The Internet is dead, there is nothing we can do about it
The speed of the Internet increased, opportunities expanded, and intercontinental communication between humans flourished. These are the core concepts of the Internet. However, we as humanity have failed it miserably. It has become the monster it is today. Visiting a website without an ad blocker and anti-fingerprinting technologies is now unimaginable. Ads, cookies, and autoplay videos are just a few of the many annoyances one must endure.
Yet, it was manageable and doable. You could install Pi-hole on your Raspberry Pi, run it as your local DNS, harden Firefox, or even use Tor and its associated browser. The Internet was usable and, to some extent, enjoyable.
With the rise of Large Language Models (LLMs), often incorrectly referred to as AI by the technically illiterate, everything changed. So-called ‘slop’ emerged from the TPUs of these neural networks2. An unprecedented amount of data and content flooded the web. Everyone wants to create LLM content, but simultaneously, everyone wants to dismantle it. People appreciate human-like content, texts, poems, movies, articles, and essays, yet few create them, instead letting machines do the work. It’s despicable. The concerning part is that it’s becoming increasingly difficult to differentiate between human-created and machine-generated content2. You cannot easily see or notice if it was made by a human or hallucinated by a machine.
Therefore, avoiding the Internet in its current state may be the most prudent course of action one could take