Google became the most successful publisher in history by connecting works with audiences; its AI now chops those works up specifically to stop audiences from reaching them.
Publishing is not printing books; it is connecting a work with the people who need it. By that definition, Google was once the most successful publisher in history.
The connector is dead
Google's mission was to organise the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful. It crawled sites and sent audiences to those pages.
Now AI summaries and the Gemini chatbot chop up the web's works and spread them across a vast multidimensional array, with the explicit aim of keeping audiences away from the originals.
The more AI, the deeper the hole
Google used to make search results deliberately worse so people would search again and see more ads. Sleazy, but profitable.
AI is different. The author calls it the money-losingest endeavour in the history of civilisation: Google is losing hundreds of billions on it, and the more it does, the worse its finances get. Do it long enough and the company may cease to exist.
It can only delay that by extracting more from web publishers: usurping their audiences, showing as many ads as possible, and still losing money.
A mob-style bust-out
In The Age of Extraction, Tim Wu argues that intermediaries are prone to main character syndrome, forgetting they are there to connect others and making themselves the prime beneficiary of the transactions they facilitate.
Google has a scorching case. Once it merely degraded search and added ads; now the gamble could destroy both Google and the publishers it once served. That is less like slow enshittification and more like a mob bust-out.
Why it matters
When the intermediary that connected works to audiences switches to intercepting those audiences, the damage goes beyond one company's accounts: the machinery for letting people find good things breaks. Google is burning the web down while losing money, which shows a platform freed from competition and regulation will torch even its own long-term business.
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