Transcription
Amazon Web Services went down on October 18th. And during that time, we lost access to things like Reddit, Slack, Snapchat, Venmo, and Fortnite. I also couldn't check the weather on my HomePod. A shocking amount of stuff runs on Amazon.
Not only that, it's been estimated that 70% of the modern internet is served by one of three players. That's Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud Platform, and Amazon Web Services. So, in this video, we're going to talk about what that means for your attention in the attention economy and a possible escape hatch into a smaller, more intentional human internet. So, let's talk about it.
So, the first question we got to ask is why is it that when Amazon has an outage, somehow half the internet disappears with it? Well, it comes down to this basic principle. Every internet connected service that you use, a website, an application, whatever, at the end of the day needs to be run on a computer somewhere. It needs something to serve it to you, a server. So those can be anywhere from something as small as Chewy over here, a mini PC that I use in my own house to serve things to just me, or it can be massive data centers filled with thousands and thousands of computers to serve millions of users all over the world. That's what Meta and big companies use to serve you lots of ads.
Now, the thing is, running servers for massive user bases is really expensive. It's difficult. It's hard to manage. And so what people do, what companies do is they outsource that to cloud providers. That's companies like Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud, and Microsoft Azure. They manage all these PCs, bigger PCs than this, so that you don't have to. Actually, a lot of my day job is managing Amazon Web Services for hosting services. So companies are essentially renting out infrastructure so that they can serve you applications without having to worry about it too much.
So, when Fortnite goes down, it's because Epic Games uses Amazon Web Services servers to connect you to their game. Same thing with Snapchat. Snapchat's data goes through Amazon Web Services. All of it goes through Amazon Web Services. So, when AWS has an outage, everybody on AWS has an outage. Of course, your company could manage its own servers and things like that, but it's a lot of work. You have to hire personnel to handle that infrastructure. You have to maintain that infrastructure. You have to organize it properly. all of that jazz. And so companies avoid it to the point where 70% of modern services, it's been estimated, are running on one of these cloud providers. 70% of these companies don't want to deal with it themselves.
It's gotten to the point where philosophers and economists have been referring to this as technofudalism, equating Microsoft, Google, Amazon, and the other big tech bros to feudal lords renting out their corners of the internet to the rest of us plebs. And with 70% of modern internet services being served essentially digitally leased out to other companies, how far off are they?
Now, fair enough. Not all of us are running companies. In fact, most of us aren't. So, how much does this impact like the average person who's not running an internet software as a service company? Well, I think actually quite a lot. I think it affects us through our attention primarily through search engines. So, let's talk a little bit about Google search.
It used to be that Google was a search engine company. That was their claim to fame. They had indexed a decentralized web so you could find whatever you were looking for. Little blogs talking about new cars or how to clean out bed bugs or god knows what else. Because the internet was full of these little human blogs run by regular people or institutions that had joined and participated in this decentralized network. It was hard to get from place to place and so Google gave you a portal into the web.
Now, at some point, Google stopped being a search engine company, a company whose primary purpose was to find you what you're looking for on the internet. To be fair, it's really expensive to run the biggest search engine on the planet. They needed some way to make money. And so, they made the shift to an ads company, a company whose primary purpose is to serve you the most effective ads possible as often as possible. What this means is Google became the largest attention economy company in the world. I mean any company whose primary means of turning up profit is serving you ads must eventually optimize for your attention, right? That's time spent looking at ads, likelihood that you'll convert and buy something because you saw an ad and just the sheer quantity of ads that you see. That's how they make a profit. They have to optimize for that. And Google is just that.
What this means for regular people is that your portal into the web, the tool you use to find interesting things, funny things, solutions to problems that you're facing written by real people on their blogs and things like that, that tool is no longer designed to find you those things. Instead, what it's designed to do is to keep your attention as long as possible. Now that may feel very similar for a lot of the time because often what's best keeping your attention is at least tangentially related to what you were searching up but it's not always it's not onetoone and fundamentally the difference is instead of being provided a service by Google you are the service the service that Google is providing out so that other companies can buy your attention your time so they can serve you ads.
This becomes more interesting when we bring into account search engine optimization or SEO. This is a set of practices that websites and blogs use to rank higher on search engines, primarily Google, right? Because people aren't going to click on the fifth page, seventh link. They're going to click on the first four probably, unless they're ads, cuz they're so often just ads in the first four slots these days. But anyways, search engine optimization practices often include things like making sure your website loads faster because people don't wait around for slow websites, and that's fairly harmless. But they also optimize for time spent on the website, clicks onto the website, time spent sort of on different pages on the website. And all of this is also optimized by the same things we see on social media. Hot takes are better at grabbing attention than nuanced and interesting takes. Shallow levels of information are better for a broader audience than deep diving something. It leads to a shallower experience overall and a more commercialized internet. But worst of all, of course, it leads to more of your attention funneled down the drain where you don't want it spent.
So, what do you do if you want to escape the sort of shallow commercialized part of the web that is served to you on the front page of Google, but you still want that interesting niche hobby stuff that's been on personal blogs since the beginning of the internet, the really interesting human stuff. Well, it turns out that it's still running. People are still writing, obviously. It's just sort of hidden in the background because search engines aren't serving it to you. A little bastion of the web, affectionately referred to as the small web.
So, we're going to talk about how to gain access to it, find interesting things, and how to participate in it by self-hosting your own blog. So, I want to highlight a couple of search engines that are built specifically to surface non-commercial content, stuff written by real people. This is Marginelia Search. It's one of those search engines. It's completely open source, which means that you can look at the code if you're that kind of person. Uh, it's written with an open license, all the awesome stuff if you're that techy person. But if you're not, you can just use it to search things and find websites written and run by real people. This is just some dude's website, and it's full of really interesting tips.
On the other hand, if I use Google to search woodworking, uh, I've specifically picked not where I live because it doxes you by default, we get a bunch of specific companies surfaced and then like websites run by bigger companies with Google reviews built in. Uh, we get Reddit and a bunch of other stuff. I'm surprised I didn't get ads. This is like the fir I have Adgard home running. I'll do a video on AdGuard in the future, which is awesome. So, I really like these smaller scale search engines. You can even specifically search for blogs or academic stuff, all sorts of great stuff. Wibby is another example of this.
If you're interested in participating in a small web or an indie web at more of a philosophical and communal level, then I recommend checking out indieweb.org. This is a group of people, a community focused on building up a people-focused alternative to the corporate web. Right? I'm not too deep into this, but I am interested. I like their principles of using your own domain as your primary online identity as opposed to a Facebook or Google or Apple account, publishing your content on your site first as opposed to on YouTube or Medium or Substack and generally owning your content. I think there's a lot of really interesting stuff happening here as well as open source protocols for letting websites talk to one another and transfer information. There's a lot cool happening here and I will definitely be diving deeper and deeper into this in the future.
The last and easiest thing to use to just replace Google in general as your search engine is Kaggi. Now, Kaggi is a paid for search engine, which feels a little weird because search has been free for so long, but that's an illusion of free, right? When you use Google, Google is actually selling your data and you are the service and the product. With Kaggi, you pay a reasonable amount, something like five bucks a month or 10 bucks a month for a certain number of searches and you get a service where your information is more private, so they claim. I can't guarantee that, but I do like Kaggi. I have used it in the past. Uh, you get a service where your searches are actually quality every time, right? Like it is a much more high quality experience because they don't have a profit motive to serve you ads. They are already turning a profit because you paid to search. I like this as a fundamental idea. Whenever possible, when participating in the web, you can avoid the attention economy by paying to not be the service and instead paying for your service. KAGI is an example of that and I respect them as a company for doing this. So, I highly recommend checking out this as just a general replacement for your search engine. You will get better results.
Lastly, I want to talk about how to participate in the small or indie web. I think the best thing you can do is start your own little blog. And there you can talk about your favorite things, your interests, whatever. But most importantly, you can curate a list of the other websites that you find interesting yourself. Because after all, this is the web. It's primarily about connecting to other nodes in the web, other sites back and forth, right? And so the more you connect to other things and share the parts of the web that you like the best, the easier it is for everybody else to find the interesting things. Your participation in it is as a curator as well as a creator instead of just a consumer like you would in the commercialized web or big tech web for example.
You can also host that on not Azure, AWS or Google Cloud, and instead on personal hardware like this, this little mini PC Chewy that I love, or on some alternative virtual private server provider, which we can talk about in another video. This video is already probably too long. I'm not going to dive into a full how to engine X Linux blah blah blah in this video, but if there is enough interest in the comments below, then I'll follow it up with a quick tutorial on how to start a blog, no matter what your expertise in computing, Linux, and other things is.
This AWS outage is a reminder of how centralized the web has become. But there are still bastions of awesome stuff created by real people all over the web. It's just a little harder to find these days. But I hope in this video I've shown you a couple of ways that you can start looking through the smaller indie web and start participating in it yourself. Simply replacing your search engine is already a massive step to one escaping some of the nonsense of the attention economy that has become Google and search engine optimization, but to just finding more relevant and useful stuff. So that's all for this video today. I hope it was useful to you. If you like the video, please like, comment, subscribe, all of that jazz. and I will catch you in the next video.