Digital life often feels far less regulated than the real world, mostly because people are so rude when talking through screens. The single most notable quality of online discourse, something that makes it both captivating and repulsive, is how often it consists of things that would never be said face to face. This is obviously true of comment sections and social media, but it extends to many articles and to much of the content on TikTok and other short form video sites. But beneath this socially lawless veneer lies a much more tightly bounded system. When you search Instagram or X (nee Twitter) for something, you are limited to what has been said on that platform. Because platforms all have an obvious incentive to keep users engaged instead of sending them off to a competitor, what you will find may be rude or surprising or funny, but it will also be selected by an algorithm tasked with keeping you scrolling.
There’s been one major exception to the dynamic of platform Balkanization, at least in theory. Google, with its mission of making all the internet searchable, has always had the opposite goal of these companies, at least in theory. While Facebook wants you to keep looking at Facebook, Google has long operated on the premise that so long as it is the best way for you to find what you’re looking for, no matter what or where that happens to be, it will have ample opportunity to show you ads. Put another way, social media both generates and provides content within a circumscribed system while Google is a way of navigating the vast and diverse ocean of content that is the internet writ large.
But Google’s comparatively benign business model has been under stress for some time. The obvious first issue is the balance between search results and advertising. When you go looking for something Google wants to provide useful enough results that you don’t even consider using another search engine. But it also wants to have you click on an ad, because that’s how it makes money. For years now the number, prominence, and flashiness of ads has been expanding, pushing the actual search results (which are much more likely to be what you really want to see) further down the page.
Perhaps the most obnoxious form this takes, and I speak from personal experience, is Google requiring a company to pay to be the top result in a search for its own name; if I want to make sure that my site has the most prominent position when someone searches for Cairncrest Farm I have to buy that ad slot. Otherwise Whole Foods or Wild Fork or both could have an attractive link to their site as the top result when someone goes looking for me. If I’m not paying Google there may be three paid links to competitors’ sites before the unpaid link to mine.
While the Google-as-benificent-guide model had been under strain by its obvious tension with a revenue model based on selling tons of ads, AI has broken it. If you type a search into Google now you will usually see a cluster of paid ads surrounding an AI summary, with search results pushed below the bottom of the screen. The thing Google made itself the name for, searching the internet, has become an afterthought.
In its place Google has been pushing AI summaries, and I see the appeal. Instead of requiring the reader to bushwack through the thickets of the internet, a summary provides a tidy, bullet-pointed explanation. But the summary has been generated by digesting the entirety of the internet and then reconfiguring it based on the user's query. Instead of organizing the internet Google has taken to strip mining it. It may work for the time being, but if Google positions itself between the user and the website containing the information, whoever’s doing the reporting or writing the guides will eventually get tired of doing unpaid work for one of the largest companies on the planet.
I’ve already seen the impact on my site. For the first time in the more than a decade it’s existed year over year views are in decline. Unless something unexpected happens, fewer people will visit this year than last. The biggest impact by far has been recipes and similarly informative blog posts. I'm lucky that most of the people who land on these pages are not looking to buy local grass fed beef, and that people who are looking for that still seem to be finding me. (As of now Google AI cannot convert pixels into a ribeye, so for the moment I should be safe.) The situation is much worse for anyone who runs a purely informational site. Folks in the business of providing straightforward news or guides to common problems are losing their traffic and with it their business.
There’s an ouroboros quality to the whole endeavor. What, I wonder, will Google do when it has destroyed the incentive structure that has encouraged a huge variety of organizations and individuals to generate the content it is now so enthusiastically parasitizing? But the problem is bigger than that, and I can see how Google, for all its influence, might feel it has no choice but to play the game. After all, Chat GPT and Claude are doing exactly the same thing, just without the legacy of having cast themselves as custodian of the internet for a couple decades.
Even social media sites will run into a version of the problem. Facebook has been rolling out AI friends, and independently made AI content is flooding all social media sites. What will social media be when it is no longer social, when it is not mostly minor internet celebrities arguing and grandstanding, but AI personalities? Already some unknown but doubtless growing number of people are exchanging more words with AI programs than with other humans.
I don’t believe anyone, no matter how clever, should be particularly confident about predicting the effects of outsourcing an increasing amount of both thought and socializing to opaque computer programs. Things have a way of being stranger and less linear than anticipated, and I invite you to remind me of this article in five years so that we can discuss how wrong time has proved me to be. With that caveat, there are a couple broad trends that look likely to define the immediate future of online life.
The first has to do with those tidy AI summaries. I must acknowledge that they are in many ways an improvement over a conventional web search. They are easily consumed, more reliable than the average website, (if less reliable than the very best website), and wonderfully accommodating; if you go looking for something, they will provide an answer tailored to your question. But they will also circumscribe thought, both by the way they combine analysis and information and by the way they provide a unified perspective. (Just whose or what’s perspective?) They discourage engaging with the truly idiosyncratic, and they make the chances of starting in one place and ending up somewhere completely different, long one of the hallmarks of the internet, a rarer experience. They smooth things out.
I expect the social effects to be far weirder. At the outset I noted that rudeness is one of the hallmarks of online life. It’s possible that the rise of AI will diminish this. There’s already something absurd about yelling at anonymous people through your phone, but there’s something even crazier about yelling at anonymous computer programs pretending to be people. I can’t imagine who would want to spend hours of each day shaking their fist at the cloud.
But AI characters designed to maximize engagement will often outcompete humans for digital attention. They are endlessly customizable, perpetually available, and they can be as deferential or argumentative or snarky as you want. They will encourage a digital solipsism in which each of us becomes surrounded by exaggerations of our own views and interests and idiosyncrasies. No doubt there will always be some sort of social platform on which people engage other humans they know to be humans, but it would be naive to assume this will remain the default.
Though these appear to be at odds, with information becoming ordered and homogenized even as online socializing, such as it is, becomes ever more fragmentary and bizarre, I see them as part of the same trend. If the internet has generally been a wild west, both for better and for worse, for most of us AI will make it more of a game preserve. There will be a facsimile of wildness, but the scope for independent thought and action, particularly action that spills over from the online to the material, will be curtailed. There will be a sense of freedom and even chaos, but it will be fenced in. We will be kept, each of us, in our own little digital enclosure, happy with the photorealistic grass, taxidermied companions, and the occasional sacrificial lamb.