The Era of the Free Internet is Ending. What Comes Next?
How will we forge connections online in the future?
The internet is going through an uncomfortable metamorphosis. It’s akin to the transformation of Western Europe after the military might of the Western Roman Empire collapsed.
The decline of central authority left a power vacuum that nobody filled for centuries until Charlemagne built an empire. Even that was short-lived, and most of Europe was subsequently a collection of small, independent kingdoms that characterized the era we now call The Middle Ages.
Long gone was the centralized power that facilitated easy trade and commerce, which shipped grain from Africa and the Black Sea region into Europe, not to mention, the influence of the cultural epicenter — the city of Rome itself.
The Shifting Tides of Power
As
noted in his article The Past and Future of the City, the city of Rome itself suffered a substantial decline in the number of inhabitants the city had alongside its loss of military might.This curious phenomenon has happened repeatedly throughout human history. People congregate around a bustling center, a hotbed of activity, and then, the decline happens. It happened with Ur, Babylon, Alexandria, Rome, and England as power leapfrogged across the time-space continuum, shifting from one section of the globe to the other.
Human history is a grand dialectic as bustling hive structures come into being and fall away. As I always say, entropy is destiny — rust never sleeps.
From Reality to Virtual
Today, the same birth-decay-death-and-rebirth process of fragmentation is playing out unimpeded, only instead of unfolding in physical space, it’s happening in cyberspace.
Seeing that, as of August of this year, there are now adults who were born after Facebook was solidified as an open social media platform (dropping the .edu requirement for users’ emails), I sense a history lesson is in order.
The internet was once a wide-open highway where traffic flowed effortlessly and unquestioningly as users hopped from site to site with ease. There was no such thing as a paywall.
In the early days of the 1990s, everything was free.
That was before the Internet was consolidated into the hands of a few massive corporations. It was more of an anarchistic hodgepodge of fun intellectual and educational connections. My first IRC chat screen name was Subzero32 named after the Mortal Kombat character. If anyone remembers me from 1996, hey, long time no speak.
Times were different then. Rarely, if ever, did companies set up digital toll booths (paywalls, pay-for-reach, etc.) to block travel from one part of the internet to the other. Today, that’s changing.
Expensive toll roads are taking over the free national highways as the large companies fight — much like the medieval kingdoms — among one another for dominance.
Subscribing to the Future
In his phenomenal essay The End of the Subscription Era is Coming,
describes the wasteful expensiveness of this new trend of subscriptions we see, with services like Substack supplanting traditional legacy media outlets as a popular way to consume media.The logic is simple and coherent. My subscription to the NY Times is $4 per month and I get access to countless journalists, games, recipes, and a whole lot more. To get the same kind of value on Substack would cost me hundreds of dollars in subscriptions. The current push toward the subscription model simply cannot continue to expand.
Nick’s essay is as eloquent as it is compelling, but — respectfully, I disagree. Current trends are shifting in the opposite direction as the major players try mightily to mediate the impending effects of generative AI models like ChatGPT, which threatens their already-dwindling ad revenue.
The Town Square Problem
Wide-open platforms that have been likened to “the town square” (let’s call them “content marketplaces”) now find themselves in an extremely precarious spot, as the potential to create annoying, fictitious, AI-generated content expands across the globe.
Sites where you’re greeted with a News Feed or homepage where you can choose from select content displayed by the platform will be most impacted, as current (and likely future) algorithms are incapable of spotting and removing AI-generated content.
Those very same algorithms have proven worryingly easy to game, even by human users with standard tools, as selfish creators have gamed the system to rise to the top of the heap (and reap the financial rewards).
Now, with AI, the whole process appears ready to go into overdrive. AI-created images are already flooding my Instagram feed at the expense of my friends’ posts.
Subscriptions are the short-term solution because they’re the opposite of “content marketplaces,” fostering direct connections between creators and consumers — connections that bolster trust at a point when proliferative fake content is diminishing trust. But, they cost money, and thus they can’t likely absorb the full brunt of the entire internet ecosystem collapsing all at once.
Barbarians at the Gates
The Ancient Roman military facilitated trade and, once its power waned, commerce in Western Europe collapsed along with the Pax Romana once Germanic tribes figured out the Roman Legions weren’t an invincible machine kissed by the blessings of the gods.
Today, like the Roman military wasn’t used to losing battles, the major players like search engines and social media sites aren’t used to uncertainty, which is strychnine for corporations focused on future profits.
Now, those same players are staring down the barrel of uncertain times as the prospect of disruption from generative AI looms. They’re tightening their grip around the flow of content, setting up those pesky toll booths along the way.
They’re not only charging their users more money in ads and fees (which is always a good thing if you’re a profit-minded corporation), but they’re also giving themselves the illusion of control over the uncontrollable — the proliferation of AI-generated content.
We already see this process underway now as they race to shut their doors and wall off their gardens in the hopes of squeezing as much revenue out of every user as possible. They’ve set up choke points that extract revenue at each point of contact.
Case in point: the shift away from link-based posts on social media.
The Paradise of Advertisements
Social media sites have responded to the two-headed monster of dwindling ad revenue and generative AI by deprioritizing outbound links, effectively halting traffic from the platforms to external websites —in other words, they’re rapidly building toll booths.
Over the past year, outbound traffic from social media sites to news sites has dropped a towering 80% in total, according to Axios. The New York Times saw a 66% decline in referral traffic from Facebook and X, while BuzzFeed saw a drop of 72% in traffic coming from the social media giants. Additionally, The Sun saw a decline of 84%, the Guardian 79%, CNN 66%, Yahoo News 66%, and Business Insider 80%, according to Digiday.
The social giants have realized that they should be charging for these outbound links, which is precisely what they’re doing when they require you to purchase paid advertising to be shown in people’s feeds.
They’re building advertisement paradises. Your links can show up in more feeds, but only if you pay. The ease of being platformed on social media sites for free is dying.
Gone are the days when a small business could set up a Facebook page and post links to their business website so shoppers and clients could simply click and buy a product or book a service. Many of my friends with blogs and businesses are seeing their hard work ravaged by these changes.
They’ve done this in the name of profit. But make no mistake, extreme measures like this will become increasingly necessary as AI-generated content floods the internet ecosystem.
They’re caught in an impossible situation — tighten their grip and make it harder for users to reach one other on a more restrictive platform, or let the easily exploitable algorithms do the work.
Neither is particularly appealing to the users they desperately need.
Searching for Advertisements
Google is doing the same with its much-maligned and ironically named Helpful Content Update, which has led to small and medium-sized blogs and businesses being deprioritized in Google’s search feed in favor of “more human content” i.e., sites like Reddit.
They did this is because so many people put “Reddit” at the end of their Google searches hoping to find human-generated content, rather than dubious blogs showing minimum-effort content often written by machines. Really, they did it to themselves. SEO is and always has been a horrible way to sift through internet websites and choose what to show users. It proved exploitable.
SEO never paid attention to the quality of the information a site posted, but rather, the arbitrary metrics Googled deemed high-quality content, which, as we see, wasn’t all that high-quality after all.
Small and medium-sized blogs and businesses used to be able to hire an SEO expert to rank on Google to attract customers. That’s changing. Google is prioritizing “human” content at the expense of these entities, entities who can show up in searches once again (for a fee, of course).
It’s crushing blogs and businesses.
The internet is breaking, in no small part thanks to us, the users ourselves. We haven’t thought much about what responsible posting would look like. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve had aspiring writers reach out to me asking for advice on how to overcome writer’s block. My answer is always the same.
“Don’t try to write something when you have nothing to say.”
If only more people followed this advice.
Nonetheless, the problem before us is abundantly clear. We flooded these digital marketplaces with low-quality content long before ChatGPT hit the scene and now, with AI content generators, it’s easy to see how the problem only gets worse from here. Unless, of course, you consume content from a subscription service you know and trust.
Welcome to Digital Byzantium
Taken together, these trends show clearly that the internet itself is headed for increasing Balkanization, as today’s central power structures of GAMMA(Google, Apple, Microsoft, Meta, Amazon), abandon the idea of the free internet.
There is one colossal problem with all this, though — it makes for a much worse user experience for anyone using sites with the “content marketplace” model or search engines. Using Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, and X is a drag these days. Most of the posts in your feed are either paid or from people you’ve never met and don’t have much in common with.
The inverse is also true. Gone are the days when you could post photos of your trip to the beach and connect with friends and family. Their feeds are now awash with short-form video content as everyone races to become the next TikTok clone. Are we more fulfilled while wasting our afternoons scrolling through silly short-form videos than when we were connecting with our friends and family?
They’ve collectively decided that the algorithm is “better” at knowing what you like than you yourself do — it’s a mantra we’ve heard countless times whenever someone says, “The tech companies know us better than we know ourselves.” But is it really true?
These antics are doing the opposite of what most of us believe the internet is for — facilitating connections between people, no matter how far away. We’ve reached the tipping point where the powerful companies that once built such connections — and allowed their users to utilize those connections for free — are doing the opposite. They’re stifling connections by demanding payment for reach.
The common theme here is that the large platforms are now charging for the same reach we all got used to having for free. I’m not sure if we’re ready for that.
At some point, we must question if the “content marketplace” model is even viable. It’s the model that’s been around since the days of Myspace at least, and I can’t help but wonder if it’s dated technology. The hardest part about this question is, given the aforementioned high cost of subscriptions, it’s difficult to imagine what comes next.
I sense we’re headed for a new digital Byzantinism absent of any central power structure ensuring smooth connections, a point where everything is walled off behind the gates like the cities of the Middle Ages, and it will be up to us to facilitate connections without the help of the major platforms.
Are we up for the task?
The enshittification has come hard and fast 🤦♂️🤯