Cory Doctorow

I've been an activist, journalist, and a writer.

I'm a recovering library worker and bookseller and Clarion West instructor every now and again, and I'm very pleased to be back here in Seattle to talk with you folks.

Ed, do you want to start by talking about Prabhagaur Raghavan?

There we go.

I do have an honorary PhD in computer science.

So Ed has got this way of talking about the ideology that says, let's make Google worse in order to increase profits.

And you have to understand, when Google hit this code yellow, they had a 90% market share in search.

So of course, query growth had slowed.

How do you increase query growth?

when you have a 90% market share.

You can raise a billion humans to maturity and make them Google customers.

That's a product called Google Classroom, but it doesn't work quickly.

And so they needed something else to goose growth, and they came up with this idea, let's make Google worse in order to make more money.

And you see in these documents that had surfaced this ferocious debate between technologists who want to do the right thing in the form of Ben Gomes and business people who want to do the wrong thing in the form of Pragyavar Raghavan.

What's interesting about this is that although for many years you can imagine fights like this played out at Google where the side that wanted to make things better won out against the side that wanted to make things worse, in this case you see this guy losing.

And he's losing because his argument consists of, if I made Google worse, I would feel bad about my work and my life.

And Raghavan's argument is, if we make Google worse, we'll make a lot more money.

So you have to wonder, what is it that created this environment?

Ed calls the mindset that says, well, if you can, you should worsen things to make money, the rot economy.

And I think it's a very apt phrase.