Nobody Is Looking

The web feels unloved. You click on something to read, and what you get is a mess of pop-ups, autoplay videos, and banners stacked on banners. The thing you came for is still there, but you have to fight for it. Reading online has turned into an endurance sport. People really used to care about the words they shared.

And yet everyone pretends it's fine. Publishers continue to load more ads, advertisers continue to pay, and the charts on the dashboards keep going up and to the right. But who is actually there? Most of the comments are bots. Half the traffic is bots. The content itself is often bots. Bots even write the Ads. Few souls read past the headline because the content is actively pushing them away somewhere else. To follow a click.

All that slop, the ads, the fake clicks, the bot-written text is the stuff being scraped to train the next generation of AI. It's a race to the bottom, powered by junk. There is only one internet. It is the fossil fuel of AI. And much like our earth-bound fossil fuels, we are slowly burning it away.