John Battelle's Search Blog Thoughts on the intersection of tech, business, and society.

The University of Peers and Elders

For the past ten or so years I’ve harbored a mostly secret desire to return to graduate school. Part of this is because I’m a frustrated academic – when I was a senior in college, I seriously considered the PhD program in Anthropology at Berkeley, thinking I’d write a masterful ethnography of the nascent technology industry. But I was put off by a doctoral candidate’s admonition that, should I choose her path, I “better get used to eating ramen for the next seven years.”

Instead I went to work covering the tech industry as a reporter, then pursued a Master’s in Journalism, also at Berkeley. Despite its status as a two-year program replete with a thesis, journalism at Berkeley – or anywhere – happens to be one of the least academic fields of study possible. I did write a rather lengthy (and quite dry) paper on the future of publishing as it relates to new digital technologies. But by the time I was finished, all I really wanted to do was start a magazine.

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Google (And all of Tech) to News: Shove It.

There’s an old maxim in the news business: Stories in which a dog bites a man are uninteresting. But a man biting a dog? Now that’s worth writing up!

Last week Google released a report on the value of news to its business. Its conclusions minced no words. Here’s the money quote: “…news content in Search has no measurable impact on ad revenue for Google.”

On first glance, Google’s experiment feels like a Dog Bites Man story – everyone knows news doesn’t drive advertising revenue – hell, I lived that truth most of my career, most recently with The Recount, which attempted to convince advertisers to support high-quality news coverage across video and social media (we couldn’t). But look a bit closer, and you might just see a Man Bites Dog story after all.

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Where’s The Business Model in Chat-Based Search?

Google’s AI Overviews feature in its main search service.

Two years ago I wrote a series of posts exploring the business model and interface implications of generative AI-based search. At the time, it was not clear how Google would respond to the existential threat that ChatGPT and its peers seemed to present. If it took root, a chat-like interface to search would fundamentally disrupt Google’s core revenue model. What was the company going to do about that?

I noted that six months into the GPT revolution, Google’s response seemed to be overly cautious. I encouraged the famously slow-moving company to go on offense: “It’s time to push something out to market, it’s time to declare yourself the leader in this new market, and it’s time to lay out a vision for what the future of computing will look like,” I wrote. “Imagine if they had waited until they figured out how to make money before launching Google Search?”

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Data Everywhere, But Not a Drop to Drink

This is not the network standard we’re looking for.

Three months ago I published my annual predictions, and while I rarely revisit them in the middle of the year, I do want to note an interesting development related to prediction #3, which states: “2025 will not be the year AI agents take off.”

Here’s what I said back in January:

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How Is AI Changing Search? ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

New data highlighted in Casey Newton’s Platformer newsletter codifies what most of us have already assumed: AI chatbot usage is starting to reshape search. And when search changes, so does the Internet as we know it. Unfortunately, the data lacks a fundamental denominator, and as such, only serves to feed the signal-free hype cycle we’re currently in.

The data comes from Adobe’s Analytics platform customers, and it paints a fascinating if incomplete portrait of how consumers conduct their online research. Yes, traffic from AI chatbots has risen more than 1000% since last summer, but….on what base? Take a look at this chart:

Tech Used To Be Magical. Why Isn’t It Anymore?

I’ll ask you kindly to get the fuck off my lawn now.

I’ve been pondering something for a while now, but have held off “thinking out loud” about it because I was worried I might sound like a guy yelling at the kids to get off his lawn. But f*ck it, this is my site, and I think it’s time to air this one out: Technology isn’t delivering on the magic anymore. Instead, it feels like a burden, or worse.

For decades, digital technology delivered magical moments with a regularity that inspired evangelical devotion. For me, the very first of these moments came while using a Macintosh in 1984. Worlds opened up as that cursor tracked my hand’s manipulation of the mouse. Apple’s graphical user interface – later mimicked by Microsoft – was astonishing, captivating, and open ended. I was a kid in college, but I knew culture, business, and society would never be the same once entrepreneurs, hackers, and dreamers starting building on Apple’s innovations.

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My Morning Paper

Nearly every conversation I’ve had over the past month has involved some variation of this question: What are you reading right now? The question isn’t about fiction, or even books – it’s about news. Most of my friends and colleagues are trying to avoid reading (or watching) too much of it – we all know the Trump playbook, and if he’s going to flood the zone with shit, well, best to stay out of the zone.

Yesterday I was having lunch with a fellow islander, a man whose built his career in marketing and communications. He asked the same question, and mentioned he’s been dissatisfied with the usual fare consumed by members of our tribe – the Times, the Post, the New Yorker et al – the “mainstream, liberal media” as defined by our current leaders. I agreed – and told him I’d recently cancelled my Post subscription (the whole Bezos thing is getting to be too much) and that I rarely read full Times pieces unless they’ve been forwarded to me, usually via email or text. I’ve been off Twitter for over two years, and BlueSky is better, but my feed has become a litany of complaint, which isn’t exactly helpful.

So what do you read, he asked again? I mean, really read? And that’s when it hit me: I read my inbox. Over the past decade or so, it’s become my morning (and afternoon, and evening) paper. I want a filter between me and the media, and I wanted that filter to be made up of humans and brands that I trust. As a medium, email is tempered – I only get things I’ve opted into getting. There’s no algorithm or AI, spam gets deleted instantly, and I chose what I open, and when I open it. It’s pretty much the opposite of how our current media ecosystem works. When the newsletters from mainstream media come in, I’ll browse them, but I rarely click through. Instead, my diet consists of a lot of individuals, and a ton of niche newsletters.

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When Tech Gets Too Big To Fail

I opened my annual predictions last week by noting that the technology industry had leapfrogged finance as the most powerful political force in the business world. But the news today that Meta is all but abandoning content moderation in favor of a decidedly Trump-friendly “let them say whatever the f*ck” approach has prompted me to revise that sentiment a bit.

It’s not that Tech has overtaken Finance. It’s that Tech has…become Finance. It’s become the most rapacious, amoral, win-at-all costs industry in the world. Consider:

Meta not only abandoned its content moderation practices (which, in turn, will allow it to supercharge its business model), it’s also building AI engagement chatbots aimed at juicing its bottom line, hired a Trump loyalist (and proponent of violence as entertainment) to join its board, and elevated a Trump devotee as its head of policy and communications. The company has pulled out every possible stop to ensure it profits from the next four years of Trump rule.
The global financial system is now dominated by the stock performance of tech companies. Nine of the top 10 S&P stocks by weight are tech companies. The entire S&P 500 is, in the words of one economist, “simply NVIDIA in drag.” When this is the case, finance becomes beholden to tech; now it’s tech companies, not banks, that are “too big to fail.”
The CEOs or founders of OpenAI, Apple, Amazon, Meta, Ripple, Robinhood, and countless others have given large sums of money to Trump in recent weeks. It’s difficult to see this payola as anything more than bribes and down payments meant to protect Tech’s position in a new world order built on … Tech.

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Predictions 2025: Tech Takes the Power Position

Look, I’m not much of an AI image-generation prompt writer.

This isn’t going to be a normal year.

2025 will be strange, frenetic, and full of surprises, particularly for those of us who watch tech closely. We’re not accustomed to the tech industry having this much raw power. The finance industry? Sure. For decades, we watched leaders from Goldman rotate through every administration’s cabinet and economic team, and we got used to it. But this year, for the first time ever, Big Tech has leap-frogged finance in the pantheon of political influence. And while the finance bros have a reliable and predictable ideology – capital is king – the subset of Big Tech bros who’ve bought their way into the Oval are evangelists for an untested and downright strange brand of magical thinking best summed up as “techno optimism.” The sophomoric claptrap underpinning Andreessen and Musk’s approach to politics may not be representative of the tech industry overall, but for better or for worse, 2025 is going to be the year when the loudest voices in the room are all adherents of the Great Man Theory, and they all happen to have direct access to the Oval Office.

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