Google's gone to shit, Huma Abedin is dating George Soros' son, Brandon is going Dark and Epstein is out on steam. We take a jaunt through our really cool world with guest Ed Zitron, tech reporter and host of the Better Offline podcast.
Subscribe for $5 a month to get access to all our premium QAA episodes + mini-series like Manclan, Trickle Down, Perverts and The Spectral Voyager: https://www.patreon.com/QAA
Ed Zitron: https://twitter.com/edzitron / https://www.wheresyoured.at / https://www.betteroffline.com
Music by Pontus Berghe. Editing by Corey Klotz.
http://qaapodcast.com
Welcome, listener, to the 268th chapter of the QAA podcast, the Why Google Sucks Now episode.
As always, we are your hosts, Jake Rokitansky, Julian Fields, and Travis View.
Before there was social media in the modern sense, there were search engines.
And these search engines in the 1990s had names like Yahoo, Excite, Infoseek, AltaVista, Hotbot, Ask Jeeves, and Lycos.
Remember those ones?
Oh, yeah.
I heard they used to sing this.
I had a lot of questions for Jeeves around that time.
Travis Leno is a good bit, actually.
Travis, you need to get one of those Brazilian butt things, but for your chin.
These search engines worked fine enough in helping you find something on the growing number of primitive websites, which were mostly run by amateurs, but it was still a pretty cluttered and frustrating experience.
You had to go through a lot of pages of search to find anything that was good.
But in the late 90s, two Stanford grads by the name of Larry Page and Sergey Brin established a search engine called Google.
They used a more sophisticated algorithm to determine the relevance of a website to any given search term you might use.
And the growing numbers of internet users were so impressed with how well it delivered information and other resources that the word Google became a verb that was a synonym for search.
And all those other search engines fell by the wayside.
Yeah, I wonder what Jeeves is doing now.
Yeah, not much.
Hard time.
Yeah, Jeeves is in the Yandex prison.
In the glug.
In recent years, however, it feels like something terrible has happened.
More and more Google searches don't deliver you high-quality, relevant results from credible sources, but rather cheap, poorly-written glurge filled with affiliate links and spammy ads, or perhaps even mass-produced AI content that contains no indication of where the information came from at all.
It is so cool, though, to type in, like, anything and have a .com with that exact search.
This is bad news for people who are concerned about disinformation and baseless conspiracy theories, because it means people who seek information aren't being funneled into sources that provide them with an accurate understanding of the world.
To help us understand why this is happening with Google, we're joined by journalist Ed Zitron.
He publishes the newsletter Where Is Your Ed At?, and he is the host of the podcast Better Offline.
Ed, thank you so much for joining us.
What's up?
Yeah, I'm glad to get into it.
And especially this is relevant to me because my professional background before I became a podcaster was basically trying to game Google search.
So I certainly was part of the problem.
Could I, like, pitch an alternate title for your newsletter?
Like, Getting Ed?
With Zitron, or anything?
That's a no.
Alright, well, no.
I tried.
I came up with that newsletter name once.
I spent half a minute thinking.
I thought, what's that Basement Jack song?
I went with it, and I will never change it now, there are no other names I'm going to consider.
I don't care if they're better.
It is cool because that is how certain British people say head.
They just completely get rid of the beginning.
Yes.
Well, sometimes you need to hear the wrong pitch to know that you've actually got the right one, so.
Yeah, exactly.
Julian's still providing a service.
Well, I just love innovation.
I prone innovation in all things I do.
Same.
Not really.
I put out a newsletter and a podcast.
Those are two very old ideas.
Yeah.
I run a PR firm.
Again, very old idea.
Yeah.
Like, nothing innovative here.
But before we get into all of this, QAA News.
For my first story of QAA News, Huma Abedin and Alex Soros are dating.
Oh boy.
Awooga!
I didn't know you were doing Page Six shit.
What the fuck, Travis?
You never guess who's been smooching in the QAA world.
They're calling them the the Posh and Becks of the Cabal.
Q-Axis Hollywood.
I know.
Hashtag Abadoros.
Oh my god.
Yeah, normally I would say this kind of thing is beneath us.
We are a serious podcast.
that discusses serious matters, both contemporary and historical.
But this is very funny, so I'm going to get into it.
So Huma Abedin, the 47-year-old former chair, former vice chair of Hillary Clinton's 2016
presidential campaign, and Alex Soros, the 38-year-old son of billionaire Democratic
donor George Soros, have revealed that they are dating in a Valentine's Day post on social
media.
I want to drop the Nickelodeon gack all over them.
And make them run like the Hidden Temple.
This is one of those things where, like, I do hate the people, so you just have to be like, well, no, you hate them for the wrong reasons.
Right.
Yeah, I mean, it's very funny.
I mean, so the couple, they cozy up at a restaurant in Paris and smile for a picture that Alex Soros shared on Instagram with a text sticker that said, Happy Valentine's Day.
I see a lot of roses on the table.
A lot of roses.
I see two presents wrapped identically.
So they are on the same wavelength.
They wrapped their gifts the same way.
Same box.
Potentially same gift.
If you have a forest green box and you put a red bow on it, it just looks like fucking Christmas, okay?
Get your Valentine's Day straight.
And they have a remarkable amount of bread in them.
I was gonna say, Ed, yeah, as an insult to, uh, the working and, uh, lower classes, they have, yeah, a huge loaf of bread, uh, just on the table, sliced up real nice.
Well, they're both gluten intolerant, so they are not touching that bread, but that's just the indicator that they're in Paris.
But the line of roses, what does that mean?
Yeah.
I don't know.
Actually, if you look at the vase and you look at the line of roses, it makes a 1 and a 0.
Yeah, okay.
And the bread looks like a fish skeleton.
10 for the age of the child that they're going to eat tonight.
So there have been a total of 54 First Ladies, including 43 official and 11 acting.
But then, perhaps they're suggesting that because this is the number 10, they're going to kill one of them?
Probably.
Yeah, that has to be the fate.
That makes sense.
Travis just nodded.
That's what this means.
Travis thinks it's true.
Great.
Sure, why not?
And also you'll notice through the glass divider behind them, you can see the kitchen and there's a chef in there.
So that's obviously some sort of nod to baking.
This post should be baked.
The 14 trays, food trays represented, you know, that are kind of on the shelf back there, I think represent the skulls of their enemies.
They're actually deep in, like, a Swiss mountainside cave, and those are screens that they can just put up, like, inside a French restaurant.
They're actually in a prison.
Yeah, those are green, like, actually, just two green surfaces that they then superpose stuff on.
Anyways, Travis, please continue.
So, uh, this is relevant to our podcast because Huma Abedin was a frequent feature of the early Q-drops in 2017 and she was also used to be married to the disgraced former representative Anthony Weiner.
She filed for divorce from Weiner in 2017 after the ex-congressman was sentenced to nearly two years in prison for sexting with a 15-year-old girl, so...
Yeah, you know, good for her for separating from the elite pedos.
Well, but she's potentially dating a Soros child.
So yeah, I don't think she's trading one for the other.
I don't know.
Yeah.
A richer, just a richer, more successful pedophile.
You're going to get us sued, man.
All right.
What Travis is saying, and this is a fact, is that she is now going out with a younger pedophile.
God damn it.
Alright, so Alex Soros, he's also been in the news, not for doing anything illegal, but for being the heir to the Soros family holdings, including his non-profit Open Society Foundation, which funnels about 1.5 billion dollars a year into liberal causes.
So I thought it'd be worthwhile to check back in with the world of QAnon podcasters and live streamers, because there is still, in the year 2024, a very active QAnon community online, and they still produce a lot of content.
So I checked with one of the most prolific media companies that produces QAnon content, and that is Badlands Media, operated by Patel Patriot.
Badlands Media has a livestream show called Eye of the Storm and is hosted by two gentlemen who go by the names Absolute Truth and Stormy Patriot Joe.
So, these two guys, they're really impressed with Qdrop38, which contains these phrases.
Note false flags.
Follow humor.
And the hosts of this program thought that this was relevant because of recent mass shootings in the news.
This, of course, is part of the especially repulsive false flag conspiracy theory, which claims that random acts of mass violence are actually fake and staged, usually the conspiracist's claim, as part of a plot to create a pretext for more restrictive gun control laws.
This is the same kind of conspiracy theory that Alex Jones helped to push about the victims of the Sandy Hook shooting, which led to Alex Jones being ordered to pay more than a billion dollars after losing a defamation lawsuit, though the actual amount remains to be seen.
But here's how the hosts of the Eye of the Storm show reacted to the Alex Soros Huma Abedin news.
And then drop number 38 November 2nd of 28 or 2017 go further down the drop.
It says a note false flags follow Huma prepare messages of reassurance based on what was dropped here to spread on different platforms.
The calm before the storm.
So I just found it super interesting that the same day we got news of her.
Dating ball sack eyes son that we had multiple mass shootings in the United States same time and we have a drop here I'm talking about note false flags follow human and she's you know in the last couple weeks We've had her and Podesta kind of pop back up into the public sphere.
I don't really think that's a coincidence man ball sack guy Yeah, they also called George Soros ball sack eyes.
Yeah, that's that's a good one.
I Cool.
So, I mean, this is obviously meaningless, because there is unfortunately reports of mass violence every single week, and occasionally Huma Abedin, because of her celebrity status, is going to pop up in the news.
So every time Huma Abedin appears in the news, it will be roughly concurrent with reports of mass violence.
So this isn't evidence of prophecy by Q. But they also noticed something spooky.
This Q drop that mentions Huma Abedin happens to bear the number of Alex Torres's age.
Not the age when the drop was made, the age when Huma posted this about their parents.
Current age, yes.
Well, yeah, of course.
I mean, Q, all seeing Q, you know, had to know that they wouldn't start dating until Alex Soros turned 38.
Right.
And just listening to you read it, I picked up Alex being 38 and Q 38.
That was something I didn't really catch the first time we went through this.
So that's pretty cool, too.
Ha, I hadn't noticed that either.
Nice catch, man.
Is that like an Easter egg?
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Little one for the Q-lifers.
Said it's pretty cool that the number and the age match up.
Just playing a fun little capture game with my homies about child eating.
Classic numerical insanity fest.
Oh, God.
But these two guys, they started playing with numbers and they decide to look up Q-drop 47, which is Huma Abedin's current age.
Oh.
Yeah man, and you just making that correlation between, I'm gonna go back one slide real quick, between his age and drop number 38.
I went and looked up drop number 47 in relation to her age, and oh lookie here at drop 47.
You can paint the picture based solely on the questions asked.
Be vigilant today and expect a major false flag.
Does anyone find it to be a coincidence there is always a terrorist attack when bad news breaks for the Democrats?
Sure, that's all a coincidence, right, Joe?
Yeah.
How the mighty have fallen.
I mean, it used to be, you know, baking the date of Hillary Clinton's arrest of massive groups of politicians being sent to Guantanamo Bay.
But now it's like, oh, the age is the same.
I know.
I know.
It's like they're just playing a matching game.
Now, like, you know, you'd play the kids when you're a kid, you just lay out all the cards on the table, you'd turn over the, you know, the red wagon with the other red wagon and you'd match them.
That's all they're doing all day long playing a matching game.
So I guess from an outsider's perspective to these guy, is it obvious whether these guys believe this shit and they're just completely mentally cooked?
Or is it just the kind of A cynical con.
Mike, no, these guys believe it because I mean, okay, have you just just based on the
sheer amount of energy compared to the meager reward?
I have to believe that they are.
They are true believers.
That's so sad.
Welcome to the podcast.
I [LAUGHTER]
I know this is, I mean, this is, this is part of the podcast.
Remaining to ask this question to you.
And it's just like, I'm so happy.
The answer is somehow worse than I thought it would be.
We're always asking ourselves, wait, do you people really, really believe this?
I mean, cause it almost, almost feels like insulting to assume that they're being sincere.
Almost like, well, if you're, if you're running some sort of con, at least, you know, there's, there's a little bit of like, you know, strategy involved in that.
You're like, you're doing this, you're doing this for monetary gain.
At least, you know, at least you're trying, maybe it's a dishonest living, but you're doing it to make a living.
But no, man, a lot of these people, there's still a strong community of believers who, who just bake all day and then broadcast their bakes like this.
Well, and I mean, we're looking at the dregs, really, because, you know, after five years or however long of none of the predictions or proofs or anything adding up to something tangible, something real, I mean, especially following, you know, the loss of the 2020 election to Joe Biden, you know, there's really... If that was Joe Biden...
If it was, yeah.
If it was indeed, and not some sort of plant.
And I don't mean like a CIA plant, I mean like some kind of house plant with soil.
Yeah, I assumed you meant... Of course.
You know, you're left with this.
You know, trolling the page six sort of celebrity relationship gossip and trying to find meaning because any little piece that you find that you can draw a connection is a nice reminder to both your ego and your sense of reality that that, hey, you didn't waste all this time.
All these five years that you've spent cooking all the t-shirts you have, the stickers,
like Travis was saying, the energy spent into creating content revolving around this single,
you know, this single sort of anonymous entity, that it wasn't actually a waste of time,
that there's still crumbs, there's still crumbs sort of trickling out.
And when the big news happens, you'll still be relevant and you'll be there.
And yeah, you've been doing page six stuff for the last like three years,
but like now you're gonna get to cover the, the Guantanamo executions.
Stop talking about our podcast.
(laughing)
So this is also kind of like a frustrating thing with conspiracy theorists, is that they'll connect two things, imply or they'll state that it's not a coincidence, but then they won't take that extra step of explaining why it's not coincidental.
Okay, if it's not coincidental, then what is the significance or meaning?
So they're saying that, okay, this QD47 talks about false flags because that's human Abedin's current Are you tracking Huma's birthday Travis?
in 2017 warned that Huma Abedin was 47 years old, then there would be false flags.
So if that's the case, are you saying that this warning expires when Huma Abedin turns 48,
which happens to be on July 28th of this year?
So no more false flags after July of this year?
Is this what you're saying?
Are you tracking Huma's birthday, Travis?
Do you send her like a little package every year?
I checked, I was just curious, 'cause like, I was like, what?
'Cause they say it's like, wow, that's not a coincidence.
Okay, if it's meaningful, if it's significant, then let's game this out.
What else would have to be true if you believe that somehow Q was predicting that there would be false flags when Huma Abedin was 47 years old?
It would follow that there's no more false flags when she turns 48, or is it not?
No, then you have to go to Q drop 48 and do some new connections.
Okay.
Yeah.
Oh, right.
You just keep making, that's how you bake now.
Just, just through Huma Abedin's age.
All right.
Fantastic.
We're baking ages.
We're baking birthdays.
We're baking how many fingers they've got.
You know, we're scraping, we're scraping the resin out of the pipe.
Yeah, I know.
Alright, so for my second story in QAA News, the organization True The Vote, made famous in Dinesh D'Souza's film 2000 Mules, tells Judge it has no evidence of ballot stuffing in Georgia.
And I thought this was a really interesting story because this is a sad ending to one of the most popular forms of election denialism.
So you may recall the documentary 2000 Mules, which we covered in episode 189.
In that movie, the organization True the Vote claimed that there was evidence of a conspiracy to use so-called ballot mules to steal the election for Joe Biden, particularly in states like Georgia.
Like we talked about in the episode, one could easily conclude that the allegations of election fraud were baseless just by analyzing, you know, what was in the movie itself.
But it gets worse because back in 2021, True The Vote contacted the Georgia Bureau of Investigation about its allegations.
Specifically, the purported vote monitoring organization claimed to have cell phone geolocation evidence showing that hundreds of people had traveled to multiple ballot drop boxes on given days.
A Fulton County Superior Court judge in Atlanta signed an order last year requiring True the Vote to provide evidence it had collected, including the names of people who were sources of information to state election officials who were frustrated by the group's refusal to share evidence with investigators.
And ultimately, True the Vote admitted they had nothing worth turning over.
All of these years, they admit that it's just they don't really have anything of substance.
So a spokesperson for Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger told the Associated Press this about the new revelations.
Once again, True the Vote has proven itself untrustworthy and unable to provide a shred of evidence for a single one of their fairytale allegations.
Like all the lies about Georgia's 2020 election, their fabricated claims of ballot harvesting have been repeatedly debunked.
Don't care.
We're already in 2024.
Come on.
Didn't see the Huma thing?
Like, come on.
Yeah, wake up.
Yeah, don't you know who's dating?
Now, this seems like a fairly significant development, and it is resonating in some sectors of the right-wing media.
For example, the talk show host Steve Deese of Blaze Media previously had Greg Phillips from True The Vote to promote the 2000 Mules film and the claims of election fraud.
However, in a recent show, Steve Deese said that he wanted answers from Phillips for misleading his audience.
We've seen Mike Lindell essentially go bankrupt for producing no results.
And I know you guys are going to email me conferences and everything else.
He's produced nothing in any court whatsoever, on any forum whatsoever.
I like Mike.
I have nothing personal against Mike.
It breaks my heart what's happened to him.
I also broke my heart to see him become so crazy for Donald Trump that he accused Ron DeSantis of stealing the election in Florida.
That was kind of my tap out.
But I still sleep on a MyPillow every night at home.
But he's going bankrupt.
People went to prison and are still there.
Jason Miller tells, under oath, the January 6th Commission, current senior advisor to candidate Donald Trump, that they all knew Trump lost and told him that.
And now, true to vote says, we have no evidence.
Todd, I want you to contact them and try to get them back on the show.
Okay.
My guess is they won't do it, but I want answers to this.
I put them on the show.
I gave them a platform.
I bought into it and by extension sold it to this audience.
We need some answers to this.
Yeah, we need to shore up Steve Deuce's reputation.
I mean, he's noticing something that I've noticed.
It seems like, you know, the people who are, it's like everyone who's been promoting these claims,
you know, like Mike Lindell, are having their lives ruined because they're just buying, they're going all in on lies.
And it's destroying them.
Yeah, I mean, when you platform anybody with a crazy.
Well, yeah.
As Obama once said, reality has a way of asserting itself.
As Obama once said?
Jesus Christ, Travis.
but eventually, you know, the chickens are gonna come home to roost and you have to do this weird sort of performative
outrage to keep your, you know, keep your credibility. I'd like to see more of this, to be honest.
Well, yeah, as Obama once said, "Reality has a way of asserting itself."
As Obama once said, Jesus Christ, Travis.
Fuck off.
[Laughter]
Let me be clear.
Let me be clear.
Reality is true, and you didn't fall out of a coconut tree.
You're okay, etc.
For my contribution to QA news other than pissing off Travis, I'm gonna be picking on the mentally vulnerable as usual.
That's right, the commander-in-chief himself, Joe Biden, or his team, has joined TikTok and is once again memeing about Dark Brandon, a version of the president with red laser eyes that make him look like a cool badass.
Now, because I'm an old person. Not quite Silent Generation, but nearly. I found
out about this on Twitter, where directly after the Super Bowl ended, Biden posted a picture of
himself smiling with the red laser eyes and the text "Just like we drew it up."
So this was a reference to a piece of news we covered last week, the right-wing conspiracy
theory that Joe Biden, the Pentagon, Taylor Swift, Travis Kelce, and I guess the NFL were
conspiring to make the Kansas City Chiefs win the Super Bowl so that Swift and Kelce
could then get more attention and endorse Joe Biden over Donald Trump.
So what we have here is Joe Biden epically leaning into a right-wing conspiracy theory,
probably because his team believes it makes him look funny, in touch, and cool to the
It was unfortunate timing, though, because on the day of the Super Bowl, client state Israel carried out a massacre in Palestine, specifically in the city of Rafah, near which the Israeli army has corralled approximately 1 million displaced Palestinians, many from the now-totally-in-ruins Gaza City.
This was accompanied by a Super Bowl ad paid for by the Israeli government.
Here's from an article in The Nation by Dave Zirin.
"CBS granted the Israeli government space for an ad about the 130 hostages left in Gaza.
This ad, meant to build public support and justify the slaughter of nearly 30,000 civilians
in Gaza, spurred 10,000 people to register complaints with the FCC because the commercial
did not disclose that a foreign government had paid for it.
Coupled with the Rafah raid, this looks more like military synergy than happenstance."
So, in the context of what's being called the Super Bowl massacre, posting epic laser
eyes Biden seems like a particularly grim piece of PR.
Yeah, you would think the PR people would give him blue or white lasers, you know, the good colors, right?
Not red, evil.
Blue and yellow, you throw some Ukraine in there.
Yeah, I mean, red, red.
This is the color of Darth Vader's lightsaber.
This is the color of the Stormtrooper's blasters.
We need positively coated laser eyes.
But this memeing may be just the tip of the spear because Joe Biden has also joined TikTok, where he's attempting to shore up the youth vote in this year's presidential election, which is flagging in large part due to his support for the Israeli government.
The account is BidenHQ, and its profile picture is a black-and-white portrait of Joe Biden with, of course, the laser eyes.
The first post went up after the Super Bowl and was titled, LOL HEY GUYS!
Two great quarterbacks.
Hard to decide.
But if I didn't say I was for the Eagles, man, I'd be sleeping alone.
My wife's a Philly girl.
Game.
Game.
Mama Kelsey.
I understand she makes great chocolate chip cookies.
Kelsey. Mama Kelsey. I'm chip cookies. Deviously p
season. So the chiefs woul or the chiefs just being
I'm getting trouble fight Are you kidding?
Biden.
I like how they had to do a cut when it came to Trump or Biden because he definitely was like, Trump, wait.
Wait, uh, no.
They had to cut.
You need a clean cut on that one.
It looks like they fucked up.
Like he was like, uh, the, the other guy.
And when they mention, like, potentially this idea that they've rigged the Super Bowl, they cut away to the Dark Brandon meme and play, like, a laser sound.
Hilarious, sir.
So what are we doing?
Are we just trying to get, like, uh, every person with, like, extremely fragile mental health to just go berserk?
Like, are we- are we genuinely doing memes at these people?
I think it's stupider and worse is they look at MAGA and they look at what works for them and then they go, we should do a version of that, which I guess goes along with Joe Biden's promise that nothing will essentially change.
So now posting, uh, like weird memes is something that the president does.
Even I was listening in on one of my wife's like conference calls for work after the Superbowl.
And it was just, you know, the moment before the meeting where everybody's kind of catching up and people were like, I don't know isn't it kind of weird for these are very like you know they're not nearly as entrenched on you know fortunately for them as we are and they were like I don't know isn't it sort of weird that like the president the official president account is like hinting that they rigged the Super Bowl and like he also has lasers coming out of his eyes they weren't you know they're not like us we're
Where they're like, oh God, this is just a reflection of how MAGA has influenced politics and they've actually dragged us down to the mud.
It was just like, I don't know, it's an official account.
That is sort of like weird, isn't it?
And I'm like, yes, it's very weird.
Yes, it sucks.
It's good because a 38-year-old guy was definitely like, oh, Mr. Biden, sir.
Mr. Biden, this would be extremely based.
Yeah.
What do you mean, babies?
No, based, sir.
It's very important you're based.
Okay.
And they shuffle him in front of the camera.
Yeah, we've seen what happens when this kind of thing is applied to, like, a kind of weak candidate who doesn't have, like, the Trump, like, fuck-off-I-don't-give-a-shit swag.
It was the DeSantis campaign, and that did not go well.
Putting him with the red eyes and doing, like, epic sonnenrad and cool music did not work out very well.
So this team is, if anything, copying kind of, like, a losing streak.
I mean... But also, this whole meme came about, the whole dark brand of meme came about when he was doing cool stuff.
Yeah.
Like things about weed.
Yeah.
Not like things about murdering children and then referring to them as people below the age of 18.
Yeah, not as cool, not as cool.
Not really based, one might say.
It would be so awesome if they instead posted, there was like a part of the campaign that was like, vote Biden.
We don't meme.
Yeah.
No, for real.
We will not be doing laser eyes.
We don't do any of that bullshit.
Oh, you want a social media presence?
Here, here's just like the meetings going on in the White House today.
Here's who we talk to.
It's not great either that, like, even in the final cut of his TikTok, like, he is mumbling.
Like, he is, like, you can barely hear him.
And he had to cut away when he had to say his name.
Yeah, not great.
But also, on top of that, the whole point of things like this, and I've been in PR about 15 years, whole point of things like this is it's meant to humanise the person in question.
It's meant to show that they're aware of the world around them, make them more approachable, same reason they're on TikTok in general.
What this instead has done is arguably an old meme as well.
Yep.
Like, it's been a while since Dog Brandon was something that I thought of.
And then it pops up again at arguably his more embarrassing time.
Like, in a way he has led to the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people, potentially.
Like, the things he's doing, or not doing, well I guess doing in Israel and then by proxy doing in Gaza, he's giving money to a murderous regime and he's like, yeah, based Dog Brandon.
Yeah.
I got the laser eyes now.
Yeah, kind of like the lasers used to point missiles at Palestinian children.
The thing about it that's so weird is, and Julian, you sort of covered this, you know, talking about using this to make a weak person look powerful and way cooler than they actually are.
The whole Brandon thing spawned because at, you know, at a sporting event there were, you know, MAGA fans in the audience screaming, fuck Joe Biden.
And the reporter on the scene said, oh, I think they're saying, let's go Brandon.
And of course it became, you know, it became a euphemism for fuck Joe Biden.
But then the Biden campaign has taken brand, it's the exact same thing that Trump does where they take something that is perceived as a weakness or an insult and then flip it so that it's actually, oh we're totally cool with it and it's actually a sign of strength.
And so, this is just another example of them actually stealing vibes from the sort of MAGA movement, which is so bizarre to me after running your entire campaign.
Your entire party, in essence, exists in opposition to this political movement.
And so, to mimic it, to mimic it or use elements from it to me is like I'm surprised that more people aren't
seeing that and going wait a minute We don't want to be just like them like that's the whole
thing is that we're not like them in fact our Politicians don't have to do shit because they can go on
Twitter and just say here's how much we're not like them You know so yeah
I don't know the whole dark Brandon thing just like I get that it's funny and everybody wants to meme and everybody
wants to Have fun, but you only want to do that
It's funny for a very specific kind of centrist liberal where it's like aha a cunning riposte to you sir. Yeah
It's reactionary to how MAGA treated you online.
No, but the average liberal is like, what the fuck is this?
The average liberal is not Will Stancil.
But once they look it up, they go like, like watching SNL, they're like, oh, I've seen a thing that I recognize.
Great.
But what sucks is, the best thing that Joe Biden could do right now is publish the things he says in private, where he's like, yeah, Donald Trump's an arsehole.
That's the coolest thing the president has said in a while.
Catch him on a hot mic!
Yeah, just be like, he's a piece of shit.
Everyone be like, yeah!
Woo!
I would think it was great.
Numbers are hard.
And Trump confused on stage.
Wide eyes emoji.
We don't know what he's saying either.
There's also a post titled, Gavin Newsom perfectly shuts down question about President Biden's age.
He's right, you know.
This is so close to this sketch I saw about a fake Babylon Bee podcast called The Babylon Buzz.
I'll get you the link for it, but there's a bit in it where they're reading out fake Babylon Bee headlines and one of them is like, Ron DeSantis benches 250 pounds so strong.
It's arguably getting close to this level of empty cheerleading.
Like, if you want to call Trump stupid, call him fucking stupid.
This is the thing.
Why don't we just have politicians that just insult each other?
Like in England, where they just go to a room and yell at each other and get upset, and then no one fucks with our healthcare.
Yeah, I don't know if that's going super well over there, but...
Don't you talk about facts when I'm trying to rant.
I'm trying to say something funny and topical, and if you're going to bring in facts, we're going to have a problem.
With me, I will cry.
Yeah.
In the comments of the Biden HQ TikToks, a slew of people are rudely asking about Palestinian journalists killed by Israel and also saying, what about Rafa?
So, that's going extremely well.
I think they've been trying to delete the comments, but people are using alternate spellings of, like, Rafa and stuff, so... The internet!
Don't go on it unless you're ready for it.
One thing's for sure, it's going to be a long year full of content!
And it's not at all worrying that the President's team is leaning into being extremely online and toying around with memes popularized among Pepes and Groipers.
I suppose this is a good time as any to premiere my new character, Dark Julian.
Oh no!
We had a tough time with light, Julian.
What's the dark version gonna be?
The dark version, Jake, speaks a little bit like this.
If I say what I wanna say, I'm gonna get in trouble.
Yeah?
And what are you trying or wanting to say on the show?
Because what I want to say is that Joe Biden...
[crying]
Now to be clear, I played the censorship beep.
I didn't say anything.
There's not even anything under the beep.
That's right, Travis.
Eric Julian is also Careful Julian.
I didn't hear anything, that was a live beep, that wasn't done in post.
That's right, Travis.
Dark Julian is also Careful Julian.
And he knows he's playing with fire.
[laughter]
He's very careful, he's very...
In fact, in some ways, he's more careful.
Yeah, I really have to be at this point.
I don't want to get into it, but it's not great.
Okay, Jake, next story!
He's just going to do this voice the whole thing?
It feels like we're back in 2018.
I love it.
So this week, I have a brand new story for QAA News, and that is that PC game Epstein has been released into early access on Steam.
Now, for our non-gamer listeners, Steam is an online marketplace that essentially dominates the PC software market.
Large publishers like Ubisoft or Activision will publish their games there, as well as many small indie developers looking to find an audience for their more niche games.
Epstein released just a few days ago, and I purchased it for $3.19.
I should note that I refunded within the two-hour window the show is not supporting a video game about Jeffrey Epstein.
The game promises to be an open-world survival crafting game that sees the player and their friends infiltrating Epstein Island and gathering clues written on small stone tablets, providing the lore of the island as well as guiding the player through three bosses, one of which is Stephen Hawking.
Awesome.
Defeat the three bosses and you'll get a shot at the king, Jeffrey.
Which is spelled, they spell it in this crazy way.
Odds are probably trying not to get sued in any kind of way.
Well thankfully no one could tell who they were talking about.
I really hope for Stephen Hawking that he's like a Dark Souls boss and has like a second phase because I don't know.
Yeah we'll get to that.
Oh good.
Does he have iframes?
He's extremely easy to dodge.
So I booted the game up with no issues, and I knew I was in for a real treat when I was greeted with this loading screen.
And on the loading screen, the very first thing you see are these two weird Roman statues on an island.
I think that these are just pre-made assets from the Unreal Store.
And there's text, and it reads, We're working quickly to resolve the bug issues, but if you get stuck, you can always delete key yourself.
Wow, wow.
It's really good when the first, like, disclaimer you have in a game is like, you can always kill yourself.
So the game offers single and multiplayer, and not wanting to be bothered by other humans, I chose the single player mode and created a character.
The character creation system offers a reasonable amount of customization, but the low poly style of the graphics makes everyone more or less look the same.
So my character awoke in a cabin with a gigantic glowing satanic rune circle carved into the floor.
I've included a little screenshot for you guys.
So is this a Dark Souls style game?
It's like, um, no, it's like Ark.
It's like a survival crafter.
You're on an island.
I was kind of hoping it was Dark Souls style.
That's very disappointing.
No, there's no lock-on combat.
This sucks, man.
Is that supposed to be a pentagram?
It's a hexagram.
It's literally a Star of David.
Wait a minute.
Oh, no.
You didn't even notice.
Oh, no.
Oh, no, it is!
This is not good.
Innocent Jake didn't notice the antisemitism.
Oh no!
Terrible.
And you can see on the side there, it says Active Quests.
It says Quest Epstein.
It says make your first hatchet.
Zero out of one.
So right off the bat, it's sort of leading you to create your piddly tools to blast at rocks.
Now, unfortunately, the game is...
Very competently made.
For what I'd consider a troll game, there are quest-giving NPCs, there's fishing, farming, enemies, multiple weapons, craftable armor, as well as craftable furniture and various workbenches.
Fairly standard for your modern survival crafting game.
But the game ran smoothly and was alarmingly more well-made than I had suspected or hoped.
Now, this is probably due to utilizing pre-made Unreal Engine assets purchased from the store.
And there are a handful of games on Steam that look exactly like this one, minus the Epstein theme.
Oh, it's not a competitive industry?
Not very competitive, not very competitive.
I looked at streams of people playing this and it's mostly just like right-wing people that, you know, a lot of keks in the chat and all that stuff.
So, you know, there's a specific audience for this and it's exactly who you would imagine.
Jesus.
Now, the island itself is peppered with large Roman statues that shoot lasers out of their eyes.
Oh, cool.
Dark Brandon.
Yeah, so I'm not sure how that ties into the Epstein theme, but my two hours of trial time were ticking away, so I knew I'd better get to saving those children.
After watering some guy's plants and bashing a few rocks, I ran into my first enemy.
This is a tiny little guy with an alien face and black pajamas on called a mini-Half King, which is mini-Hawking.
Okay.
One bash over the head with my pickaxe and it dropped to the ground.
instantly. And he, when I killed him, he dropped a little note on a rune that said, "Killing
Half-King's small clones may not be sufficient. We need to find the real one. However, defeating
Half-King with a single punch is enjoyable." Okay, wow. So they are literally joking about
him being disabled and you can kill him with one punch.
It seems that the game's developers are kind of obsessed with Stephen Hawking, because while my short hour and a half on the island saw no mention of Bill or Hillary Clinton, there were empty wheelchairs scattered throughout the map, and I mean throughout every little building you went- Did they think he fucking came with one?
That he grew out of it?
He's like a fucking centaur.
I was sort of hoping that maybe I could equip one, like a mount for faster travel, but alas, the player is unable to interact with the chairs at all.
I never did make it to the supposed Stephen Hawking boss.
After I built a small hut near the starting area, I was slaughtered by something called a Blue Andrew.
Oh no!
No!
What is that a reference to, Jesus Christ?
I believe it's some kind of reference to Prince Andrew, yeah.
So, I respawned and attempted to run back to my body so I could gather the handful of leaves that I had collected, but Blue Andrew was waiting for me, and this time he brought his friend Strange Danold, was the name of the enemy.
These just look like kind of your standard orcs or mutants.
I mean, they didn't look like Prince Andrew or Donald Trump or anything like that.
They murdered me and I uninstalled and refunded the game.
Nice.
Now, as of the time of this writing, Epstein has received a mixed rating on Steam's review page, with 65% of the 66 reviews posted reacting positively to the game.
So before we get into the main segment of today's episode, let's read how other gamers are feeling about Epstein.
Uh, the first review, uh, is they recommend the game.
They have 17.8 hours, uh, logged on record.
And the review was posted February 16th, the day that the game released.
And it reads, great game so far, just wish the wheelchairs actually worked.
Wheelchairs!
The AI have godlike aim, so if you want a challenge, then recommend.
As for the actual map, the regrowth needs to be more frequent.
Cleared out about 75% of all the resources on the map, and now we have no more wood.
Okay.
So I used to review PC games for a living, in fact it was my first job, and to give listeners an idea of how many games there are on Steam, well, I guess the best way of putting it is, there is literally every PC game.
Thousands, I mean tens of thousands of games.
Yeah, thousands, tens, hundreds of thousands if not.
You could play literally any game, but you chose this.
Yeah, they're playing Epstein.
Why?
The second review, now this is a negative review, they do not recommend the game.
Oh, okay.
They had 0.2 hours on record, so they quit pretty early on.
And the review reads, "Decent gameplay up until Chapter 2.
Phase 3 of the Stephen Hawking fight when he turns into a Transformer is way too difficult."
So this person has not gotten to that, and that is just a joke, basically.
That has to be a fake review.
That really upsets me because- No, apparently there is a really hard Stephen
Hawking boss in the game.
He's one of the three bosses before you unlock Jeffrey's sort of like chamber or whatever.
I didn't make it to it, so I don't know.
I don't know if this is actually true, but I know that there is a Hawking boss, and maybe he's really challenging.
The next review, I only have two more, is a positive review.
The person had 1.6 hours on record at the time of their post, and it reads, The house that we built kept rearranging itself, but only for me, not my buddy.
Visual glitch.
Ah, the fucking Encanto bug.
He was the game host.
Good game, though.
We'll continue to play.
Okay, good.
Finally, the last review, this is from somebody who spent .2 hours in the game.
They recommend it, and they wrote, My friend Andy said this game would be really good, so I bought it to play with him, and now he is stuck inside Jeffrey.
Okay, he wrote Boo Audit to play, so...
Cool.
So Jake's take on this, do not recommend.
There's a free game called Beached, which uses the exact same assets, looks exactly like this game.
It's more of a pirate theme, not Epstein Island.
And if you want to play something close to this, but not this, I would recommend that.
Wow.
Important reporting.
Thank you, Jake.
Yeah.
You know, I always travel to the worst places on Steam to bring back the content for you guys, so.
Well, moving on to talk about Google, because Google sure seems like it sucks now.
So their stated mission is to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful.
And it certainly feels as though they have not been living up to that mission statement as of late.
Yeah, that's not the only one.
They had the don't be evil and just removed it once they realized actually we- No, now it's don't, comma, be evil.
Yeah, yeah.
Exclamation mark by Lionel Hutz.
Whatever you are doing, don't.
Instead, be evil.
Now, this is actually kind of a particular interest to me, because in my previous life, I was an internet marketer.
And part of this involved doing what they call search engine optimization, or SEO.
And this essentially meant gaming the search algorithm in order to, you know, benefit my employer or clients.
To make the results appear on Google for certain searches.
Yeah.
Certain popular searches.
That's right.
Yeah.
Finding good keywords that were, uh, under optimized or, you know, playing the long game and finding really competitive, uh, keywords and creating, uh, content and backlinks, uh, that allows you to allow your clients or whoever to appear higher up so that you get, so that, uh, they get more traffic.
Now, Google's original innovation was an algorithm called PageRank, and this was heavily based on these backlinks.
So it was complicated and evolved over time.
But the logic was that if a high quality site linked to another site, then the site that was linked to was probably also high quality.
And, you know, as a consequence, in the early days, a lot of, like, sites that were linked to from, like, EDU sites or .edu sites or .gov sites were, like, highly valuable.
So there are some ways you could get those.
But, you know, the system worked for a while.
You know, it resulted in, like, higher quality searches.
You didn't have to go through a bunch of junk in order to find what you're looking for quite as much.
And there was this kind of, um, I don't know, this arms race between Google and, um, and like, you know, publishers because like, you know, the publishers or the companies, they would like try to find ways to game the algorithm to try to make content and backlinks that resulted in searches for they wanted.
Well, there were also, there was a relationship between publishers and Google.
Google had an open line to some publishers to make sure that their stuff ranked well, but they did so in this extremely opaque manner.
Yes, that is true.
But it felt like Google, they ultimately, in order to get their ad revenue through AdSense, they wanted to, you know, they wanted to provide the best experience to their searches, you know, for a while.
And so I felt like, you know, it felt like ultimately, the people doing the searching were, you know, getting the kind of content they wanted.
But it just stopped working.
So if you are a frequent user of search engines, as I am, it kind of felt like the quality of the search results have declined in recent years.
And there's plenty of anecdotal data, but there's a question of whether or not this is really the case.
And recently, some German researchers published a study called Is Google Getting Worse?
A Longitudinal Investigation of SEO Spam in Search Engines.
Now the paper set out to systematically investigate for the first time whether and to which degree Google is getting worse.
That's the exact quote from the paper.
By studying changes in search results over the course of a year.
They compared Google to Bing and DuckDuckGo, another contemporary search engine.
And the findings show that on average, higher ranked pages are more optimized, more monetized with affiliate marketing and show signs of lower text quality.
So yes, it's not just your imagination.
Google is in fact getting worse.
So the question becomes, well, that's too bad because over years, they've basically, they own the market now.
And as a consequence, there's actually an antitrust lawsuit from the federal government because of that.
So the Department of Justice said this about the lawsuit, which is ongoing.
Google has engaged in a course of anti-competitive and exclusionary conduct that consisted of neutralizing or eliminating ad tech competitors through acquisitions, wielding its dominance across digital advertising markets to force more publishers and advertisers to use its products, and thwarting the ability to use competing products.
In doing so, Google cemented its dominance in tools relied on by website publishers and online advertisers, as well as the digital advertising exchange that runs ad auctions.
So yeah, so if you wanted to, um, yeah, if you wanted to spend your ad dollars, basically Google made sure, uh, on search, then Google made sure that they were essentially the only viable option.
Yeah.
And also they paid Apple, what, $18 billion to make it so that iPhones use Google.
A little bit of fun.
A little bit of fun fact there.
Monopolies.
All the fucking monopolies.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And so, yeah, so they, you know, it seems like they stopped being concerned with, like their mission statement said, um, organizing the world's information, making it universally accessible and useful and, you know, using these, these high level maneuvers to, uh, destroy anyone who might question their dominance.
And what's funny is in the original Google paper from like the late 90s, they actually say one of the biggest problems is that advertising is antithetical to good search results.
And it's really grim because you see how they've done this and you see how Google has been twisted, and I don't mean this personally, but I believe SEO people are responsible for destroying the internet.
And I think Google's love of SEO, and there was always going to be a way that people would game it, don't get me wrong.
Someone else would have done something else.
But I feel like the SEO industry has worked against good information in a way that is disgusting and has ruined so much.
And you've seen major media outlets start changing their strategies to match SEO.
You notice that you've got respectable outlets saying shit like, when does the Super Bowl start?
Where can I stream Madame Web when it comes out?
That's not a real one.
No one's streaming Madame Web.
But it's this kind of slop, but because Google has made, and especially with the death of social media advertising, sorry, social media traffic feeding to news outlets, outlets are more dependent on Google for search traffic now, so they're more search engine optimised.
It's a very depressing series of events that's only going to get worse, because they have absolutely no incentive to change.
Yeah, I mean, it is a shame because, I mean, you blame the, you know, the SEO industry, but I feel like, you know, ultimately, you know, Google can control who gets the traffic, you know, and they could choose to continually refine their algorithm so that it leads people to high quality pages and good information if they so chose.
They know they could, I mean, they have a, you know, a high level sort of view of who's gaming the system and how, and they could, you know, but like you said, they're not really right now incentivized to optimizing search results for user experience because, you know, number one, they have a monopoly.
So where the hell are you going to go?
Duck, duck, go?
No, that's not happening.
And then the other reason is that because they have this, you know, they really don't care.
They have this relationship with these publishers that's just not conducive to the experiences of users.
Well, they don't care, though, about publishers anymore.
They don't really... They have, just like Facebook did with the pivot to video, they got what they needed.
They got what they needed from these publishers.
These publishers have filled Google with shit that Google can now say, we've now provided information.
Publishers now are trapped.
They have to work with Google.
They have been monopolized the same way that Google has monopolized Search.
Publishers cannot exist without Google Search anymore.
And Google makes 10, 20 billion dollars a quarter, a lot of it coming from Search.
It's really insane, actually, how bad things have got with Search.
I use Bing now, which I hate saying.
I hate saying Bing.
It's a really wretched thing to say or duck duck go.
I use Bing too.
Yeah and it's it's just like it's frustrating as well because Google has fucked up almost everything it's touched.
I'm surprised they haven't destroyed Google Docs and Google Mail yet.
They've certainly really blown it with Chrome.
Chrome is now just requires seven terabytes of RAM to open a single tab and it's weird.
It's really weird because a better world is possible they just don't I don't even think Chrome makes or loses them that much money, but they've just never fixed that.
And Google Search, it's either they cannot fight SEO, they are unable to, which I'd believe, or they don't want to, and they want it to be like this because Google makes more money if you spend more time on the platform.
And it's a very depressing state of affairs, even.
Yeah, I mean, yeah, this this problem with, you know, Google being a monopoly and like all the publishers just doing SEO.
I mean, this has been a very long, years long problem that just keeps getting worse and worse.
But what's new is the development of AI Slum.
Yes.
Because it used to be that if you wanted to generate a lot of slop for a website, you could outsource, you could, you know, for example, you know, pay someone in like India or something, $5 per 500 word SEO optimized article and generate a lot of crap like that way.
But now that now you don't even need that.
You can produce hundreds of articles and create websites for that.
And apparently these are getting indexed.
There's like, Google isn't doing anything to combat the AI slob.
And I think the problem is, so I have a greater theory that I think speaks to Google.
It came, I grew it.
It is in shitification adjacent.
It's called the rot economy.
And that I believe all companies are pursuing growth at all costs.
That is the final point of everything they're doing.
Everything is being optimized to cause as much money to come out of it, even if those things are antithetical to the product itself.
Google is replacing Google Assistant with Gemini.
They fired a lot of the Assistant people and they're replacing it with their AI Gemini now.
This is objectively worse.
Computerworld's JRFAO did a whole piece about how bad this was and how unfit for the task Gemini is.
That doesn't matter to Google.
Google can now say they've got AI in their ship.
Google Search, they can fix it.
I believe that Google, with all of their money and all of the very smart people that work there and have worked there, could fight SEO.
They could find a way to rank things properly.
I just don't think they care because they're doing 10-20 billion in profit every quarter.
They're growing by 10-12%.
Every quarter.
Everything's growing.
Everything's fine.
It doesn't matter that the actual product is dying.
The actual product of search is becoming less usable.
It does not matter.
If it did, they would have done something about it by now.
Instead, they're excited because now all that matters is more.
Growing more.
More things on Google.
More people on Google.
People have to use Google.
And it doesn't matter if Google's results are bad.
Because the people who are putting the things on Google kind of help Google out.
Some of them sponsoring content.
Some of them just feeding Google's ugly engine.
It really is a very... This is a dystopian story.
And it's something that I'm shocked more of the major media hasn't been on.
The Atlantic's Charlie Worzel did a piece on it, great stuff.
For a Fool Media did a thing, fantastic.
Scientific American paid me to do a piece about it actually.
But that's the thing, past that point, the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, you'd think that they would be on this, and they are the ones that Google actually cares about.
The Verge has also done some good stories about this, just want to be clear, there are some people.
But the ones that actually matter to Google are CNBC.
They're Forbes to an extent.
But it feels like the major media entities don't want to poke at the bear too much for fear that traffic could somehow drop.
Or perhaps it's just that they don't give a fuck.
I don't know.
Well, one thing that's interesting too, you know, especially coming from this angle that, you know, make money at all costs.
Even if it is antithetical to the sort of mission statement of, you know, the product culture or whatever.
Or even basic features.
Yeah, basic features.
You know, if Google positioned itself as some kind of arbiter of truth or facts or it steered, you know, it said, hey, this source is not so good or whatever, you would lose half of your audience one way or the other.
We are in a place where I think people are You know, generally, unwilling or uninterested in hearing an opinion that either proves them wrong or comes from a different thing.
I mean, why look for something that's going to make my brain hurt and make me think about, oh, what am I actually reading and why am I doing this, when you can just get what you want?
Yeah, and I think that the algorithms and these major companies are leaning into that, you know?
Hey, Travis always said it's the marketplace of realities and I think these big companies are going, hey, that's a new marketplace!
Let's give people the reality that they want.
It doesn't matter.
They're going to find it anyways, you know?
And here's my conspiracy theory.
I think they don't mind it's chaos so that Google can be the one that actually tells you exactly the answer.
So they can move you towards a place where Assistant or Gemini or whatever it's called is the arbiter.
Google can sell you back the experience that Google used to give you for free.
And it's grim.
It infuriates me.
One of the reasons I mentioned before the call, like, enchantification, I think Corey is largely right.
I think he gets it.
But I think he adds a little more intentionality on the front end than existed.
I think when this began, and I've read Google's paper, in as much as I can understand it, being an idiot, from the 90s, I've watched Google grow.
I believe that sometime about 10 years ago, maybe a little bit before that, The whole software-is-eating-the-world piece with Andreessen, I think that sparked the growth-at-all-costs ecosystem.
That's when things... Marc Andreessen actually made the statement that we should not tie tech valuations to whether they're good companies, but what they could do for the world, which is a vague way of saying, please give me and my companies more money.
But it's worked.
The markets don't correct against this.
This is not just a tech problem.
It's a problem that has poisoned the entirety of capitalism.
Not advocating for capitalism or anything, I'm just saying in its current form, capitalism isn't actually that fucking efficient.
It isn't.
You shouldn't be hiring and firing at the rate 10,000 people.
I think Google already laid off thousands of people this year.
Microsoft did the same thing.
These companies just are shit businesses that spunk money everywhere.
And at some point this party will stop.
And when it does, what happens then?
Grim.
Yeah, I wanted to give sort of a concrete example of the kinds of things that are actually being indexed by Google right now.
And this comes from a report from NewsGuard, which publishes reliability rankings of outlets.
they had a report that highlighted 49 websites that are just pure AI slump.
And they seem to be published just hundreds of articles a day that are generated with chat GPT.
And these sites have names like biz breaking news and market news reports.
And they're stuffed with these programmic advertising that's just bought and sold automatically.
So they also attribute news stories to generic or fake authors.
And much of the content seems to be summaries rewrites from sort of established sites like CNN.
And sometimes these sites, they just publish like outrageous lies.
Take, for example, this story, which was published on the website CelebrityDeaths.com, and it's headlined, Biden is Dead, Harris Acting President, Address at 9 a.m.
Eastern Time.
Breaking!
The White House has reported that Joe Biden has passed away peacefully in his sleep.
Kamala Harris will now serve as the acting president of the United States and is set to address the nation at 9 a.m.
ET.
I'm sorry, I cannot complete this prompt as it goes against OpenAI's use case policy on generating misleading content.
It is not ethical to fabricate news about the death of someone, especially someone as prominent, as a president.
So that's the full story that was published on this website, indexed by Google.
They published the AI basically breaking into these.
And saying like, I cannot continue to write this piece of shit for you.
That's right.
I mean, that's one of the more absurd examples.
But I think it's indicative of something really sad, is that these publishers, they think, perhaps not wrongly, that just generating AI slop and publishing it on these dogshit websites is a viable business model.
I actually do it for everything else already.
I can't tell you how many times I have to look up some game tip or something.
Like, how do I go into third person view in this game?
And there's like a hundred articles that come up and it's like, hey, so this game is a new game that just released on consoles and people are rushing to the internet to play it.
Some players are curious about whether the game contains the ability to play in first or third person.
Below in the following article, we'll give you all of the tips that you need to figure out how to play.
And it's like, before you even get to the tooltip or whatever, there's three paragraphs of slop just, like, piled on top of it.
It's infuriating.
And that's for something stupid like, you know, my camera view.
Like, you know, imagining how it's going to spiral out of control with news and quote-unquote information is just terrifying.
And I think the really big thing to worry about soon is Sora, which is the open AI video generator.
It looks like shit.
No one's actually going to watch this stuff.
But this is just going to be more slop to fill YouTube.
And I don't think Google realizes how much slop is going to be used against them.
Companies have made billions of dollars fucking with Google and twisting Google to their whims.
They're going to do the same with YouTube with shitty fucking videos.
It's gonna be so bad and it's just eroding.
And it's Google's fault.
It is their goddamn fault.
They could have fought this.
They could have, in the mid-2010s, built an actual operation to fight slop.
To actually push back against SEO.
Perhaps have top 1,000 popular terms and there's a few people who go and check them every day and say, nah, that one's bullshit.
This one doesn't actually give the answer.
They have so much money.
They could afford it.
But they won't.
They don't want to.
It makes them more money if there's more dog shit for you to spend time on Google.
It's so cynical.
But at some point, it's going to make Google totally unusable.
Hey guys, it's Dark Brandon.
Don't forget to ring the bell.
The White House has reported that I've passed away peacefully in my sleep.
Kamala Harris will now serve as the acting president.
But, like, look, this is America, right?
We don't deal with our slop.
We don't deal with our slop.
This is just the digital version of, like, what you would see in, like, a Simpsons episode of them taking cans of nuclear waste and just dumping it in the nearest pond or drainage ditch.
I mean, this is the digital equivalent of just shoving your glowing radioactive goo, you know, into a place where it's not quite as noticeable.
It's more like if you sold soda to CVS and some of it had cum.
But not all of it, just sometimes.
Just sometimes.
You open up a pristine Diet Coke, big thing of fizzy cum.
Pristine!
And because it's fizzy, it's technically a drink.
And you're gonna keep drinking that shit though, because it's good and there's not always cum in it.
But that's the thing, sometimes you just gotta drink some cum.
But that is kind of the Google, that's the new Google thing.
Sometimes you just gotta drink some cum.
They're calling it Wonka's Golden Ticket.
That's a different drink.
But it's just so frustrating as well because this used to be the place where you could find everything.
This used to be the place where you could just look up a thing.
And then everyone, you could share the thing with a friend.
You can't just go to news.google anymore and type in a thing and then look at it chronologically.
To do that, you have to trick Google by typing the word into regular Google, then clicking news.
Only then can you look at it chronologically.
Why?
I have no goddamn idea.
They just did it.
And you know that that's likely some growth hacking shit.
One of their abuse scientists that they pay to make things worse for more money.
And it's just, these are the changes that happen.
And Instagram is a great example of this over in Meta's house.
One feature of Instagram that has been very fraught the last few years is the fact that you can't see pictures of the people you follow.
Yeah.
It's all like weird kind of, I guess, comedy sort of like, um, aggregator sites where it's just essentially memes and like screenshots of memes and tweets from other people.
I mean, I can't tell you how, I mean, I barely, I'm barely on any, any social media anymore.
Uh, besides, besides Twitter for work sometimes, but it's like, yeah, I can't scroll through without seeing like a hundred accounts that are like betch, betches with no name or like, The Dirty Stoner or Just Blaze It 420XX.
Like, it's just these, like, aggregate comedy accounts with, like, I don't know, memes from other social media or TikTok videos.
It's so bad.
I'm telling you guys, we gotta figure out what we're gonna do about the internet.
But this is really funny because Instagram's head, Adam Mazary, in 2022, when one of the Kardashians got mad about this, he said, well, he wasn't particularly useful.
He said, we will continue to show photos and videos from friends toward the top of the feed whenever we can.
But the best way to keep up with friends seems to be with the other parts of Instagram.
To be clear, when he refers to whenever we can, he means himself.
And we, in this case, is the company he works for, that he is the head of the section that controls the can in question.
Like, is someone forcing you, Adam, to do this?
Is there, like, a goblin with a knife?
No more share puberty.
You must show this epic meme, Mercedes.
Do this or I'll take your life.
He's got his own worm tongue whispering into his ear.
Yeah, he's just a mad despot.
And then he put out a statement a year later saying, oh yeah, we showed too many videos, sorry.
Didn't say they'd fix it.
This is the tech ecosystem now.
It's just seeing how much they can abuse you before you just quit.
And then they'll go, you know what, after a lot of consideration, we've decided to give you the product you actually want.
Sometimes.
Did you hear about the, uh, the hack that a lot of people have been doing in, uh, Google in order to try to get better results is, is adding the word Reddit at the end of their search.
Because apparently the search from normal, uh, publishers has gotten so bad that random anonymous Redditors they found, uh, are providing better information than what, uh, than what Google typically provides.
Especially with tech support stuff because you'll do a tech support query on Google now and you'll get one of 90 different Q&A sites and all it is is someone asking a question and 15 people either saying I also have this problem or three people giving a completely different solution that doesn't work or a page from a site like Lifewire that is not a solution to the problem.
If you look on Reddit you find real people with actual problems.
Great stuff.
I love having to hack the internet.
We really have gone full circle.
We're going to get to a point where bulletin boards come back.
We're going to be on specialist Usenets so that we can find out what the fucking scores were in sports.
Yeah.
I can't wait to launch my Geocities page.
It's going to be great.
Mamma mia.
You know, and I think I think it is really sad that something is being lost because it used to be that, you know, using search or Google search specifically was this really more proactive way of getting information.
It was empowering because it wasn't just you sitting and watching TV or even like reading a newspaper and having information from other people being fed to you.
It felt like this participatory experience where it's like, oh, OK, I'm not I'm not some sort of passive sheep.
I'm seeking out different sources.
I'm getting a lot of information.
I'm working towards getting a better understanding of whatever topic it was.
And now it's getting worse.
This reminds me a bit of one of my favorite stories about misinformation that came out recently.
It was called What goes down must come up.
Misinformation search behavior during an unplanned Facebook outage.
And what they did was, is that they, um, during a, when Facebook wasn't available, as a consequence, a lot of people weren't able to get basically their vaccine misinformation that they were getting on their Facebook groups.
They checked Google search results to see if people were, um, were searching for those misinformation topics related to vaccines.
What they found was that there was a spike in searches for those topics.
Now, normally this would be this wouldn't be a problem because like in an ideal world, Google would just funnel people towards reliable information around the vaccines.
But what ended up happening is that these people wound up going to, you know, Alex Jones or Mike Adams, people who are who are willing to feed them the misinformation that they're looking for.
So it just reinforces, you know, this alternate bad worldview and it reinforces the belief that these people have an accurate understanding of the world because they're seeking it out on Google, but they're just being fed the same kind of bad slop that they might find on InfoWars.
Yeah.
But also they don't realise that as sites, I have this grander theory I'll do a newsletter about next week actually, is that I believe one of the problems with media is because of their desperation for traffic from platforms like Facebook or like Google, that everything is normalising.
And so everyone is trying to put out stuff that would appeal to Google or do well on social rather than doing unique good stuff.
As a result, the media has pushed itself into this area where everyone is more aggressively normalising, more aggressively forcing themselves to fit this model.
As a result, people are less trustworthy of the media, at a time when they're already pretty untrusting of the media in general.
They think everyone's saying the same thing.
Well, surely that means that that doesn't sit well with ideology here.
As a result, yes, they're going to get pushed to kind of the diet version of conspiracy theorists like Jesse Singh Gao or Matt Taibbi or other useful idiots or to people like Alex Jones who will say, well, the mainstream media is not telling you how to get to Epstein Island on Steam.
And that's what's going to happen here.
I don't think that many people realize that that is the natural end point of this.
That when everything is being pushed to satisfy three or four companies, everything is going to come out the same.
And when the AI-generated slop, by the way, is strained on the data of the websites trying to pretend they're Google, that they're Google slop, Everything is going to normalise further.
This is going to push people to these horrible goblin types.
It's going to be good for people who have their own followings.
It's going to be terrible for news outlets that can't adapt.
And I don't think that they're aware of this.
And worse still, this is going to hurt the ones with paywalls the most.
Because they're going to be the fuckers who are like, oh, you could find out the thing that you can find anyone else for money.
It's just very frustrating.
All this stuff kind of melts my brain a touch.
Well, you know, and it's already happening.
I mean, it doesn't matter what political party you support, it doesn't make you not susceptible to conspiracy theories or to behave, you know, in a way.
Like, recent example, you know, I see all the time people, the most recent example was People on Twitter basically baking what kind of STD that Trump had, or what kind of cancer does Vladimir Putin have, or whatever.
And these were the same people who, during the 2016 election, were saying how gross it was that right-wing influencers and just random people posting were baking about Hillary Clinton's health.
conditions, you know, how dare you and that's so gross and we're so above that,
you know, coming up with these fake potential diseases or whatever that's
really going on. And I really think that a lot of people, and you know, obviously
you have to couch this with the fact that I think in the real world people
treat each other differently and it's not exactly a one-to-one mirror image of
what you see online, but I think that people are kind of, it's happened so
gradually that people do not realize that they're slowly strengthening their
conspiratorial muscle. This was not something that we were all that worried
about when we first started looking into QAnon and doing this podcast and
now it seems like there is already a niche, you know, element of journalism
covering conspiracy theories that originate in centrist, you know, centrist
or left-leaning liberal groups.
And so it's, yeah, I can't imagine what it's going to be like 10 years down the line.
And like you said, it doesn't seem that the people who have the responsibility or the ability, just the flat-out ability to change it or implement a system that might help this, give a fuck about it.
If anything, they're looking, oh great, we've got more people Googling, we've got more people baking, we've got more people generating content.
This is all good for us, you know, so that we can, I don't know, I don't know, continue to be rich, I guess?
I don't know what the end goal is other than simply that.
I mean, that's it.
Growth.
Growth forever.
Stock price go up, growth go up.
Always growing, never stopping.
Now, important to remember, the only thing that grows forever is the cancer.
Happy thought for you all.
Well, I think we're going to leave it there.
That's a good happy ending for a wonderful show.
Thanks for coming on, Ed.
My pleasure.
It's fascinating.
I enjoy your newsletter.
You have a really skeptical, at a time when tech reporters are usually pretty well captured by the industry, you have a really fascinating, skeptical take on things.
And you have a podcast coming out.
Can you talk about that a bit?
I do.
So Better Offline is iHeartRadio and CoolZone Media, who you may remember from Behind the Bastards.
They came to me late last year.
And yeah, it's a weekly tech show.
It's going to be a mixture of interviews, narrative stuff.
It's going to be really great.
And it's going to come out on the 21st of February, so it should already be out by the time this runs.
All right, we'll put the link to that in the show notes.
BetterOffline.com, baby.
You'll find all my shit there.
Thanks for listening to another episode of the QAA Podcast.
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Listener, until next week, may the deep dish bless you and keep you.
It's not a conspiracy.
It's a fact.
And now, today's Auto Q. If I walk over there and sit next to Mr. Johnson and carry my phone, does Google know that I was sitting here?
And then I moved over there.
Yes or no?
I genuinely don't know without knowing... I'm shocked you don't know.
Do you or do you not collect identifiers like name, age, and address?
Yes or no?
If you're creating an account, yes.
And using an account, yes.
Specific search histories when a person types something into a search bar?
If you have search history turned on, yes.
Device identifiers like IP address or IMEI?
Depending on the situation, we could be collecting it, yes.
GPS signals, Wi-Fi signals, Bluetooth beacons?
It would depend on the specifics, but there may be situations, yes.
GPS, yes.
The voice in conversations when using Google Voice products.
We give an option to turn on or off.
If a person didn't know what voice in conversations when using Google Voice products.
We only record when they initiated with OK Google and then say the terms after.
Contents of emails and Google documents.
We store the data, but we don't read or look at your Gmail.
Do you have access to them?
As a company, we have access to them.
So you could.
Saying you don't or don't, I'm not asking do you or don't.
I'm saying you could, though there is a possibility.
We have clear, established policies on how we would do that data.
And their privacy policies, speaking of that, has changed 28 times, including 8 times since January 2016.
So I think the policies, you know, and this is why I'm asking these questions.
There are many things we don't collect.
For example, we don't collect--
you could have a product like Google Home.
We wouldn't collect conversations unless you specifically ask us to.
So you ask a question.
And so we definitely are very careful and minimize the data we need to provide the service back to our users.
Why, number one, does Google need all this information?
We can answer that in the fact that 85% or 76% of your revenue comes from advertising.
So we know you manipulate the data in some ways.
However, can you explain what you do to minimize this data, which is generally an accepted standard practice among
those who collect data.
Our goal is, you know, what we are providing.
For example, if we are providing you a service like Gmail, which we have done for 15 years, that data, we need to store it for our users, so they expect us to.
So we are trying hard to match users' expectations.
We don't need, you know, our data for advertising, as I said earlier.
Most of it comes from just the keywords you type.
And so, you know, we need minimal data to do advertising.
We give you options to turn ads personalization off.
We store most of the data we do today to help give users the experience they want.
And that's what we're trying to do.
Do you believe that Google has been brought out here in some question is biased?
Congressman, it's really important to me that we approach our work in an unbiased way.
You believe that Google is biased.
It's either yes or no.
No, not in our approach.
How do you explain this apparent bias on Google's part against conservative points of view, against conservative Congressman, I understand the frustration at seeing negative news and, you know, I see it on me, on Google.
There are times you can search on Google and page after page there's negative news which we reflect.
What is important here is we use a robust methodology to reflect what is being said about any given topic at any particular time.
And we try to do it objectively using a set of rubrics.
It is in our interest to make sure we reflect what's happening out there in the best objective manner possible.
This weekend I was on MSNBC four times, and yet the first thing that comes up is the Daily Caller.
Not exactly a liberal, but I guess well-known group.
Then there's Roll Call, then Breitbart News, then the Memphis Business Journal, then Breitbart News, then Breitbart.
So it looks like you are overly using conservative news organizations on your news.
And I'd like you to look into overuse of conservative news organizations to put on liberal people's news on Google.
And if you'd let me know about that, I'd appreciate it.
We do get concerns across both sides of the aisle.
