The Internet is dead

"AI" killed the Internet star

You know what, I miss the 1990s. All the way up to the early 2000s. And not just because I was young in that period. It's not just nostalgia. Those years were objectively better. There were great movies (too many to list), great music (many great bands from the 1980s still active and many good new ones), even great sitcoms — I've recently re-watched "Spaced”, a classic British sitcom from 1999-2000, and I still found it funny and endearing, although in that case it could be just nostalgia: I did live in London in those years, after all).

But, more importantly, in those times the so-called Internet was just beginning to show its vast potential.

We called it the “world wide web” back then. I think no one uses this expression anymore. (I know the “web” and “Internet” technically refer to different things, but anyway, the point is that no one says "world wide web” or even "www” anymore.)

Up until 2010 or so, the main form of publishing was blogging. You set up a blog with Blogger or Wordpress, and voilà. You could get thousands of readers. Sometimes friendships were formed. And you could find a lot of free, interesting and uncensored information.

No one uses Blogger or Wordpress anymore. Now there's mostly social media: Facebook, Instagram. Even Twitter became “X", one of the worst rebrands ever.

It's not the same thing at all. Now everything is controlled, spied, branded, censored.

For former bloggers, there is Substack, but it's also not really the same thing. For one, it is really an email newsletter, not a blog. And two, perhaps because of the competition with the other companies that monopolize searching, most Substack sites are really hard to find.

Speaking of Google: it became much worse. It is really hard to find anything useful sometimes. I'm not sure if it's because their search engine got worse or simply because there is a lot more material online these days.

Youtube got much worse too, especially since they started to censor people heavily during the Covid era. The most interesting creators migrated to other platforms. A lot of the videos now are very commercial. Gone are the days when any Youtuber could become a star just doing random videos without any major corporate support.

But all that was before “AI”, of course. The new type of software that some misname “intelligence" was the killing shot.

If "video killed the radio star", then AI killed the Internet.

I am not sure of the exact percentages, but a lot of texts you find online today, probably the majority, are written by bots. Just google any article about anything. Everything seems written by ChatGPT or a similar software. And as such, everything reads exactly the same. More than once I located two articles in different sites but with an identical text. I guess both authors used the same bot. Lots of commenters are bots, too.

Image search was also contaminated by the so-called “AI art". Google “baby peacock", for instance, and at least half of the resulting images will be ugly, unrealistic digital images created by one of those bots.

(The other day I watched “Beetlejuice Beetlejuice”, the sequel to Tim Burton's 1988's classic, and one of the good things about it was that most of the effects were, like in the 1980s/90s, practical effects, make-up or stop-motion. Little CGI, and certainly no random “AI art".)

Alas, “AI” is going to be ever more present in our lives. It is going to “curate” all of our online experience (and not only), so that you don't risk running into some dangerous "conspiracy theory" blogger, or, God forbid, a text or an image created by a real person from scratch, and not merely recycled from data fed to a "software language model". You'll have to get used to use facial recognition to get into a self-driving car that you will pay with a scan of your retina, the whole shebang. It is sold as a utopia, but those of us who grew up in the 1980s and 1990s know better. We watched all those old sci-fi movies. We know how they end.

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While I decide what to do with my own personal creations in a new Internet that has little space for them, I leave you with two little gifts.

One is my recent documentary about Finland, “Dreaming of Finland”, linked below. The few people who have followed this blog — or well, newsletter — know that I visited Finland last year and wrote about it. Well, now there's a film about it too. It even has some 90s style stop-motion.

The other is Geist magazine, an independent (very independent!) magazine of literature and art that I occasionally publish. There is a new issue, number 6, Fall 2024, that just came out this past Halloween. You can read a preview here or just order an old-fashioned print copy in full colour and quality paper at our online shop here.

Thank you.