Three Dumpster Fires

Google, TikTok and SpaceX went from smoldering to full flames - would we be better off without them?

I’ve been eyeing these three little piggies over the past month and this week they got too interesting to ignore so let’s check out what’s going on.

🔥 Google

AI is such a threat to Googles core search business that they don’t know what to do with it and it may end them. The dumpster fire was entirely self-inflicted as they rushed to release their highly anticipated (and quite late) AI in response to OpenAI/ChatGPT. It’s called Gemini and among the bad/wrong images it generated were ones of Nazi soldiers of color rather than German.

The internet got busy, quickly uncovering similar problems with chat - for example getting Gemini to say Elon Musk and his evil memes have been worse for the world than Hitler. Why is it always with the Nazis?

Two years ago, Google’s CEO Sundar Pichai said AI is more profound than ‘fire or electricity.’¹ When I wrote Games People Play, it was Google’s AI team that beat the best player in the world in the hardest game (Go). Google has worked hard to create AI for a long time. But they make all their money on Search and AI fundamentally threatens search so up until OpenAI forced their hand they preferred AI stay indoors at R&D playing games.

Google has tried over and over and over again to find something else that makes anywhere near the gobs of money search does but to no avail. They even created a new parent company called Alphabet to highlight all the stuff they do besides search but that’s just lipstick on a pig. Soo many failed products. The only thing besides search that meaningfully contributes to Google’s bottom line is YouTube which they acquired nearly 20 years ago and has a revenue model is very similar to search - Ads baby.

Remember the Google Glassholes? Android is brilliant but it’s open source so the only revenue comes from their App Store (Play). The Chrome browser was super slick for its time - not so impressive anymore - but again, limited revenue. Same with Chromebooks.

Up until the 90’s IBM was the biggest of the big dogs in tech. They dominated the computer industry. Today, not so much. PCs were the disruptive tech in that round, and they upended everything for IBM. Ironically, IBM created the tech that then disrupted them. They built the first PCs. But like Google and AI - never embraced them because they didn’t want to upset their Mainframe cash cow core business. IBM sold their PC operating system (it was called DOS or Disk Operating System) to Microsoft and subsequently was pushed off the dancefloor to watch from the side.

Google pulled from the same playbook as Microsoft, building their one trick pony Search by taking what Digital Equipment Corp built in the AltaVista search engine, improving the algorithm and building an ad business on top of it. I wrote about that and Googles ensuing Enshittification last month:

Lost and Found

The thorny problem of how incumbents avoid disruption from new tech and nimbler competitors is captured by the Innovators Dilemma. Microsoft got really stuck here in the 2000s. Windows and Office were so entrenched at the core of the company and Microsoft’s initial responses to giant waves of disruptive tech like smart phones and the cloud were really bad. I lived through this one and honestly, I didn’t think we’d make it. Satya Nadella deservedly gets all the credit for brilliantly navigating Microsoft’s transformation into a cloud and services company over the past 10 years. Satya’s partnership with OpenAI is genius because Microsoft doesn’t get directly blamed for consumer generated AI hallucinations because well it’s OpenAI’s service …

In the beginning, Google really believed in their ‘Don’t be evil’ motto but that’s gone as they have grown and splintered into Alphabet. Remember when Google results would render in discrete pages and the footer of each page would be a long Gooooooooooooogle indicating how many pages of results and how fast they came back? There was the excitement of exploration and discovery. Now that’s been replaced by the evil Infinite Scroll of results and it’s not much fun at all. Industry pundits blame Google’s culture for their spectacular lack of execution in AI and they may be right.

I’m for full disruption of the search space - I’ll take an AI generated answer to a question with references (and appropriate ads) any day versus an endless scroll of blue links, many of which are ads.

Check this controversial press release from industry analyst Gartner that predicts search traffic will drop by 25% by 2026 due to AI. It’s going to be a bumpy ride for Google that’s for sure².

🔥🔥 TikTok

TikTok is fascinating. Also terrifying:

• TikTok disrupted the disruptors 5 years ago with short format videos and a magical algorithm that served up endless entertainment. Instagram freaked, pivoting hard to videos in reels to compete and stop losing share.

• TikTok’s algorithm keeps an average users’ attention an astonishing hour and a half plus a day; double its closest competitor Instagram.³ Talk about going viral.

• 170 Million Americans use TikTok including around two thirds of adults under 30. In the terrifying camp: A third of US adults under 30 get their news from TikTok.

• TikTok is a Chinese company headquartered in Beijing (ByteDance). China would never allow a US or any foreign owned company to do business in their country⁴ let alone one running an app that captivates the attention of millions.

Last week the House passed bill to ban TikTok, re-igniting a fire that had been smoldering ever since Trump took on TikTok in the name of National Security four years ago. Originally the concern was how can we let this Chinese company collect detailed information about every American that uses this app?⁵

Now the TikTok threat has evolved into the more subtle, yet more dangerous one of Propaganda. In an election year this feels very similar to the Russia/Facebook propaganda disaster of 2016.

The WSJ created a bunch of accounts to test how TikTok portrays the middle east conflict to a 13-year-old. It shows with real data how - with only a pause here or there on war videos - a rabbit hole quickly swallows you showing video after video of violence and terrified families:

How TikTok Brings War Home to Your Child

NCRI, a social media think tank, did a study on how TikTok suppresses topics the Chinese Communist Party doesn’t like. They compared videos on Instagram versus TikTok and found dramatic difference on topics like Tiananmen Square or protests in Hong Kong. You can read the report here. Bottom line: TikTok can and does manipulate content on its platform.

Right before the House voted there was a classified briefing on the TikTok threat. It was confidential so who knows what was actually covered but rumor is evidence was shown on how TikTok has been able to sway public opinion away from Israel and towards Palestine by amplifying pro-Palestinian content. That’s pretty awful. It’s easy to see how a future conflict the CCP is really invested in - like invading Taiwan (for the Chips of course!) - would result in a full-scale propaganda/disinformation campaign in the US.

Then TikTok threw gas on the Dumpster Fire 🔥🔥🔥

Just before the House voted on the bill, TikTok pushed an in-app notification to users across the US to call their representatives to save TikTok.

This is it:

Users became completely unhinged and here’s what happened next in the halls of congress:

…calls from “students in near tears” with the “chatter of the classroom behind them.”

​​”They’re flooding our offices, often from kids who are about as young as nine years old, their parents have no idea that they’re doing this, they’re calling in, and they’re basically saying things like, ‘What is Congress? What’s a congressman, can I have my TikTok back?’” …

“One person threatened self-harm unless they got their TikTok. Another impersonated a member of Congress’ son, scaring the bejesus out of the congressman, by the way,” …

“And this is exactly the kind of influence campaign which, in the hands of a foreign adversary in a moment of national peril, could sow chaos and discord and division in a way that could really harm our national security to the benefit of a foreign adversary.” 

Any representative in the House that still questioned the power and influence of TikTok rushed to switch their vote. The bill⁶ passed last Wednesday with broad bipartisan support by a margin of 352 to 65.

Now it heads to the Senate where stuff is getting squirrelly again with Trump flip flopping or rug pulling his support for the bill thanks to rich donors who back TikTok and it may go no farther, but I’d vote for it in a minute.⁷

🔥🔥🔥 SpaceX

SpaceX isn’t really a dumpster fire, but they are the ones that actually ‘sploded a couple of really big things on Pi Day last week (3/14) so they get a special shout out for that.

Last week was the third launch of SpaceX’s massive Starship which I am fascinated with and have written about before in The Need for Speed.

Starship Launches Recap:

1. First Launch - around a year ago - stages didn’t separate, one big explosion. Took 4 minutes.

2. Second Launch - about 6 months ago - stages separated followed by not one but two big explosions. Took 8 minutes.

3. Third Launch - last week - clean stage separation, the Ship portion made it into orbit demonstrating both how it will deploy cargo (the Giant Pez Dispenser) and refuel and then it checked out. The Booster portion turned around to head home for an ocean landing but never made it. Another two big explosions. Took 50 minutes.

SpaceX hopes for a Fourth launch as soon as May.

This iterative approach with massive rocket ships with lots of moving parts is pretty amazing. In software it’s all about fast iteration and refinement based on data but I am amazed by SpaceX’s engineering approach at this scale.

The funny thing is SpaceX has to keep shouting how successful each launch is in the face of everything repeatedly blowing up. There is no hiding the big explosions. SpaceX is under pressure to get it right and soon because NASA is counting on StarShip for the Artemis program returning us to the Moon and subsequently Mars.

SpaceX will figure it out. They have a proven track record with the Falcon 9 which was developed the same way. Falcon 9 launches all the time now⁸ including sending bunches of Astronauts to the International Space Station. Most recent launch was yesterday! You can watch replay here.

I’m still fascinated by the rockets and the scale and scope of the engineering but increasingly less impressed with the dystopian future Musk and Bezos and the like paint where humanity’s life in the stars is on desolate planets and space stations because we mucked up Earth.

So here’s the dumpster fire wrap:

1. Go AI, lets shake up search and Google.

2. For TikTok, it’s time to pull the plug on China running a propaganda machine that targets our most vulnerable.

3. SpaceX, well, keep building the crazy rockets and exploring but also let’s keep Earthing for a good long time.

Best, Andrew

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Check out last week’s article!

1. At the World Economic Forum no less!

2. One thing Gartner points out is the outsized number of searches Google gets because Apple pays them to be the default search on iPhones. What if Apple decides it’s their turn to go big on AI and switches that up? Things can change quickly. Oh btw Google is also under threat of breakup from the DOJ with multiple antitrust trials ongoing for monopolizing the search engine and advertising market.

3. Great data and visualizations on TikTok against the larger social media landscape in this WSJ article.

4. China doesn’t allow foreign companies to do business directly. Microsoft for example has to resell their cloud services via a Chinese company who also manages the datacenters.

5. Every App does this btw

6. The Bill is called Protecting Americans from Foreign Adversary Controlled Applications Act or PAFACAA. You can read it here and no it doesn’t ‘shut down TikTok’

7. The text in the notification is incorrect - the bill doesn’t mean TikTok goes away, just that the US portion has to be sold off so it’s not under the control of the CCP. Fun dance videos shall prevail.

8. The latest launch was yesterday! It was a resupply mission using the Dragon capsule to the ISS. It was the 311th successful launch of Falcon 9.