By Curtis Collicutt in Internet — Aug 9, 2024

Is There a New Internet Brewing? The Internet Used to Be Fun, What Is It Now? Goop Piled on Other Goop?

Internet 2.0 was probably as good as the Internet will ever be. What will it become now? A smaller, more personalized Internet? Just a bunch of algorithmic junk we try to filter out?

The internet of today is a battleground. The idealism of the ’90s web is gone. The web 2.0 utopia—where we all lived in rounded filter bubbles of happiness—ended with the 2016 - https://ystrickler.medium.com/the-dark-forest-theory-of-the-internet-7dc3e68a7cb1

In response to the ads, the tracking, the trolling, the hype, and other predatory behaviors, we’re retreating to our dark forests of the internet, and away from the mainstream. - https://ystrickler.medium.com/the-dark-forest-theory-of-the-internet-7dc3e68a7cb1

[And] generative AI has dropped the cost of producing bullshit to near zero - https://danielpinchbeck.substack.com/p/generative-ai-and-the-dark-forest

The, I guess, 2.0 Internet–the MySpace salad days of the Internet–was an interesting and fun, if perhaps completely naive, time and place. We are well past that stage now and have entered some kind of post-capitalist version of the Internet. It's not a fun place anymore. Maybe it was never meant to be. Human relationships seem to stop working above a certain number of people, perhaps this is part of what we are currently experiencing, mixed in with a bunch of other problems.

Web 2.0 began with its own aspiration to democratization: proliferating personal websites, distributed network effects, and utopian dreams of global communication. These dreams did come to pass; connectedness flourished. And yet, this success was achieved through centralized platform ownership and the building of walled gardens that now dictate the terms of online life. - https://pluriverse.world/

Just thinking about what the Internet is, or is becoming, is confusing, perhaps even daunting.

Social media has made things plain old mean.
We may need to build our own pockets of the internet.
From a technical point of view, web development is a big mess.
Some things can change, like what the Internet looks like, but other things can't–like our reliance on IPv4 addresses.
Where have all the websites gone? Algorithms have taken over.
It's all goop on goop.
Search is worse.
Will GenAI make things even more worse?
Ultimately the Internet has to change, but into what?

Web Development is a Big Messy Mess of a Hairball (But it Scales!)

Recently Avery Pennarun, the CEO and co-founder of Tailscale, penned a blog article entitled "The New Internet."

...the tech industry has evolved into an absolute mess. And it’s getting worse instead of better! Our tower of complexity is now so tall that we seriously consider slathering LLMs on top to write the incomprehensible code in the incomprehensible frameworks so we don’t have to. - https://tailscale.com/blog/new-internet

Modern software development has a lot of problems. A lot. But we still do it. A lot.

Tailscale looked at the problems and came to the below conclusion.

...there was an underlying cause for all the problems. The Internet. Things used to be simple. Remember the LAN? But then we connected our LANs to the Internet, and there’s been more and more firewalls and attackers everywhere, and things have slowly been degrading ever since. - https://tailscale.com/blog/new-internet

He goes on further to say:

People layer on piles of [programming] goop. But the goop can be removed. Except networking. You can’t build modern software without networking. - https://tailscale.com/blog/new-internet

I do like most of the points in the blog post, but I'm not sure that the "haves," as Pennarun puts it, will be Tailscale customers. Ultimately, I'm not clear on what, according to Pennarun, the new Internet really is.

However, clearly, the Internet is not just a network. It's something else: all the things, the "goop," layered on top as well. Does IPv4 matter? Of course. Is it the Internet? No.

Where Did All the Websites Go? Algorithms Have Taken Over

...we get our content from a For You Page now— algorithmically selected videos and images made by our favorite creators, produced explicitly for our preferred platform. Which platform doesn’t matter much. So long as it’s one of the big five. - https://www.fromjason.xyz/p/notebook/where-have-all-the-websites-gone/

We used to be a society that visited websites. No longer it seems. I was reminded about a site I used to love, BLDG BLOG...which I no longer visit.

Link - https://x.com/geoffmanaugh/status/1810143538304389427

Search Deteriorates

Results are no longer as refined as they once were, as the algorithms used to determine them can now be easily manipulated and used for the benefit of corporations who want you to see their product before you get your results. Even then, result pages are now filled with marketing and oddly worded articles designed to pull you away from the authoritative and data-driven results generated from the search. - https://www.the215guys.com/blog/google-search-sucks-now/

Google search is not the same as it once was. Now, it’s arguably filled with as many spam links as it is with genuinely generated results, so it’s up to you to decide which is which. - https://www.the215guys.com/blog/google-search-sucks-now/

Search has changed considerably as well. I find myself using Google to search less and less, though of course I still use it.

Note that, only in the last few days, Google was found to have broken the law in terms of having a monopoly on search.

Alphabet's Google broke the law with monopolistic behaviour over online search and related advertising, a federal judge ruled on Monday, the first victory for U.S. antitrust authorities who have filed numerous lawsuits challenging Big Tech's market dominance. - https://www.cbc.ca/news/world/google-illegal-monopoly-1.7285798

AI Furthers the Deterioration

I have been reflecting on the increasingly glaring problems with Generative AI as it proliferates across the Internet. Like a fungus or cancer, it keeps growing, devouring everything in its path. - https://danielpinchbeck.substack.com/p/generative-ai-and-the-dark-forest

We are getting into a fascinating period where GenAI can easily create huge amounts of text and other content, and conversely can also reduce large chunks of text to key points. So we are in a situation where we have a tool that can, for example, create large amounts of overly-verbose text and then also take that wall of text and reduce it so it is more easily digestible. A common example is GenAI writing an email for you, and then the person on the other end of the email using an LLM to read the email and reduce it to the few key points...points that the original author likely used in the prompt.

In terms of the web, we can now programmatically crate massive swaths of text that appear to be human generated–including, for example, a blog that has a search function which uses GenAI to "just in time" create the blog post that is being searched for. What does that mean?

Conclusion

The luster the 2.0 Internet had years ago has worn off and now there is a dull metal and a few exposed sharp edges. We humans are amazing at finding ways to game the systems for financial gain, and that's what we've done with the Internet. We've gamified it, and now it basically runs as an algorithm. And we've layered the general evils of social media and the sloppiness of today's GenAI on top of that. (NOTE: I like the overall weirdness, the alieness, of GenAI. In many cases it's very recognizable.)

But nothing stays the same for long, and I don't think we want the Internet to be static. Sure, the Internet has lost its innocence and is now something much darker, mostly due to the inherent sadness and despair of social media and our inability to process how it actually affects people, but there is the possibility that something new will come along to help us solve these problems.

Maybe it's a smaller, more personal Internet. Maybe we'll use (Canadian-based!!!) products like Tailscale to create smaller scale, curated, lower case "i" internets. Maybe it's reading curated newsletters, some of which you pay for. It's hard to say right now, except to say that times...they are a changin'.

Yeasts are eukaryotic, single-celled microorganisms classified as members of the fungus kingdom. - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yeast

The idea of a new Internet brewing is a fun one, because what do you need to brew something? To create alcohol we need to add some water, some yeast (a strange living thing technically classified as a fungus) and sugar, mix it all together and then wait for it to ferment, to go bad. Beer, wine, vodka–things people like to drink, to put into their bodies–these are the waste product of yeast. Tasty, but overall a somewhat gross process.

The Internet is fermenting. It's not clear what the next version will be. Some people like goopy-goop.

PS. IPv6

Strangely, the Internet is effectively the same as it ever was from a technical perspective, in that we still mostly use IPv4 addresses which are limited in number by mathematics, specifically to 2^32, which is 4,294,967,296 total IPs. That sounds like a lot, but it's not even one IP address per person on the planet, or even every cell phone. You can scan every one of those IPs in a few minutes. IPv6, on the other hand, has a much, much larger space. At 128 bits, it is a huge number: 340,282,366,920,938,463,463,374,607,431,768,211,456 addresses, which cannot be scanned in a reasonable amount of time. But for various reasons, we won't be fully adopting IPv6, ever, it seems.

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Thanks for reading! Please forward on to your friends and colleagues.