Salman Ansari

If you degrade hyperlinks, and you degrade this idea of the internet as something that refers you to other things, you instead have this stationary internet where a generative AI agent will hoover up and summarize all the information that’s out there, and place it right in front of you so that you never have to leave the portal… That was a real epiphany to me, because the argument against one form of this legislation was, “My God, you’ll destroy this fundamental way of how the internet works.” I’m like, dude, these companies are already destroying the fundamental way of how the internet works.

Nathan Schneider—whose Governable Spaces I am always recommending—said something that’s been ringing in my ears ever since:

I think of tech as a wildfire—it burns really quickly. And we get a lot of wildfires out here, and there's the front of it, where the blaze is, and then once it's burnt over, that's when cool things start growing up. They grow much slower, and they find their way through…the burned trees and new life happens. I kind of hope we're entering that phase of social media that we're done with the fast burn. And maybe it had to happen.

What’s there after the fire passes over if not that goddamn mushroom at the end of a world?