The Case for Rude Technology

Today I had the misfortune to find myself on CNN.com. I was greeted immediately by an autoplay video for a completely unrelated article. Autoplay is shit. Do it if you want me to add to the little counters going in my head that make me hate your business more. That’s not what this essay is about.

I poked my way through their bland journalism regurgitated from Reuters, and at the bottom I was greeted by some incredible news: Mattress stores in Milwaukee were going out of business! It turned out I didn’t care. But it did make me think about the technologies.

There’s a shitload of money in making sure products are safe and comfortable for consumers to use. People like feeling safe and comfortable. The cost of this is something like a padded cell for people that are interested in getting more than the lowest common denominator. I’m not talking about accessibility, which is obviously important. I’m talking about features being ripped from a product for the sake of appealing to a larger wedge of your users.

But Float, businesses have to make money. How do you sell a product no one likes?

You don’t. I’m not talking to businesses. I’m talking to you, dear komrade.

Did you know that search used to have its own language? A lot of money went into research in natural language processing and combinatorial mathematics to make Google what it is now — something where people can barge in with full English sentences and get something approximately what they think they want.

But all of that came with a gutting of this first elegant retrieval system, something you could almost-not-quite predict whether it would work, and I would argue a narrowing and destruction of what the internet was. It exploits the desire for accessibility rather than adding anything to it, because there were already ways to research without knowing this system. It wasn’t really for regular people, and that was ok (from a people standpoint — Google obviously hated it.)

Thousands of years ago, there were people. People that wanted to find things. They would go and they might not have found what they want, but it wasn’t typical for people to pop out of the bushes and say “Hey! You’re looking for berries, but I’m a fucking mattress store and I want you to know all those other ones are shit!” If that happened, the response would probably be immediate and fatal. People didn’t put up with that shit, though it could also be that time travelers have a bit of a language barrier in neolithic Eurasia.

To find something you had to use the tools available to you. You did not negotiate with your tools. If you wanted to be sure that there were berries, you either got them yourself or you talked to people you trusted. And I do not trust Google.

It’s not just the invasion of privacy implied with a system designed to learn who I am, what I might want as a statistical mean given arbitrary inputs, and what my weird fetishes might be. It’s the quality of results I’m after. For example, right now if you use their image search, you are inevitably and hilariously redirected to Pinterest.

What is Pinterest? You already fucking know if you use Google Image search. It’s another goddamn site to search for images! Worst of all, if you click on one of these, you’re taken to an incredibly generic set of results from that site. It’s like going to a library, searching their system for a book, and that system redirects you to a library inside of that library and the book is a crayon drawing of a list of more books. Fucking useless.

Most of the time, when I use image search, I’m not using it to look for images. I’m using it to find documents to bypass Google’s broken web search. This used to work. It’s a lot easier to find an academic journal talking about electron clouds for thionyl chloride if you can see a diagram you know will probably be in it.

Now I’m stuck with talking to Google’s corrupt librarian. The librarian really, really wants me to use Facebook. It wants me to trust CNN, the New York Times, and McDonalds. It wants to sell me 5,000 privacy-ripping webapps that will convert images, when I’m on a bloody PC. It does this because it thinks it’s gotten to know me, and it thinks it knows what I’ll click, and all of that garbage hides the article on Java with the information I need to complete this anthropology paper. It’s a mattress store salesman lurking in the bushes like an idiot when I’m just fucking hungry.

Enough. There’s a better way. We have to stop using the internet.

There’s no clever plan of action after that sweeping statement. No way to get other people to put down their tablets and phones to live in harmony with technology once more. Google is just irredeemably broken to me now, so I stopped using it. Bye, Felicia.

All I can do is encourage you to think about whether the results you get from Google do it for you. Try other retrieval systems. Visit your actual library — actually, go to their website. Most of them still use the complicated but elegant tools that we developed to put information (all information) in your hands at the Dawn of the Internet.

Why? Because librarians know what the fuck they’re doing. There’s literally a science (called Library Science — go figure) to information collection and retrieval. It’s not easy to use their systems sometimes. But these are real humans you can talk to that will help you give the results you need.

Google just wants to be your friend.

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