The internet feels like it’s falling apart.
Not literally. Structurally, it’s sound. There are plenty of fiber optic cables lining ocean floors, cell towers looming above cityscapes, and server-filled data centers. But the very foundations of the utilitarian web—the platforms that undergird our everyday experiences online—feel shaky, pulsing with the first foreshocks of a collapse.
To start, nothing seems to work anymore. Google’s search engine once provided directory-level assistance to the denizens of the internet. Now it’s chock full of ads, sidebars, SEO-optimized clickbait, and artificial intelligence-powered guesstimations of possible answers to peoples’ questions. Earlier this year, a group of German researchers found that Google ranked product reviews pages high when they had low-quality text, tons of affiliate links to ecommerce sites, and were riddled with SEO tricks that don’t exactly coincide with quality. In other words, Google was letting their platform get co-opted by the lowest of the low.
On Amazon, the digital shelves are littered with sponsored products and cheap replicas of popular items. On either Amazon or Google, you’ll often need to scroll for a bit to get anything remotely helpful or relevant when you search. Government antitrust complaints against both companies have essentially called them toll booths for advertisers, who need to pay-to-play to get noticed, which has degraded those services in the process. When big tech giants make their relied-on services worse, that’s bad for consumers—even if they don’t have to pay more.
On social media, the situation is even more dire. Facebook is functionally good for fighting with high school friends about politics, getting birthday reminders, and learning who is married or pregnant. There’s almost no news on the platform anymore, and my feed is full of meme pages that I would never follow, repurposed TikToks posted as Reels, and—you guessed it—low-quality ads. X is a right-wing cesspool full of Elon Musk sycophants, tech bro hustle posters, and—good lord—the worst ads you’ve ever seen outside of Truth Social. TikTok, one of the only interesting, serendipitous, and (usually) joyful places on the internet is in danger of being banned from the United States in the next month unless the conservative Supreme Court or President-elect Donald Trump himself intervene to save it.
And the rise of generative AI has meant that every one of these platforms is now infused with what’s most commonly called slop, insultingly bad fake images often designed to trick or enrage people. You can find Facebook Groups fawning over beautiful landscapes without realizing they’re melting away if you look closely enough, and that the gorgeous Instagram model in the photo has far too many fingers.
The internet, of course, is controlled by the largest, richest, most powerful companies in the world. It’s not a dead internet, as some have posited, because we primarily consume artificial content; rather, it’s living and neglected, merely damned by corporate greed, indolence, and indifference. Silicon Valley’s giants no longer compete and no longer innovate; instead they cut costs, boost profit margins, and block out competitors in order to maintain consumer habit and market dominance. Online platforms give us convenience, but no novelty, and they have vanishing utility in increasingly our digital lives.
In 2025, perhaps the whole thing will explode. But hopefully, people will begin to rethink their reliance on digital platforms that treat them with utter contempt, like they’re consumers, like they’re “users.” If it’s the end of the internet as we know it, then I feel fine.
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