For the last few years I’ve been quietly dreading Google Zero, the term coined by Nilay Patel 1 for the day Google stops sending traffic to websites at all. As someone who makes his living building websites, and who has his own to worry about, it felt like watching a slow-motion collapse I couldn’t do anything about. Then Google launched its AI search, the moment everyone said would finally trigger the collapse, and we all braced for it. And then I sat there, waiting to feel the floor give out, and it didn’t.
So I went searching 😉 for the panic, to figure out where it was lurking. In the last ten years of building websites, I can think of three clients who ever worried about their search ranking. Three. All my other clients have sites that don’t need, and sometimes don’t even want, traffic from Google. That has never been the point of these sites. The more I looked, the stranger the fear seemed: I’d spent years dreading the loss of something I’d never used, on behalf of clients who’d never asked for it. (I haven’t checked my own analytics in years.)
The dread, it turned out, wasn’t mine. I’d borrowed it. It came from all the businesses that either sell ads or traffic in followers. But even they weren’t always like this. It was a model sold to them too.
Big tech runs on scale—that is their entire business. These hyperscalers can only picture success in one shape, and it’s the shape of their own business model: make a thing that appeals to the masses, then make sure the masses use it, ad nauseam. They took that myopic lens and baked it into everything they make, then sold it to us. Social media is the perfect example. It taught us that volume was the only way to gain visibility, and we all quietly absorbed it. We’ve been trained to see ourselves as mini-hyperscalers, to treat “number go up” as the only signifier of success, and to feel like failures when the number stay small. Look at it with a clear head and it’s just an old idea in new clothes: a demand to be mainstream. That has never interested me for a second.
I’ve spent my whole life in one subculture or another, from raves to queerness to the art world, always illegible to the mainstream. The record label I run, Dragon’s Eye Recordings, started out releasing CD-Rs in editions of 100, burned and mailed by hand to people scattered across the world. I ‘scaled’ it to 250, the most my body could produce in one sitting, then tried to move to larger CD editions, and it fell apart. It succeeded because of its small scale, not in spite of it. A friend and I used to have a running joke about the shows or bands everyone was suddenly talking about: we’d say, flatly, “that looked really well attended.” It was a joke, but we were also dead serious, even if we would never have admitted it at the time.
Now, looking back, I can see the problem isn’t that some things fail to scale. It’s that scale can fail things too, simply by subjecting them to growth. What you make isn’t a small version of something that wants to be big, it can be exactly the size it was meant to be. There are so many things in this world that, by the hyperscalers’ metrics, read as nothing—just a rounding error. But that misses the point: something doesn’t need to be meaningful to a million to be meaningful to one.
As I roll this idea of descaling around in my head, I’m reminded of a performance by Julie Tolentino, Raised by Wolves.2 It was an hour-long performance piece presented by appointment, for small groups, sometimes as small as one or two people. Its scale was limited by the run of the show, but more poetically, by how many times her body could physically manifest the work. To scale it to a hyperscaler’s proportions would literally kill the performer, and by extension, kill the work itself.
That’s the thing the scale model can never account for: some works, some experiences, some websites, are built for an audience of one. And reaching that one person, in the right way, can be just as meaningful as reaching a million. So I’ve stopped dreading Google Zero. It was never coming for me, or the work I do, in the first place. Once we stop reaching for the unfathomable “everyone,” we can start the process of descaling, which I suspect will look a lot like building for one another.
- Patel, Nilay. “Google Zero is here — now what?” The Verge, May 30, 2024.
- Tolentino, Julie. RAISED BY WOLVES, 2013, Ten wooden platforms, microphone, clock, golden cat, hair, pillow, plastic horse, candle, glasses, sound system, record player, vinyl records, suitcase, Commonwealth & Council, Los Angeles, CA.