What Was the Internet?
As AI overtakes the web, five writers reflect on how far it’s fallen
Executive editor Matt Lord introduces a new special feature with contributions from Siva Vaidhyanathan, Avery Dame-Griff, Joanna Walsh, Chad Wellmon, and Cory Doctorow:
For as long as it’s been around, we haven’t been sure how to feel about it. The utopians had their favored metaphors: cyberspace; a global village; the electronic frontier, digital commons, or new public sphere. If American literature, as Emerson said, is “in the optative mood,” the same has been true—maybe truer—of so much thinking about the internet.
But it didn’t take long for disillusionment to set in. A few years after British computer scientist Tim Berners-Lee invented the World Wide Web at CERN in 1989, critics began to sound the alarm on the “Californian Ideology”: the insidious creep of corporate greed in the guise of bohemianism. Since then, the story of the web’s decline has paralleled that of Silicon Valley and the “new economy” of neoliberal globalization it stood for. Social media, once a vehicle of “participatory culture” and “networked protest,” has been enshittified. Big Tech has gone red (in the GOP, not communist, sense). Attention merchants lock us into doomscrolling while platform capitalism, the backbone of today’s national security state, extracts, surveils, and kills. Despite valiant efforts by activists and reformers, it’s been the dystopians’ world—or at least the realists’—for some time now: an age of techno-feudalism, digital colonialism, the new Jim Code.
With the rise of AI, however, some new mood seems discernible, at least around the edges: the elegiac. A lot of the web is being swept away. In May, Google overhauled its iconic search box for the first time since 2001, signaling its all-in on the “intelligence age.” As chatbots hallucinate and hide their sources, search results become harder to browse, and digital life becomes ever more atomized, online access to information looks more imperiled than ever. Wikipedia has managed to survive—a miraculous exception that proves the rule—but it’s staring down new threats. Boston Review has been online since 1995, but our search engine traffic is falling, like everyone else’s. If work is published on the net and no one can navigate to it, does it leave a trace?
In other words, is this the end of the web itself? And if so, is some kind of eulogy in order?
“Just as I’d hoped, [the web] has enabled a flourishing of human creativity and self-expression,” Berners-Lee writes in his recent memoir, This Is for Everyone. But “to ensure the web agents serve people—not corporate profits, not governments, not themselves, but people—it’s critical that we develop systems today that put the human first.” We asked five humans who’ve been paying attention what to make of this moment. Read on for their reflections: about how the web used to work and what it used to feel like, the strange and sorry thing it’s become, and the good that’s worth remembering when so much of what we love is dying, or already long gone.
Read the whole feature on BR’s website.