I Don't Google So Much Anymore

Plus: Black Twitter doc, college protest perspective, and more-than-human inspiration

Trailer for the Black Twitter doc, where despite my brother Kamau being in the thumbnail, I get the first words!!

Hi you,

I sent this out last week to Puck and was slower than usual to get this edition to you. Apologies! The world is a bit topsy turvy right now.

I have a new web browser. It’s called Arc. I don’t work for them, but I love it so much I’m sharing an invite link with you. It’s that good. The tabs are down the left side! It allows you to easily split your screen to show multiple pages side-by-side. It will organize your tabs for you! And because of Arc, I changed my default search engine which is literally changing how I see the world. But first, a few things from the feeds…

• Prentice Penny, showrunner for Issa Rae’s Insecure HBO series, has directed his first documentary, Black Twitter: A People’s History. It’s based on Jason Parham’s 2021 Wired cover story but has been meaningfully updated for the post-Elon Musk era of the social network, and visually reimagined for the screen. It’s on Hulu, and I’m in all three episodes. It makes me a bit emotional remembering what Twitter used to be and getting to honor the contributions Black folks made to that platform and the wider culture. Check it out and let me know what you think.

• Amid the wave of protests, encampments, counter-protests, and violent assaults, it’s been difficult to get a clear picture of what’s happening on U.S. college campuses. I’ve been trying to keep up by tuning in to student journalists, who don’t have the same incentives as television pundits to highlight the most dramatic incidents and escalate tensions. They are also better sourced and positioned than almost all national news outlets, even those with on-the-ground reporting resources. This PBS NewsHour interview with three student journalists is worth a watch. I also recommend the UCLA Daily Bruin’s central page and its coverage of the April 30 violent assault on protestors. Several student papers across the country have collaborated to document campus actions and reactions. Since I first put this newsletter together, I listened to On The Media which offers a much fairer report on campus activities and puts the entire thing in needed perspective. Simply put, like most protest movements from Occupy Wall Street to Black Lives Matter, these are overwhelmingly peaceful, and throwing police at the situation is often what escalates things toward violence.

• In the spirit of shifting the narrative away from incitement and toward enlightenment, I highly recommend this TED conversation between Palestinian and Israeli peacemakers Aziz Abu Sarah and Maoz Inon. I first met Maoz in October after my conversation with Noam Shuster-Eliassi. Sarah and Inon have both lost family members to violence from the other side. They are both deeply angry about that loss, and they both have committed to channeling that anger toward peace.  (I know I recommended this before, but in case you didn’t click then, click now).

• I first met Jon Alexander on a podcast appearance we shared, and we've been friends and collaborators since. I have Rob Hopkins to thank for that. He put both of us, simultaneously, on his From What If to What Next podcast, and it was one of the most imaginative conversations I've had. Rob invited us to describe the world in 2030 if so many things had gone right. He did 100 episodes and has harvested the most beautiful visions from across his guest network into a MINISTRY OF IMAGINATION manifesto. It's available free now and offers a real boost in a time of democracy backsliding, often uninspired electoral choices, and a media environment which focuses almost exclusively on adding to the doom loop. This is a reminder of what we are working toward, not just fighting against. And I just realized my homes Zachary Norris is also in here! Several How To Citizen alumni made the manifesto. Check it out.

• Finally, some inspiring and incredible news from the more-than-human world: For the first time, researchers have witnessed an orangutan applying plant medicine to itself. It’s beautiful and humbling. I can’t wait to read about animals micro-dosing and offering ayahuasca retreat packages on Instagram. Sign me up!

and now the main piece from Puck.

Search and Destroy

Will Perplexity Finally Challenge Google’s Search Dominance?

For the past several months, I’ve set Perplexity—a newish, conversational search engine powered by generative A.I.—as the default on all my devices. Rather than responding to search queries with a cascade of endless links, it offers conversational responses based on search results, and weaves in citations. It’s basically like having a text chat with a brilliant research assistant, someone who enables you to go deeper on a topic more quickly. In my short time using Perplexity, I’ve become convinced that generative A.I. services like this one are not only the future of web search, but will profoundly alter our collective relationship to the internet and information itself.

But the revolution is still nascent. Perplexity was founded less than two years ago, in August ’22, by former machine learning research scientists at OpenAI and Meta, and has emerged as one of the most groundbreaking products in the recent A.I. wave. It’s not the only A.I.-powered search product out there—several others have popped up that emphasize privacy, customization, academic focus, and more. But Perplexity feels like the most broadly useful of the bunch. Its ascent was coronated by a $1 billion valuation, based on $165 million in funding from prominent VC firms including New Enterprise Associates and Sequoia Capital, corporate investors like Nvidia and Databricks, and mega-rich individuals including Jeff Bezos, Susan Wojcicki, the former C.E.O. of YouTube, and Dylan Field, the C.E.O. of Figma. 

I first learned about Perplexity from a YouTube video, which is a bit ironic. Basically, Google can only blame itself for introducing me to a service that’s reduced my Googling by at least 90 percent. But Alphabet—which generated over $300 billion in its most recent fiscal year, with 77 percent of that revenue derived from advertising owing to its monopoly position in web search—is not sitting idly by, and has started scrambling to keep the feisty upstarts at bay. The company has steadily improved its Gemini model, and just integrated the chatbot directly into Chrome’s address bar. But when it comes to search, the company is treading lightly, offering access to “Search Generative Experience” through Labs. Whereas Perplexity offers a few hundred words of explanation and line-by-line citations, Google’s S.G.E. is more like a supersized snippet of information, inserted above standard search results. That’s probably because Google has a lot more to lose if its core search product starts spewing falsehoods, or undermining its economic relationship with publishers too quickly—or even cannibalizing its ultra-high-margin advertising business.  

Here are a few illustrative highlights from my recent queries. When I heard someone on a podcast mention that airline hijackings occurred once every five days in the 1970s, Perplexity got back to me with a short written report, citing Smithsonian Magazine, CNN, Wikipedia, and multiple FBI investigation pages. It was a tidy, context-rich explanation. When I needed tech support to resolve a hardware issue, Perplexity offered me a running start by offering results from across product forums, Subreddits, and Quora. Then there was this quality response to my question about how often one should water snake plants, and this threaded series of queries about the cause of the Maui wildfires (spoiler alert: it wasn’t D.E.I.). While traditional search engines provide search results, Perplexity and its ilk provide answers.

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Read the rest, and find out what I did about my snake plants!

Love,

Baratunde