#theinternetisdying
Gearóid Carroll
Available for bookings from 1/2025: creative, brand and comms strategy for creative agencies. Advertising, digital, social, earned and experiential.
Perhaps due to the febrile nature of the times we live in, the tech-savvy community seems to have become aware of various trends, leading them to conclude that #theinternetisdying. This term itself is imprecise. The internet is a series of abstractions, ranging from physical infrastructure to software and functions upon which communication, messaging, video streaming, app data, transactions, and web pages operate.
So why now?
I believe the most intriguing question regarding #theinternetisdying is this: why now? What has occurred is more about internet users awakening from their ‘comfort zone’ and abruptly realising how rapidly things have evolved? I believe that a number of inciting incidents are the cause of this sudden wakefulness:
The reality
In reality, what’s happened to the web as netizens knew it has happened over time. To use a vintage web phenomenon as an analogy. It’s like the vintage Joe Cartoon interactive Adobe Flash animation Frog in a Blender from the late 1990s.
A cartoon frog sits in a blender and admonishes the viewer, claiming that they wouldn’t dare to to blend him. The blender has settings from 1 to 10. 1 is mildly agitated water, 10 is instant blended frog. Silicon Valley has slowly upped the power of the blender and netizens realise that things have got weird.
Google tax bias
Google search has been on the shit list of websites as engineering documents from inside Google were leaked. They revealed some aspects about how search actually worked that Google had been denying for decades. A few of the key findings were:
Google has even lied in court and in parliaments to hide these facts. Disclosure of these details have rippled through the search engine marketing industry and strongly discouraged numerous web businesses once the truth came out – for a lot of businesses #theinternetisdying.
For Google the timing couldn’t be worse:
Google is perceived as having set itself up as the ‘start page’ to the open web, while all the time sticking the proverbial knife in all of which adds an inevitability of the feeling of #theinternetisdying.
Decline of Google search
Back in June 2022, The Atlantic complained about the declining utility of Google. This echoed similar themes on discussions that had happened earlier in the year on Hacker News and Reddit . The consensus was that they searched Reddit, StackOverflow, Hacker News or StackExchange as it provided a richer, more relevant base of search results.
I have been using social bookmarking service Pinboard and photo service flickr for search for similar reasons for the past few decades.
Pinboard allows me to search 65,000+ web pages that I have found over that time for something that might be useful. My act of saving the page link in pinboard allowed me to categorise the page saved and implied a certain ‘good enough’ quality to it. I also get to search the public links of other netizens that do a similar thing. Pinboard is insufficiently popular to reward spammers, so the quality quotient is relatively high. Reddit offers a more expansive corpus of links and information, without the same level of quality control.
The reason why Google’s web search has degraded has its roots in Google’s pivot to mobile two decades ago. Google abandoned key areas of interest to web users:
And the list goes on, I am less sure why it has suddenly surfaced into the public consciousness now?
Link rot
A month or so go my friend Matt in his newsletter recommended a website that allowed you to search Google to find out the oldest mention of a term. So I put my own name in, and nothing came up prior to 2004.
That meant all records of my early agency work had been expunged from the web. Work that included big brands:
Alongside startup brands that fizzled out almost as quickly as they had started. Maybe there is still some traces locked somewhere in behind LexisNexis or Haymarket Media paywalled databases.
Author and veteran member of the digerati Cory Doctorow wrote about link rot this year, partly prompted by research from the Pew Research Center. Pew found that 38 percent of content surveyed disappeared over a ten-year period.
But link rot isn’t a new concern. Interest in link rot seems to have peaked 20 years ago.
Link rot is a subset of a wider concern called bit rot, where digital media degrades over time, or can no longer be read due to issues with software file compatibility. Bit rot as an issue was explored in a series of short stories by Canadian author Douglas Coupland in a book of the same name back in 2016.
Web of data to walled gardens
Of all #internetisdying factors, this one surprised me as much as link rot. Closing of Twitter API access was considered to be a defining moment for #theinternetisdying. However it fails to acknowledge that the high point of the web of data was web 2.0 and the comparatively free access to APIs. Facebook with its closed wall by design set the standard for subsequent services like TikTok and Instagram. Like link rot, the awareness timeline feels a decade too late. The closure of Google Reader is an equally big impact back in 2013, stopping mainstream adoption of RSS in its tracks.
LLMs
Journalist Steven Levy has been chronicling Silicon Valley for decades. He wrote a few of my favourite non-fiction books including Insanely Great , Crypto and Hackers . In the summer of 2023, he wrote an article for Wired magazine: What OpenAI wants . This became a cover story for the September 2023 issue of the magazine under the header ‘Dear AI Overlords, Don’t Fuck This Up’. Less than a year later, the consensus from netizens seems to be that they already have.
Several things have happened, here are three of them:
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Automation has eaten blue collar roles for decades, but it has taken the automation of white collar roles to create the panic and sense that #theinternetisdying and AI is killing it.
The Sky Is Falling In
As a child I fell in love the Asterix The Gaul books. In them was the Gaulish village chief Vitalstatistix – who is portrayed as mostly reasonable, well-informed, fearless, (comparatively) even-tempered and unambitious. Vitalstatistix was known for his irrational fear that the sky may fall on his head tomorrow. I was thinking about Vitalstatistix as I wrote this post on #theinternetisdying.
Back in the late 2000s, Dr Ira Wolfe wrote a book that discussed how online behaviour and Google services were creating irreparable damage in the workplace and beyond. His book was merely the latest in a series of panics about societal destruction:
Back in March 1997, Wired magazine had their own version of the #theinternetisdying, they believed that web browsing (or web surfing as it was termed back then) was about to be killed off by ‘push technology ‘.
You may already be using push technology without realising it, such as receiving mobile notifications for breaking news or localised weather alerts.
In conclusion, #theinternetisdying? really?
Previous technological shifts introduced new challenges, but we adapted and progressed. There’s no reason to think the current ‘#theinternetisdying’ phase is any different from those before. Perhaps in 15 years, I’ll be writing about how people feel the ‘metaverse’ has become closed or some other futuristic concern.
Posts on related content can be found here .
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More information
Geeks, Geezers, and Googlization: How to Manage the Unprecedented Convergence of the Wired, the Tired, and Technology in the Workplace by Dr Ira S Wolfe
Ukrainian YouTuber found her AI clone selling Russian goods on Chinese internet | Wenhao’s News Blog
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5 个月All good points, on a complex issue. I'd add in some other key aspects of the shift in the underlying model of the internet too. 1. Digital entrepreneurialism was promoted as a way to generate income for platforms, rather than as a way to ensure a more sane internet. "There's an app for that" became "There are 99 companies for this task and 1 of them might be around in a year!" This hyper-competitive approach provides potential progress at the expense of consistency, and jars with the group/standards-based approach of the earlier days. 2. Technology became more diverse in terms of devices and modes of access. Access to the same set of information and tasks now has to be handled across a huge variety of contexts, from PCs on broadband to touchscreen phones on dodgy networks, and TVs with a handful of buttons. The technology powering this is just about keeping up, but largely within bigger companies and orgs that have the resources to do it. But everyone else is still trying to figure this complexity out. I'm not sure there was a "golden era" that could have scaled up successfully. But I definitely think we've been fooled into avoiding any kind of critique about what we actually _want_ from all this.