They're questioning who's. Who's promoting Geese, whether it's like, an operation to make them cool by some commercial actor.
- [37:10]
C
And, like, millennials went through this whole era of peak missing disinformation, right? And what's really funny is, like, that seemed to hold. Like, everyone was like, yeah, Facebook's full of fake stuff and Twitter's full of fake stuff, but no matter what age you are, the minute we switch to primarily video feeds, everyone seemed to just become stupid overnight and assume that every video on the Internet was real. And it's like, for some reason, video just took, like, way longer for people to understand, could be manipulated. And I think there is a massive cultural conversation in America right now that is very, very promising to me of people going, why am I seeing this? Who wants me to see this? And then you couple that with AI is a complicated conversation because it's like, according to numbers, people are using it. They don't seem to be happy about using it unless they're going through psychosis and they are not happy about data centers. But there is this sort of sense of, like, a lot of AI users not really understanding that AI is part of the same Internet ecosystem as everything else. So my mindset is almost like, ignore them. Like, they. They've sort of, like, put themselves in a closed, like, loop that, like, I don't care about, but everyone else, you know, are open to trying new apps, they're open to trying new search engines, they're open to trying new ways of finding each other, and they're happy to pay that. Like, I, I have a friend who told me he now pays for a search engine. I forget the name of the search engine.
- [38:42]
B
Pays for a search engine. I've never heard of that.
- [38:44]
C
He's like, it's great. It's worth the money. I mean, I, I pay for an RSS Reader because Google Reader got shut down 10 years ago. And I was like, I want a Google Reader. I want, I want something like that. So I think that there is enough good stuff happening early for me to be optimistic. I don't know how this will go, but there is a possibility to bring it all the way back to the sort of the start of this conversation that, like, we will look back on this moment, you know, starting in, like, 1999 and ending maybe in the next year or two as sort of a, you know, like that way where they say, like, the Dark Ages weren't Dark Ages because people were still doing stuff, but everything was held back by the Catholic Church and its monopoly on information. Yeah, I think your audience is probably smart enough to know where I'm going with this metaphor. It's possible that we are, like, on the precipice of being able to say that that was true for the last
- [39:39]
B
couple decades that we've been living through the Dark Ages.
- [39:42]
C
Yeah, people are still doing stuff and, like, things are happening. But if we can just sort of break through this, like, stranglehold that a couple companies have on the way information is shared online, I am incredibly optimistic about what could happen after a lot of bad.
- [39:59]
B
This is a shockingly rosy ending.
- [40:01]
C
Like, I, I am a history nerd, and so, you know, I, I like to sort of wonder, like, you know, is this the first time something like this in history has happened, like the horrors that we currently live through and. No, no, it happens a lot. It happens actually when the Protestant Reformation happened and you got access to the Bible for the first time in the printing press. It happened in the early 1900s with the proliferation of radio, and it happens every time you get a massive access to new information. And so there will be bad things about whatever comes next. But I am ready.
- [40:34]
B
Well, do you have a final thought you want to leave us with right now?
- [40:38]
C
If you are someone who finds themselves, you know, furrowed brow, headache, but you can't, like, look away from TikTok or Instagram or whatever it is, like, worth just sort of sitting with that feeling and maybe asking yourself, is there. Is there something else? You know, download a random app, try something new. Like maybe use your laptop rather than your phone. We didn't even talk about phones, but they're a whole part of this story as well. Like, use the Internet in a new way and see what you find. Click on a random subreddit, send an email. You know, just try to. Try to remind yourself that, like, you are not a consumer, you're a participant.
- [41:22]
B
You don't have to just take the first thing that comes up in the Google search box or listen to whatever the AI voice that now responds to you says.
- [41:29]
C
The Internet is not tv. It is something new. It is something different. And a lot of companies right now really want you to think that it's tv. They want you to just sort of passively stare at it. But you're a participant. So, like, at the very least, like, hit the like button on something. Just participate. Remember that you can participate.
- [41:44]
B
Well, thank you so much for your time. Ryan project. Where can the audience find your stuff?
- [41:50]
C
You can follow me. Either Broadrick or Ryan Hates this on most platforms, it's one or the other. Usually I think it's Ryan hates this on most platforms now. And Garbage Day, you can find at Garbage Day Email, it's my newsletter. And Panic World, you can find on all podcast platforms.
- [42:05]
B
Amazing.
- [42:06]
C
Thank you.
- [42:14]
B
Okay. I hope you enjoyed this episode. I thought it was good to be reminded that the Internet can still be strange and surprising. And it's nice that Ryan was optimistic at the end. We're often so doom and gloom, but as always, we want to know what you think. So drop us a line at the gray area@vox.com or leave us a message on our voicemail line at 1-800-214-5749. And once you're finished with that, go ahead and rate and review and subscribe to the podcast. This episode is produced by Thor Neueter and Beth Morrissey, who also runs the show, engineered by Shannon Mahoney and fact checked by Melissa Hirsch, with help from Sarah Schweppe and Emma Munger wrote our theme music. Our executive producer is Miranda Kennedy. The Gray Area comes out on Mondays and Fridays. Find it wherever you listen to podcasts. If you watch podcasts, you could do that too. You can go to YouTube.com Vox for video versions of the Gray Area. The show is a part of Vox. Support Vox's journalism by joining our membership program today. Go to vox.commembers to sign up. And if you decide to sign up because of this show, let us know.