The Web isn’t dying, but it is being distanced from us. As a place to seek knowledge and connections, it is being replaced for many (including me) by AI chatbots that harvest findings from it, rewrite and summarize what they find, and—as gravy on that steak—point to sources it finds there.
To some degree, this disincentivizes publishing on the Web. Chatbots remove readers and viewers, discourage advertisers and subscriptions, and tell writers that the Web is less worth their effort than it was in the past.
Also, as the sum of information harvested to train and inform chatbots approaches a virtual Everything, it almost seems as though the collective provisioning of human knowledge is complete—or near enough.
Of course we’ll continue to publish, because we are curious, thinky, and chatty animals. But the land rush that gave us forty zillion websites (seriously, about 210 million, according to Netcraft) actually ended around 2011 (Netcraft again), and has pretty much plateau’d since then:
If the blue or red line starts to drop, I am sure that will be because agent-to-agent connections between buyers and sellers push aside the old roles of websites for publishing goods, and for buying them. Available inventories will be published in other media, using AI agents, while customers will shop and buy through agents of their own, which will peruse those same media, and make smart deals. We might still call this new matrix The Web, but its nature will be different.
We always mischaracterized the Web with mixed real estate and publishing metaphors: pages we’d author and post in sites we’d construct or build at locations on domains that we’d visit and browse, as if these were the solid and durable occupants of a world wide library.
But in fact the Web is a whiteboard. And it’s much easier on the Web to erase stuff than to produce and keep stuff up.
While I love the Internet Archive and consider it the most saving grace ever invented, it’s a cemetery with glass-top graves. What’s there is done. It’s of near-infinite value, but not new. And new is what keeps the Web alive.
I don’t know if chatbots are to the Web what the Chicxulub event was to dinosaurs. But I fear that it might be. I just hope the resemblance is a small one.
Meanwhile, it’s good to know that, while some great thinkers (such as Ben Thompson of Stratechery) say the Internet is done (see Ben’s The End of the Internet), other great thinkers and doers (such as Dave Winer) work on whole new networked environments. For example, Dave’s Big Undo.
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