Interesting reflection on the state of the internet reveals a sobering yet necessary truth:
The platforms that once defined the digital age are crumbling under the weight of their own success. Once celebrated for their utility- innovation- and democratizing power, today’s online spaces are increasingly marred by corporate greed, declining quality and a disheartening indifference toward users.
Search engines, gateways to meaningful information: are now rife with low quality results, SEO (driven) content and aggressive advertising.
Amazon’s virtual shelves echo with a similar degradation, prioritizing paid visibility over quality or relevance.
Social media has devolved into fragmented spaces: algorithmically manipulated, ad saturated and devoid of their original vibrancy. Even platforms that still foster joy like TikTok, face an existential threats rooted in geopolitics and regulation.
Adding to the erosion is the rise of generative AI… flooding the web with artificial content that blurs the line between reality and fabrication. The “slop” Nover describes: fake images, untrustworthy reviews and hollow engagement. It underscores a more significant issue: the commodification of our online experience. Today’s digital landscape is not broken but neglected, treated by tech giants as a vessel for profit rather than a public good.
How much should we rely on systems that no longer value us? What does a healthier, more authentic digital future look like?
If this truly marks the end of the internet “as we know it,” perhaps that’s not a loss but a call to reimagine what the web can and could be..
Internet #Web #AI #Trust
Maybe this was the last year of the usable web. If so, blame corporate greed.
The internet feels like it’s falling apart.
Not literally. Structurally, it’s sound. There are plenty of fiber optic cables lining ocean floors, cell towers looming above cityscapes, and server-filled data centers. But the very foundations of the utilitarian web—the platforms that undergird our everyday experiences online—feel shaky, pulsing with the first foreshocks of a collapse.
To start, nothing seems to work anymore. Google’s search engine once provided directory-level assistance to the denizens of the internet. Now it’s chock full of ads, sidebars, SEO-optimized clickbait, and artificial intelligence-powered guesstimations of possible answers to peoples’ questions. Earlier this year, a group of German researchers found that Google ranked product reviews pages high when they had low-quality text, tons of affiliate links to ecommerce sites, and were riddled with SEO tricks that don’t exactly coincide with quality. In other words, Google was letting their platform get co-opted by the lowest of the low.
On Amazon, the digital shelves are littered with sponsored products and cheap replicas of popular items. On either Amazon or Google, you’ll often need to scroll for a bit to get anything remotely helpful or relevant when you search. Government antitrust complaintsagainst both companies have essentially called them toll booths for advertisers, who need to pay-to-play to get noticed, which has degraded those services in the process. When big tech giants make their relied-on services worse, that’s bad for consumers—even if they don’t have to pay more.
On social media, the situation is even more dire. Facebook is functionally good for fighting with high school friends about politics, getting birthday reminders, and learning who is married or pregnant. There’s almost no news on the platform anymore, and my feed is full of meme pages that I would never follow, repurposed TikToks posted as Reels, and—you guessed it—low-quality ads. X is a right-wing cesspool full of Elon Musk sycophants, tech bro hustle posters, and—good lord—the worst ads you’ve ever seen outside of Truth Social. TikTok, one of the only interesting, serendipitous, and (usually) joyful places on the internet is in danger of being banned from the United States in the next month unless the conservative Supreme Court or President-elect Donald Trumphimself intervene to save it.
And the rise of generative AI has meant that every one of these platforms is now infused with what’s most commonly called slop, insultingly bad fake images often designed to trick or enrage people. You can find Facebook Groups fawning over beautiful landscapes without realizing they’re melting away if you look closely enough, and that the gorgeous Instagram model in the photo has far too many fingers.
The internet, of course, is controlled by the largest, richest, most powerful companies in the world. It’s not a dead internet, as some have posited, because we primarily consume artificial content; rather, it’s living and neglected, merely damned by corporate greed, indolence, and indifference. Silicon Valley’s giants no longer compete and no longer innovate; instead they cut costs, boost profit margins, and block out competitors in order to maintain consumer habit and market dominance. Online platforms give us convenience, but no novelty, and they have vanishing utility in increasingly our digital lives.
In 2025, perhaps the whole thing will explode. But hopefully, people will begin to rethink their reliance on digital platforms that treat them with utter contempt, like they’re consumers, like they’re “users.” If it’s the end of the internet as we know it, then I feel fine.
Article link: https://www.fastcompany.com/91246383/its-the-end-of-the-internet-as-we-know-it-and-i-feel-fine
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