The relentless churn
AI is destroying the world wide web. Why do I keep putting stuff up there?
The last couple of years have been rough. I've had a lot of things in my personal life that have kept me from doing some of the fun and creative things that I really want to do. I launched an internet radio station and then ignored it for 18 months. September is all up ons and I've only managed to update this site five times so far this year (six if you count this one). And it's not because I have a dearth of ideas or anything. It's not even that I don't have time to work on this site. I have around 90 draft entries that I started and haven't quite been able to finish off.
What's the blocker? What's been the main thing keeping me from updating this site? It's a two-pronged answer.
The Internet is Different now
When I launched my first blog in 2001, the Internet was a much different and more fun place. It's all but useless now. I've complained about this before, so I don't feel like I need to rehash that again. There are still pockets of the real World Wide Web and the Internet out there, but they almost seem like they're on another planet. Or, more precisely, that the pockets of the IndieWeb/Smolweb/whateverweb that exist are holdouts and the Corporate AdWeb is the other planet. Google and Microsoft and Amazon have spent a lot of money and energy into making everyone believe that they own the web and the internet, and now AI companies have jumped into the mix. Now companies believe that they not only own the web's infrastructure, but also everything that's ever been posted to it, and it's their right to be able to take it all, put it in blender and sell the sludge back to you.
The world wide web and the internet used to be one of my favorite things. I loved making silly little websites and sharing them with my friends. I still remember how I felt when I was poring through my webalizer stats and I found that someone from NASA had looked at the family recipe for cookies that I put up as part of a winter blog entry I made. It seems almost silly now, but back then it was magical.
It's (somehow1) 25 years later now and I still like making silly websites to share with my friends, even though nowadays most of my friends don't visit my website or any website (there are two people I know of who actually do regularly check this site. You know who you are, and I thank you). Strangers almost never visit. It's disappointing. I don't blame them, but it was tempting. I stopped, though, when I realized that the Web has become bifurcated.
There's the 'normal web' that's facebook and and reddit and youtube and Google and twitter and tiktok and whatever other corporate megaportal that people spend their time on. There's a lot of people on those things, but something about those sites feels hollow to me. Beyond the scraping, collecting, aggregating, and selling your personal info to scientifically engineer how to serve you ever increasing numbers of ads, nothing on those sites ever really feels like a community to me. Everything feels like a performance designed to attract followers
And then there's the 'fun web' where a bunch of normal2 people hang out and chat, show off the cool stuff they're doing with computers (and also sometimes with things that aren't computers!). Everything about just feels more like hanging out and less like a performance3.
Why keep going?
I'm spending a lot of time on the 'fun web' lately. It kind of happened without me noticing. I deleted my facebook account, I put my twitter account in stasis, and I stopped leaving comments on most sites4. I check the Fediverse and then I go do something else. Sometimes I think that the something else is something that I want to put up on the web to help someone if they find it. Maybe it helps them solve a problem they have, maybe it gives them an idea for something they want to do, maybe they lament that they wasted five minutes reading my drivel. Whichever is the case, I'm glad to help.
But I'm not naieve. I know that the chances of someone finding this site by accident now are extremely minuscule. And I also know that an AI scraper will come along and slurp up this article to add to its training data, so even if one of my articles could have helped you, odds are that you're not going to read it. You'll read an AI-generated summary that just summarizes what I and who-knows-how-many people have written about thing and go down the road never having even gained a ghost of a clue that I exist.
But there's always a chance.
There's always a chance that someone out there might find a thing I wrote and read it. They might like it, they might not, but there is a real, live person behind these words. And I know that there could be another real live person on the other end of this series of connections we call The Internet. I keep going because I want to do everything I can to reach that person. Wherever or whoever they are.