For most people, “the internet” is not the wires and protocols that tether us all together like an awkward group hug at a funeral. No, it is the web. That twitching, blinding maze of pages and pop-ups; a confetti of cat pictures, clickbait headlines, and the occasional weight loss life hack. And while it once thrived with the sincerity of lonely hearts uploading diaries in HTML, it soon learned that sincerity is poor for business. What mattered wasn’t what humans wanted to read, but what search engines wanted to index.
Search engines – the great librarians of entropy, didn’t write anything themselves. They simply promised that if you wrote something mildly useful and tagged it like graffiti on a cubicle wall, someone might stumble upon it while looking for what film that actor was from. But as soon as eyeballs became currency, headlines became screams of doom, introductions became endurance tests, and paragraphs – entire textual fields of wasteland – were grown solely to feed the monstrous, unblinking eye of keyword density. Meaning was mugged in a back alley by metadata as the pearls of a necklace bounced in slow motion across the floor.
But instead of Batman, this arrangement birthed a mutual resentment that somehow functioned. Readers learned to scroll with the cold detachment of someone browsing through a will. Website owners mastered the dark art of pretending to answer a question while circling the drain. And the search engines? They didn’t care, not really. As long as the ads loaded, the apocalypse could wait.
However, Large Language Models don’t need links or pages or even your carefully positioned “10 ways to improve X”. They ingest the raw meat of the web and regurgitate gourmet answers without so much as a breadcrumb in return. It’s like asking a butler for your coat and he hands you a tailored suit stitched from the fabric of everyone else’s.
From the user’s perspective, this is delightful. From the content creators’? Well… when AI answers questions instantly, the steps in between become fossils.
And what then? AI needs to gorge on fresh, human-made content like an insomniac with a Netflix account. But if there’s no reward left in publishing, if the applause has left the auditorium, what madman keeps performing?
Perhaps everything retreats behind paywalls, or perhaps AI companies will tip a few coins into the begging bowls of those they pillaged, which would result in a LLM tailored version of SEO for “not intended for human consumption” articles.
Alternatively, we may enter a beautifully grim dystopia where low-effort slop disappears, leaving behind smaller, quieter, better-lit corners of the internet. I am a dreamer, but for now, we’ll just limp forward – disoriented, incoherent, still typing – because inertia is cheaper than innovation.
But one thing is clear: there is no going back. Once the public has tasted instant certainty, it will not gladly return to the scavenger hunt that is page 2 of search results.
There’s an irony to all this. The web began as a human thing. Flawed, chaotic, full of blinking text and auto-playing music. It was reshaped into a monument for machines, and now, with machines pillaging the internet, we might just end up writing for each other again, or maybe we’ll start going outside again.
The next web won’t be prettier. It may be scarred, stitched together from fragments, riddled with barriers. But maybe, just maybe, it will instead reflect what information was always meant to be: a conversation, not a commodity. A messy, maddening, strangely beautiful attempt to be understood. Or at least, to be heard before the page loads an ad for toenail fungus cream and your ad-blocker crashes the browser.
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