23 Mar 2025 Search

I’m still waiting for my copy of Careless People by Sarah Wynn-Williams, so I don’t have anything more on the content of the book than what I have seen in other reviews. The local bookstore had a stack—more than they normally order for new hardcovers—but I hesitated and they were gone next time I went in there. So yes, I am a little behind on this.

But come on, people.

Careless People is a best-seller because Meta decision-makers want it to be a best-seller.

In other Big Tech news, Google is delivering ads for obvious malware, with a landing page featuring an unauthorized copy of one of Google’s own logos. Even worse, they got spotted placing ads on Child Sexual Abuse Material. At first these look like embarrassing self-owns, especially for a company that’s contending for favorable PR in the AI business. Is their AI really that bad at classifying landing pages, extension listings, and the content of sites where their ads appear? The search ad malware thing is particularly egregious—the whole point of the deceptive ads that are all over Google Search now is to impersonate some well-known company. It should be a high school level coding project to filter out some of these.

But Big Tech’s apparent eagerness to appear in bad news makes sense when you look at the results. Out of all the people who read and were outraged by Careless People over the weekend, how many are going to come in to work on Monday and delete their Meta tracking pixel or turn off Meta CAPI? And how many people concerned about Google’s malware, CSAM, and infringing content problems are going to switch to inclusion lists and validated SupplyChain objects and stop with the crappy, often illegal ad placements that Google recommends and legit ad agencies don’t? For Big Tech, doing crimes in an obvious way is a power move, a credible, costly signal. If there were a Meta alternative that didn’t do genocide, or an honest alternative to Google search advertising, then advertising decision-makers would have switched to them already. All these embarrassing-looking stories are a signal: don’t waste your time looking for an alternative to paying us. The publisher’s page for Careless People has a Meta pixel on it.

I do have a book recommendation that might be a little easier to get a hold of. Codes of the Underworld by Diego Gambetta was the weekly book recommendation on A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry. I’m glad to see that it is still in print, because it’s a useful way to help understand the Big Tech companies. Actions that might not have made sense in a company’s old create more value than you capture days are likely to be easier to figure out after understanding the considerations applied by other criminal organizations.

Codes of the Underworld by Diego Gambetta

Criminals have hard-to-satisfy communications needs, such as the need to convey a credible threat to a victim without attracting the attention of enforcers. This is related to the signaling problem faced by honest advertisers, but in reverse. How can a representative of a protection racket indicate to a small business that they represent a true threat, and aren’t just bluffing? Gambetta digs into a variety of signaling problems. It’s a 2009 book, so many of the Big Tech firms were still legit when it came out, but a lot of the communications methods from back then apply to the companies of today.

Is there a solution? As Gambetta points out, real-life organized crime perpetrators tend to copy from the movies, and today they’re copying the partnership with a friendly government subplot from The Godfather Part II. Maybe it’s time to watch that movie again.

More: Winners don’t click search ads (Google Search keeps getting FBI warnings but not really doing anything about them. Quite a flex.)