This week's Vergecast did a great job summarizing the current state of affairs for web publishers grappling with the more-rapidly-than-they'd-hoped impending arrival of "Google Zero." Don't know what Google Zero is? Basically, it describes a seemingly-inevitable future where the number of times Google Search links out to domains not owned by Google asymptotically approaches zero. This is bad news for publishers, who depend on Google for a huge proportion of their traffic (and they depend on that traffic for making money off display ads).

The whole segment is a good primer on where things stand:

My recollection is that everyone could see the writing on the wall as early as the mid-2010s when Google introduced "Featured Snippets" and other iterations of instant answers that obviated the need for users to click links. Publishers had a decade to think up some other way to make money since then, but appear to have done approximately nothing to prepare for a world where their traffic doesn't come from Google.

To the SEO industry, such a world doesn't make sense—you can increase your PageRank one-hundredfold and one hundred times zero is still zero.

To younger workers in publishing, a world without Google is almost impossible to imagine, as it has come to dominate almost every stage of advertising and distribution.

To old-school publishers who can remember what paper feels like, they only recently reached the end of a 20-year journey to migrate from a paid subscription relationship with readers to a free ad-supported situationship with tech platforms that consider their precious content an undifferentiated commodity. Publishers would love to go back, but the world has changed—nobody wants to pay for articles written by people they don't know.

The only people who are thriving are those who developed a patronage followership based on affinity for their individual identities. They've got a Patreon or a Substack and some of the most well-known journalists are making a 5-20x multiple of whatever their salary at Vox or GameSpot was. But if your income depends on the web publishing dynamic as it (precariously) exists today and you didn't spend the last decade making a name for yourself, you are well and truly fucked. Alas.

None of this is new if you read the news about the news.

What is new is that Google is answering more and more queries with AI summaries (and soon, one-shot web apps generated on the fly). As a result, the transition to Google Zero appears to be happening much more quickly than people expected/feared. Despite reporting on this eventuality for a decade, web publishers appear to have been caught flat-footed and have tended to respond with some combination of interminable layoffs and hopeless doom-saying.

This quote from Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises never gets old and applies well here:

"How did you go bankrupt?" Bill asked.

"Two ways," Mike said. "Gradually and then suddenly."

Fortunately, the monetization strategy for justin.searls.co is immune to these pressures, as I'm happy to do all the shit I do for free for some reason.

Well, I suppose this is one way to fix America's dwindling college enrollment problem:

Across America's community colleges and universities, sophisticated criminal networks are using AI to deploy thousands of "synthetic" or "ghost" students—sometimes in the dead of night—to attack colleges. The hordes are cramming themselves into registration portals to enroll and illegally apply for financial aid. The ghost students then occupy seats meant for real students—and have even resorted to handing in homework just to hold out long enough to siphon millions in financial aid before disappearing.

Bonus points if the chatbots are men, at least.

In 2011, the same month Todd and I decided to start Test Double, Steve Jobs had recently died, and we both happened to watch Steve Jobs' incredible 2005 Stanford commencement speech. Among the flurry of remembrances and articles being posted at the time, the video of this speech in particular broke through and became the lodestone for those moved by his passing.

The humble "just three stories" structure, the ephemera described in Isaacson's book, and the folklore about Steve's brooding in the run-up to the speech became almost as powerful as his actual words. The fact that Jobs, the ruthlessly focused product visionary and unflinching pitchman, was himself incredibly nervous about this speech might be the most humanizing thing any of us have ever heard about him.

Well, it's been twenty years, and the Steve Jobs Archive has written something of a coda on it. They've also released the e-mails Steve wrote to himself in lieu of proper notes (perhaps the second-most humanizing thing). They've also spruced up and remastered the video of the speech itself on YouTube.

Looking through his e-mails, I found I actually prefer this draft phrasing on the relieving clarity of our impending demise:

The most important thing I've ever encountered to help me make big choices is to remember that I'll be dead soon.

In 2011, Todd and I ran out of good reasons not to take the leap and do what we could to make some small difference in how people wrote software. In 2025, I believe we're now at an inflection point that we haven't seen since then. If you can see a path forward to meet this moment and make a meaningful impact, do it. Don't worry, you'll be dead soon.

I've never regretted failing to succeed; I've only regretted failing to try.

If you just read this month's newsletter, you might have gotten the impression whoa, it's really hard as a foreigner to buy property in Japan. And the fact it took me over a month, mostly on-site, to enter into contract to buy a condo in cash should serve as ample evidence of that.

However, multiple seemingly conflicting things can be true at once, and Bloomberg's Gearoid Reidy calls out several great points in a saucy column (archive link) which he wrote after I got myself into this mess:

But increasingly, the spotlight is falling on foreign buyers, particularly wealthy Chinese, seeking a safe place for their capital and drawn by Japan's political stability and social safety net. Lawmakers and commentators have been raising the lack of restrictions on property in parliament in recent weeks, as well as in the media. Former international soccer-star-turned-investor Keisuke Honda summed up what many think when he recently tweeted that he thought foreigners should not be allowed to buy land here.

Japan wouldn't be alone in seeing foreign non-residents snap up a bunch of attractive real estate—whether to park capital in a stable economy or to exploit increased tourism by flooding the zone with cheap Airbnb listings. What's different is that Japan's government does almost nothing to document, constrain, or tax foreign buyers.

Amazingly, it was only this decade that Japan first began making it harder for foreigners to buy properties even in sensitive areas next to military bases or nuclear plants. Beyond that, it's open season: Buyers don't even have to be resident in the country, there are no additional taxes or stamp duties for foreign purchasers, nor are there extra levies for second or holiday homes.

Japan is an outlier in the region. Singapore doubled its stamp duty on foreign buyers to 60% in 2023 as part of a series of disincentives, while Hong Kong only recently removed a similar curb in an effort to breathe life into the property market. Elsewhere, Australia announced a two-year outright ban on foreigners buying some homes, a step Canada last year extended.

All of this is genuinely surprising when you consider Japan's general hesitation around immigration. The suppressed value of the yen over the last four years has only exacerbated the issue and led to a run on housing inventory since 2021. Nevertheless, over-tourism has gotten far more attention from the media—pointing a camera at throngs of poorly-behaved white people outside Sensoji Temple makes for better TV than footage of largely-empty luxury condominiums popping up on every corner in Nakameguro.

Ultimately, the barriers to buying real estate in Japan have less to do with legal restrictions or taxes and more to do with language, culture, and the lack of comprehensive regulation against discrimination. What this adds up to is that real estate agencies specializing in serving foreign buyers and for which there are dozens in Tokyo specifically (many marketing to a single locale like Singapore or Hong Kong), can do deals all day long while asking almost nothing of the buyer beyond the funds for the purchase. However, there are very few such real estate agents outside Tokyo and a handful of foreign-friendly mid-market metros like Fukuoka.

Once you venture outside Tokyo, if you intend to buy desirable homes or new construction (i.e. not an abandoned house in the middle of nowhere), few realtors will have experience dealing with foreign non-residents and, regardless, many developers will insist on working with buyers directly—which means foreigners are often boxed out entirely. (About 40% of foreign buyers report having been turned away as a result of not being Japanese.)

Anyway, Gearoid describes a very real affordability crisis. Many Japanese workers with well-paid jobs have lost all hope of ever becoming homeowners despite a rapidly-declining population. Personally, I wouldn't be thrilled to have to pay more in tax when our purchase closes, but I'd completely understand and support the policy outcome such a tax would serve.