What's left of the internet?
I didnāt leave the internetāthe internet left me. And despite the āitās not X itās Yā structure of the previous sentence, and the em-dash used, a real human wrote this. Or more accurately: is currently (trying to) write this. This human is me.
I love the internet. Or should I say I: I used to love the internet? Iām not even sure what āthe internetā is anymore. It sure as fuck isnāt Facebook, even though thatās the reality for a lot of people. What even is āFacebookā today, given that Meta owns WhatsApp, Instagram, and a gazillion other things? Are you on Facebook when youāre sharing a funny video with your friends on WhatsApp? In some sense yes; in some sense no. Your (Meta)data is probably gobbled up all the sameā¦. I donāt knowā¦
What I do know is that āthe internetā is dead, and probably has been for a long while. When I sit on an airplane or a train and I get the opportunity to see what other peopleāregular peopleāand yes, Iām going to continue to use em-dashes, fuck you LLMsādo on their phones, all I see is WhatsApp, Instagram, TikTok, Facebook, Twitter X, YouTube, Netflix, and so on. Sometimes someone is reading a book. Iām sure sometimes someone is reading an article or a research paper or something. But even so, most people, when reading an article, are not raw-dogging the internet like we used to, but are using the Substack app (or again something like Facebook/X/etc.) to read the thing in their favorite walled garden.
We did this to ourselves, mind you. Convenience, convenience, convenience. Walled gardens are terribly convenient, and nobody likes to leave them. Leaving them brings friction. And boy oh boy, do people hate friction.
And now come the agents. The fact that I had to preface this with āhey, trust me bro, an LLM didnāt write this oneā is a testament to the weird times weāre in. Look. I love LLMs. Iāve probably used more tokens than the one SF hypeboy that told you that the Singularity is coming tomorrow. If my wife would know my current AI spend sheād probably divorce me, but hey, Iāve got a lot of projects and a lot of ideas so why not spawn a swarm of 50 agents that just do stuff on their own. After all, the only way to understand whatās really going on is to really use the stuff that everyone is talking about, and see how powerful it really is. And yes, itās powerful. Iāve built nihao with a single self-referential recursive prompt, for example. But this post is not even about all that. Itās about the slop. And the blocking. And Sam Jippity Altman wanting to scan your eyeballs. But first things first. The slop. Oh my God, do I hate the slop.
From Slot-machines to Slop-machines
I wrote and talked about at length as to why the internet was basically forced to turn itself into a slot machine to monetize itself. Iām not going to repeat this argument here, and I guess that everyone reading that far (you are the 1%! or more accurately, the 4%, if statistics are to be believed) knows that thereās a military-industrial surveillance complex that is farming your eyeballs and brain cycles.
Everything is a slot machine. Everything is designed to be maximally addicting. Which means maximally targeted. Which means maximally surveilled. Which means if youāre a pseudonymous internet person behind a VPN like me, youāre fucked. Completely fucked. Without reproach.
I canāt use the internet anymore, whatever āthe internetā is in its current state. I refuse to comply, and itās virtually impossible to use the internet without complying. And things will only get worse from hereon out.
Hereās the thing though: I didnāt leave. All I did was stay true to my principles, and the internet left me. What a sad state of affairs.
Web 1.0 Web 2.0 Web 3.0 Web 4.0
Just writing the headline above brings me back to the Web 2.0 days, which I hated too. Everything had the same look, the same style, the same design, the same smell. Round corners. Everything glossy. Colors that would led you to believe that you had a stroke. Flickr, twittr (yes, without āeā, I kid you not), tumblr, and a million other things ending in ārrrā that I canāt remember anymore. Donāt want to remember, probably.
Now thereās a new smell in town: LLM smell. And boy, does it stink. Sometimes you can smell it from a mile away, and you wonāt even start reading or click on the thing. Sometimes the āauthorā is a little more skilled, putting some sprinkles of real human writing here and there in the beginning, and you start reading. But after the 2nd paragraph you become suspicious. You start reading words that a normal humanāor at least this human in this particular fieldāwould never use. (And yes, I just used em-dashes again. Deal with it.). The 3rd paragraph rolls around and the rhythm and the sentence structure changes. Sentences become short. More authoritative. You see negation and emphasis everywhere. The thing is telling you what it all means. Why this and that is important. You get up, wash your eyes with soap, go take a shower. Maybe some fetal position to cry about the current state of the world for a hot minute. Maybe you touch some grass after that. Hopefully you touch some grass after that.
If youāre a writer, itās quite obvious in writing. If youāre a designer, itās quite obvious in designing. All the vibe-coded apps look the same. Iām sure itās the same for music, videos, and everything else thatās currently being generated. If done without care and without effort, it will have LLM smell. And itās not gonna be good. Or pretty. Or insightful. A one-shot prompt will always and forever produce something what the kids these days would call āmidā. (And thatās probably and outdated term; thatās how much of an unc I am.) It will do that by definition, because thatās what LLMs are and how they work: middle of the curve.
And yet, Iām bullish
I think weāre gonna make it, fam. Itās gonna be different, but itās going to be okay. The dog of wisdom told me as much in a meme.
Is the attention span of everyone rekt? Yes. Is content on the āinternetā gonna get worse? Absolutely. Are you going to have to scan your eyeballs, or your sphincter, or provide some other insane biometric info or government ID to use any mainstream internet service whatsoever going forward? Also yes, unfortunately.
But itās going to be okay. And you can also exit. Join the Amish, or generate a keypair and join another weird cult. Touching grass helps too. Talking to real humans, in real life, about real things. With your own weird idiosyncrasies and weights and hallucinations.
Iām bullish on humanity, and maybe the overabundance of LLM slop will bring out the best in us. The most authentic. The most human. The most real. But am I bullish on the internet, as it once was, and as it currently is? Not so much. And yet thereās hope, and new things are born every day.
The internet is dead. Long live the internet.
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