Out With the Old
In With the Bots
Hello Friends,
From the moment my first son was born, I anticipated, with much joy, the moment he and his peers would take over the world and run it. I believed they could only do better than us.
This replacement is not only a rite of passage for our children, but it’s also a necessary evolution for society. We grow stronger as a whole when we open the doors to new energy and new ideas (hoping, of course, egotistically perhaps, that at least some of our wisdom survives).
We are better for it. Fresh eyes and all that.
I trust this whole-heartedly.
Well, it seems we’re in the midst of another transition, an out with the old and in with the new situation, so to speak.
The company Cloudflare, a global networking company, has reported that there is now more non-human traffic on the Internet than human.
…bots have now passed human traffic online for the first time in the Internet’s history…
CEO and co-founder of Cloudflare, Matthew Prince
In other words, software-generated actions outnumber human activities. That’s AI agents, ad serving and tracking tasks, and automated responses.
When I hear this news, I immediately go to a dark place. I mean, I already feel that the Internet is full of fake garbage. But now, with this report, we can assume that there is a greater than 50% chance that the garbage is not even human-generated.
Over half of what you are looking at when you scroll the web is AI or just dumb bots: the users you’re bidding against on eBay, the other fans you’re battling against for concert tickets, the sources you’re considering as authorities on medical advice—all more than likely software.
The writer, Cory Doctorow, coined the term Enshittification to describe our current experience on the internet—an exhausting slog of reduced usefulness and frustration. He suggests that it basically came about when the marketers took the direction of companies’ web presence from technology folks. Internet companies became obsessively concerned with click-through rates, engagement, and social approval.
In the early days, and even through the mid-2000s, users could surf the web to learn and entertain themselves, not with inane 30-second videos, but with high-quality subject matter. During that time, content drove the rise in popularity of websites.
Homepages were destinations to return to. People spoke about them in the same way that they talked and laughed about the most recent Friends or Seinfeld episodes the day after at work.
“You call some place Paradise, kiss it goodbye.”
Eagles, The Last Resort.
Apparently, now, it’s the robots who are enjoying the web and laughing at us around a virtual watercooler.
My kids grew up in an online world, a lifetime of smartphones, ubiquitous connectivity, and continuous transformation. They coolly ride the waves of the shifting ground that I feel under my feet.
Perhaps they will come to see the non-human participants on the internet as peers and heirs, or at least as co-creators and not as adversaries, of their future.
Happy reading, happy writing, happy surfing,
David