Trusting the internet has always been a fools errand, but at one time, someone took the time to produce slop. Now, the push of the button spits out something worse than those links titled, ‘Why a paperclip could save you in a snowstorm.’ Those twenty ad-ridden pages were poorly crafted by someone but no longer.
We are in the final stages of the internet.
We can smell the miasma even now. Things are almost correct, but not quite. Save a very few sites, the truth has become unknowable. Whether by design or not, the pace of change is as disorienting as it is disconcerting.
Data mining has long moved from demographics to psychographics, bombarding you with outrageous crap, trying to extract more data. The algorithms ruled us long before the positive reinforcement machines came for our brains.
LLMs came to make us feel good about the siphon of sewage being fed us. Our intellectual talents are being outsourced, all the while training our language lottery simulacra replacements.
The language average-ers are replacing us. For our bosses, it is magic, because their job is to go to meetings and read email. The thinky devices are good at summarizing, because hey, your boss is a top line guy. It is their killer app, assuring them it understands how to disseminate their managerial genius.
And no one is more convinced of their sagacity as the CEO class.
Maybe the plan is to force-feed us entropy until we have AI agents talking to AI agents. All that will be left are LLMs spamming our search results with answers that are almost correct. The data centers are burning down our neighborhoods and society. Whoever is up to overthrowing humanity, the AIs or tech bros, they are doing a fine job.
All we can do is to give a slow nod, while retreating to our small, trusted backwaters of the internet. We all have a small community away from all the cruft.
On old platforms and new, small groups are hidden and huddled together, staying afloat. Tiny islands of comfort in a sea of despair and outrage with more than just para-social relationships.
Returning to being our own algorithms should be the future. Stuff as simple as those earliest internet groupings, web rings, blog rolls, and rss feeds could make a comeback. There will still be the need to grow our own internet gardens. We will tend our own inputs and judiciously mind our outputs.
Bubbles have burst before, and our communities have survived. Surely they will this time, hiding in the reeds, letting the flood wash by. Learning to ignore but not be ignorant will be lifesavers in this next moment.
Because the crash is happening. Soon.
Remain Lost 