What to Do About the Junkification of the Internet

Google is trying to kill the 10 blue links. Twitter is being abandoned to bots and blue ticks. There’s the junkification of Amazon and the enshittification of TikTok. Layoffs are gutting online media. A job posting looking for an “AI editor” expects “output of 200 to 250 articles per week.” ChatGPT is being used to generate whole spam sites. Etsy i... See more

To accomplish this goal, the “proud extroversion” of the early Web soon gave way to a much more homogenized experience: hundred-and-forty-character text boxes, uniformly sized photos accompanied by short captions, Like buttons, retweet counts, and, ultimately, a shift away from chronological time lines and profile pages and toward statistically opt... See more

Search engines — the window into the web for many people — top their results with pages containing thousands of words of auto-generated nothingness, perfectly optimized for search engine prominence and to pull in money via ads and affiliate links while simultaneously devoid of any useful information.

Social networks have become “the web” for many pe... See more

Besides the infinite social media maelstrom1 and the continuously growing commercialization of the web2, we will soon have to deal with an avalanche of AI-generated content3 as well. The corners of the internet cultivated by individuals are important for its vitality and may even become critical to the very survival of a humane online ecosystem. Ot... See more

platforms have risen to become the monolithic, centrally-managed household names that we are so familiar with—where we comfortably upload our memories and fantasies, our arguments and aspirations.

Unlike an HTML website where you can right click on the background and select “View Page Source” to review every creative decision, what we see on social media is powered by vastly complex “black box” algorithms.  For New Yorker contributing editor Kyle Chayka, the appeal of the early-internet aesthetic is its contrast with the “repetitive tem... See more

Platforms have boxed our social lives and creative endeavors into slick, hyper-designed perimeters, guiding users through algorithmically perfect scrolls.