The Era of the Free Internet is Ending. What Comes Next?

How will we forge connections online in the future?

Artwork: “Entropy Awaits” by the author, Joe Duncan

The Internet is going through an uncomfortable metamorphosis. It’s akin to the transformation of Western Europe after the military might of the Western Roman Empire collapsed.

The decline of central authority left a power vacuum that nobody filled for centuries until Charlemagne built an empire. Even that was short-lived, and most of Europe was subsequently a collection of small, independent kingdoms that characterized the era we now call The Middle Ages.

Long gone was the centralized power that facilitated easy trade and commerce, which shipped grain from Africa and the Black Sea region into Europe, not to mention, the influence of the cultural epicenter — the city of Rome itself.

The Shifting Tides of Power

As Matt Yglesias noted in his article The Past and Future of the City, the city of Rome itself suffered a substantial decline in the number of inhabitants the city had alongside its loss of military might. This curious phenomenon has happened repeatedly throughout human history. People congregate around a bustling center, a hotbed of activity, and then, the decline happens. It happened with Ur, Babylon, Alexandria, Rome, and England as power leapfrogged across the time-space continuum, shifting from one section of the globe to the other.

Human history is a grand dialectic as bustling hive structures come into being and fall away. As I always say, entropy is destiny — rust never sleeps.

From Reality to Virtual

Now, the same death-decay-and-rebirth process of fragmentation is playing out unimpeded, only instead of unfolding in physical space, it’s happening in cyberspace. Seeing that, as of August, of last year, there are now adults who were born after Facebook was solidified as an open social media platform (dropping the .edu requirement for users’ emails), I sense a history lesson is in order.

The internet was once a wide-open highway where traffic flowed effortlessly and unquestioningly as users hopped from site to site with ease. There was no such thing as a paywall. In the early days of the 1990s, everything was free. That was before the Internet was consolidated into the hands of a few massive corporations. It was more of an anarchistic hodgepodge of fun intellectual and educational connections. My first IRC chat screen name was Subzero32, named after the Mortal Kombat character. If anyone remembers me from 1996, hey, long time no speak.

Times were different then. Rarely, if ever, did companies set up digital toll booths (paywalls, pay-for-reach, etc.) to block travel from one part of the internet to the other. Today, that’s changing.

Expensive toll roads are taking over the free national highways as the large companies fight — much like the medieval kingdoms — among one another for dominance.

Subscribing to the Future

In his phenomenal essay, The End of the Subscription Era is Coming, Nick Hilton describes the wasteful expensiveness of this new trend of subscriptions we see with services like Substack supplanting traditional legacy media outlets as a popular way to consume media.

The logic is simple and coherent. My subscription to the NY Times is $4 per month and I get access to countless journalists, games, recipes, and a whole lot more. To get the same kind of value on Substack would cost me hundreds of dollars in subscriptions. The current push toward the subscription model simply cannot continue to expand.

Nick’s essay is as eloquent as it is compelling, but — respectfully, I disagree. Current trends are shifting in the opposite direction as the major players try mightily to mediate the impending effects of generative AI models like ChatGPT, which threatens their already-dwindling ad revenue.

Wide-open platforms that have been likened to “the town square” (let’s call them “content marketplaces”) now find themselves in an extremely precarious spot, as the potential to create annoying, fictitious, AI-generated content expands across the globe.

Sites where you’re greeted with a News Feed or homepage where you can choose from select content displayed by the platform will be most impacted, as current (and likely future) algorithms are incapable of spotting and removing AI-generated content.