I didn't leave the internet—the internet left me. And despite the "it's not X it's Y" structure of the previous sentence, and the em-dash used, a real human wrote this. Or more accurately: is currently (trying to) write this. This human is me.

I love the internet. Or should I say I: I used to love the internet? I'm not even sure what "the internet" is anymore. It sure as fuck isn't Facebook, even though that's the reality for a lot of people. What even is "Facebook" today, given that Meta owns WhatsApp, Instagram, and a gazillion other things? Are you on Facebook when you're sharing a funny video with your friends on WhatsApp? In some sense yes; in some sense no. Your (Meta)data is probably gobbled up all the same.... I don't know...

What I do know is that "the internet" is dead, and probably has been for a long while. When I sit on an airplane or a train and I get the opportunity to see what other people—regular people—and yes, I'm going to continue to use em-dashes, fuck you LLMs—do on their phones, all I see is WhatsApp, Instagram, TikTok, Facebook, Twitter X, YouTube, Netflix, and so on. Sometimes someone is reading a book. I'm sure sometimes someone is reading an article or a research paper or something. But even so, most people, when reading an article, are not raw-dogging the internet like we used to, but are using the Substack app (or again something like Facebook/X/etc.) to read the thing in their favorite walled garden.

We did this to ourselves, mind you. Convenience, convenience, convenience. Walled gardens are terribly convenient, and nobody likes to leave them. Leaving them brings friction. And boy oh boy, do people hate friction.

And now come the agents. The fact that I had to preface this with "hey, trust me bro, an LLM didn't write this one" is a testament to the weird times we're in. Look. I love LLMs. I've probably used more tokens than the one SF hypeboy that told you that the Singularity is coming tomorrow. If my wife would know my current AI spend she'd probably divorce me, but hey, I've got a lot of projects and a lot of ideas so why not spawn a swarm of 50 agents that just do stuff on their own. After all, the only way to understand what's really going on is to really use the stuff that everyone is talking about, and see how powerful it really is.

And yes, it's powerful. I've built nihao with a single self-referential recursive prompt, for example. But this post is not even about all that. It's about the slop. And the blocking. And Sam Jippity Altman wanting to scan your eyeballs. But first things first. The slop. Oh my God, do I hate the slop.

From Slot-machines to Slop-machines

I wrote and talked about at length as to why the internet was basically forced to turn itself into a slot machine to monetize itself. I'm not going to repeat this argument here, and I guess that everyone reading that far (you are the 1%! or more accurately, the 4%, if statistics are to be believed) knows that there's a military-industrial surveillance complex that is farming your eyeballs and brain cycles.

Everything is a slot machine. Everything is designed to be maximally addicting. Which means maximally targeted. Which means maximally surveilled. Which means if you're a pseudonymous internet person behind a VPN like me, you're fucked. Completely fucked. Without reproach.

I can't use the internet anymore, whatever "the internet" is in its current state. I refuse to comply, and it's virtually impossible to use the internet without complying. And things will only get worse from hereon out.

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Here's the thing though: I didn't leave. All I did was stay true to my principles, and the internet left me. What a sad state of affairs.

Web 1.0 Web 2.0 Web 3.0 Web 4.0

Just writing the headline above brings me back to the Web 2.0 days, which I hated too. Everything had the same look, the same style, the same design, the same smell. Round corners. Everything glossy. Colors that would led you to believe that you had a stroke. Flickr, twittr (yes, without "e", I kid you not), tumblr, and a million other things ending in "rrr" that I can't remember anymore. Don't want to remember, probably.

Now there's a new smell in town: LLM smell. And boy, does it stink. Sometimes you can smell it from a mile away, and you won't even start reading or click on the thing. Sometimes the "author" is a little more skilled, putting some sprinkles of real human writing here and there in the beginning, and you start reading. But after the 2nd paragraph you become suspicious. You start reading words that a normal human—or at least this human in this particular field—would never use. (And yes, I just used em-dashes again. Deal with it.). The 3rd paragraph rolls around and the rhythm and the sentence structure changes. Sentences become short. More authoritative. You see negation and emphasis everywhere. The thing is telling you what it all means. Why this and that is important. You get up, wash your eyes with soap, go take a shower. Maybe some fetal position to cry about the current state of the world for a hot minute. Maybe you touch some grass after that. Hopefully you touch some grass after that.

If you're a writer, it's quite obvious in writing. If you're a designer, it's quite obvious in designing. All the vibe-coded apps look the same. I'm sure it's the same for music, videos, and everything else that's currently being generated. If done without care and without effort, it will have LLM smell. And it's not gonna be good. Or pretty. Or insightful. A one-shot prompt will always and forever produce something what the kids these days would call "mid". (And that's probably and outdated term; that's how much of an unc I am.) It will do that by definition, because that's what LLMs are and how they work: middle of the curve.

And yet, I'm bullish

I think we're gonna make it, fam. It's gonna be different, but it's going to be okay. The dog of wisdom told me as much in a meme.

Is the attention span of everyone rekt? Yes. Is content on the "internet" gonna get worse? Absolutely. Are you going to have to scan your eyeballs, or your sphincter, or provide some other insane biometric info or government ID to use any mainstream internet service whatsoever going forward? Also yes, unfortunately.

But it's going to be okay. And you can also exit. Join the Amish, or generate a keypair and join another weird cult. Touching grass helps too. Talking to real humans, in real life, about real things. With your own weird idiosyncrasies and weights and hallucinations.

I'm bullish on humanity, and maybe the overabundance of LLM slop will bring out the best in us. The most authentic. The most human. The most real. But am I bullish on the internet, as it once was, and as it currently is? Not so much. And yet there's hope, and new things are born every day.

The internet is dead. Long live the internet.

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This article first appeared on dergigi.com.