[iroh2727]

I’ve realized only recently a way to interpret what’s going on at Google economically-speaking: as companies grow and as economies grow as well (e.g. to be more automated and industrialized), this always results in greater bureaucracy [1]. However, Google while it did add more bureaucracy, tried to instead turn these new less-purposeful jobs and bloat into widescale attempts at “innovation”.

Partly legitimate, but partly to maintain culture and a semblance of being an innovative company, in spite of the fact that they are a monopoly that, at the end of the day, is not really incentivized to innovate (e.g. M&A is much more practical for monopolies, as is competitor sabotage, sales and marketing, which of course they’ve also done).

I guess Peter Thiel for example said this long ago (in a convo with Eric Schmidt iirc): that Google is actively anti-competitive. And this is always, always the case for monopolies. They’ve just done such a good job of marketing and creating sideshows to make it appear otherwise. Not to say that they haven’t made some legitimate tech breakthroughs since being a monopoly, but also that tech is solely to serve their ads monopoly, rather than to serve the general public (e.g. what do you think their ML investments are for? It’s not to create C-3PO…)

[1] see e.g. Max Weber for how industrialization leads to bureaucracy, or more recently, David Graeber’s bullshit jobs talk or book for a more fun, anecdotal take.