by
Noam Cohen
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The ethical obligation to run a Web search engine without advertising reflected an academic’s belief in the importance of public access to information, which could be a matter of life and death. In a remarkable appendix to that 1998 paper, “The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine,” Brin and Page offered an example of the danger to the public from search results that were tainted by advertising. As a test, they typed in the query “cellular phone” at all the prominent search sites. Only the Google prototype, they reported, returned a top result that was critical of cell phones, specifically a cautionary study about speaking on the phone while driving. PageRank didn’t return the link in order to do the right thing, the two explained; it was simply conveying to its users what the Web thought were the most relevant links to someone interested in cell phones. The better question to ask was, Why didn’t the other sites link to that study? Page and Brin’s answer: “It is clear that a search engine which was taking money for showing cellular phone ads would have difficulty justifying the page that our system returned to its paying advertisers.”
Brin and Page had put their finger on the Catch-22 of the search business: if results improved so much that they became uncannily accurate and precise—like a chess computer arriving at the single best move for a certain position—then advertising will have lost much of its purpose. You would be shown where to go based on the consensus “best result,” and thus should have little interest in hearing what an advertiser wanted to tell you. OK, there might be a few ads to introduce a new product, or to try to persuade you to switch between brands, but this wasn’t the basis of growing business. A search engine needed to sell something valuable—like reaching customers in a way competitors couldn’t—if it wanted to make a lot of money. The bad incentives were clear: search companies would stop trying to improve their services for business reasons, which is why Page and Brin toward the end of their paper made the following assertion: “We believe the issue of advertising causes enough mixed incentives that it is crucial to have a competitive search engine that is transparent and in the academic realm.”
um ya
All of which raises some intriguing alternative history: Would Brin and Page have remained true to noncommercial search had they met at a top-class school with a less go-go culture, like, say, MIT? Could they and we have avoided this reimagining of Google’s relationship with its users? Or would we instead be talking about a different pair of brilliant Stanford graduate students who researched how to improve Web search and inevitably found their way to Sand Hill Road, while our alternative-universe Brin and Page would be obscure but distinguished computer science professors?
probably the latter tbh. that's my hypothesis due to like neoliberalism and stuff
After some fumbling with other ideas, Thiel and Levchin came up with PayPal, which would create “a new Internet currency to replace the U.S. dollar.” Thiel pitched the idea as fulfilling his anti-government dream of a global market that protects the welfare of the public by empowering them as consumers: “What we’re calling ‘convenient’ for American users will be revolutionary for the developing world. Many of these countries’ governments play fast and loose with their currencies. . . . Most of the ordinary people there never have an opportunity to open an offshore account or to get their hands on more than a few bills of a stable currency like U.S. dollars.” But there was that other thing, too, the chance to make a fortune. If you happened to create and own a new digital currency, you could collect a cut from each online transaction. You would become the middleman of e-commerce, commerce, as David Shaw and Jeff Bezos had sketched out, without incurring a retailer’s burden of keeping track of orders, maintaining warehouses, and making deliveries.
does your currency have an army tho. no? ok bud
[...] it appeared to Thiel and his comrades, multiculturalism had the single, overarching purpose of coddling the weak. Stanford students, some of the most talented young people of their generation, shouldn’t need to be shielded from occasional strong language or from the uncomfortable fact that the world’s best thinkers were not neatly divided among various racial, sexual, ethnic, and social groups.
hahahahaaaaaa
“In the multicultural allegory, the wealthy are per se oppressive, because their success creates misfortunes for others. The other two possible causes of poverty—bad fortune or bad choices—are rejected a priori. Quite naturally, multiculturalists conveniently overlook the fact that without productive people paying taxes, there could be no welfare for the poor.”
aaaaaaaaah kill me
These two distinct pools of candidates for PayPal resulted in an initial staff that was nearly all white and nearly all male. Of the six original founders, the one nonwhite person was an immigrant from China. All were men. All but Thiel were twenty-three or younger. Four had built bombs in high school. A picture of the staff six months later shows that it had grown to thirteen and included one woman, an office assistant. “The early PayPal team worked well together because we were all the same kind of nerd,” Thiel recalled. “We all loved science fiction: ‘Cryptonomicon’ [by Neal Stephenson] was required reading, and we preferred the capitalist Star Wars to the communist Star Trek.”
good lord
thought: homogeneity as a symptom. a symptom of what? not sure, but it's definitely not good
Thiel’s complaint against eBay wasn’t so much about its monopoly powers, but that it was becoming a monopoly in online payments instead of PayPal. According to Thiel, a truly free market, with perfect knowledge and perfect competition, leads to failure for everyone. “Under perfect competition, in the long run no company makes an economic profit,” he writes, adding the emphasis. “The opposite of perfect competition is monopoly.” Thus, the goal of any sane start-up should be to create a monopoly. When Thiel uses the term monopoly, he hastens to add, he does not mean one based on illegal bullying or government favoritism. “By ‘monopoly,’ we mean the kind of company that’s so good at what it does that no other firm can offer a close substitute,” he writes in Zero to One, his business-advice book.
i wonder if there's any critical analysis of that last point in the book (i can't remember). why can no firm offer a close substitute? why is no one else able to replicate it, if it's lucrative enough that people would want to? if it's based on IP restrictions, then surely that's government favoritism. but if it's not, and if it instead stems from the idea that some lone genius CEO is so high IQ that no one else can come close, then, well, he's an idiot
Under this theory of benevolent monopolies, government regulations and laws are unnecessary. Taxes are in effect replaced by monopoly profits—everyone pays their share to Google, Facebook, Amazon, PayPal. And in contrast to the government, these profits are allocated intelligently into research and services by brilliant, incorruptible tech leaders instead of being squandered by foolish, charismatic politicians. Levchin, during an appearance on The Charlie Rose Show, was asked about the libertarian cast to Silicon Valley leaders. He said he personally was OK with taxes being used to build and maintain roads, for well-functioning law enforcement and national security. For helping those less fortunate, too. But, he added, “I have relatively low trust in some of my local politicians . . . to spend my taxes on things that really do matter. And so this lack of inherent trust of the local or broader political establishment is probably the most defining, most common feature of Silicon Valley ‘libertarians.’”
what are the axioms here? that people who are smart enough to accrue monopoly profits are also smart enough to put their money in the right place (research-wise) rather than hoarding it for themselves ...? what evidence is there to back this up ... especially historically ...
The tools for collaboration and direct publishing that Tim Berners-Lee had argued for at the start were introduced to the mainstream during these years as Web 2.0. This phrase immediately stuck in his craw, however. What exactly was new—2.0-ish, that is—about these companies built around user contributions? They were simply fulfilling the original vision for the Web, where “interaction between people is really what the Web is.” 5 There was one vital difference, however. In Web 2.0, the tools for sharing and publishing were part of a social network or service that profited off of what you created there. You weren’t publishing a video to the Web, you were publishing a YouTube video; you weren’t writing a restaurant review on the Web, you were posting a Yelp review. The truly new idea expressed by Web 2.0 was a commercial one, and perhaps that is why Berners-Lee couldn’t recognize it.
sad