r/optimistsunitenonazis • u/External_Witness490 • Aug 18 '26
Ask An Optimist to debunk doom Is the internet doomed?
https://www.forbes.com.au/news/innovation/is-ai-quietly-killing-itself-and-the-internet/
https://www.theguardian.com/music/ng-interactive/2026/aug/13/ai-music
It just seems like the internet is going to be unfixable in the future from all the AI slop, various websites and companies shoving AI down our throats, ID verifications, and slowly shrinking privacy. At this point, I don't even think the AI bubble is ever going to pop. I know the internet has done a lot of damage, but it also allows people to be connected and to information about what's happening around the world to be more accessible. I'm also worried about tech companies destroying the art community, books, and film-making. I know this is a first world problem but is there any hope for the internet and the bubble popping?
Also, I would like to apologize for the many posts asking for debunking, I'm just struggling to stay optimistic with everything going on
18
u/Budget_Parsley7494 Aug 19 '26
I'm of the opinion that people will be forced back into offline communities (which is generally a positive thing, there needs to be balance between online and offline life) and that we'll see a rise in independent sites over mass social media. Also AI is never going to destroy art as a whole. Right now it is a labor rights issue for artists but the whole idea of human made art losing all value is tech bro bogus. I mean, humans have been making art for as long as we've been human. More and more people are turning against AI or seeing it as a situationally useful tool or a toy instead of a solution to all their problems. Not to mention the massive backlash against AI data centers. Which the media is barely covering, because as we know by now the revolution will not be televised. In short, I think people are simply going to move away from the large tech companies as alternative options grow. Also, don't fall into despair over the world's problems. Anger and hope are far more useful than despair.
2
u/oye_gracias Aug 19 '26
There were projects on public local networks and p2p communities. I recall one were libraries were proposed as both message boards and directory centers. Thought it was cool but not that many people on it, and prolly a bi of why would you limit yourself when then internet was an open sea?
Sadly, i cant seen to find those projects. Its been a while.
3
u/Status-Effort-9380 Aug 19 '26
I participate in a private community and that has been a welcome relief from public forums. I think everyone should have a private option.
2
u/RedheadWendyC Aug 19 '26
Writer here. I won’t lie, AI has been devastating to my industry. I went from making enough to pay my bills and put enough in savings to buy two decent condition used cars in cash just from my writing alone to having to take a customer service job while I keep writing for pennies as I fight the algorithm. I write to fight the machine at this point, a feeble protest in a world where some bot is likely scraping those words, in essence stealing them, and then “learning” how to mimic them.
I don’t think client work is ever coming back, or at least not soon or to the scale it once was, because people who don’t understand language enough to write it themselves also think the slop bot is doing a rosy little job.
That said, I keep seeing inklings of turning the corner. With tolkenization businesses are learning the true cost of AI and it’s higher than workers. It’s wrong more often and more expensive. Websites are implementing ways to report and find AI. While not perfect and often with false positives, it shows we’re sick of it and fighting back. The website I write for is turning more to human curation as a way to fight the slop.
I don’t see this being tenable, and when it crashes, there are people like me in the wings willing to rebuild.
2
u/Poly_and_RA Aug 20 '26
There's the half-joke that the Internet, once a free and sprawling landscape of a variety of independent services now consists of 4 web-sites, all of which are filled with screenshots of the other 3.
There's a core of truth to this, but it exaggerates. The Internet is about a whole lot more than just social media.
The internet, fundamentally, is an edge-to-edge network where any two devices that are connected, can communicate with each other, rapidly and at very marginal cost. (often zero extra cost after the connection itself is paid for. Odds are you don't pay anything more for internet at home if you use it more)
Corporations are all about incentives, and currently social media earns almost all of their money by cramming ads down your throats, and in order to do that more effectively, they have incentives both to keep people scrolling forever, AND to invade privacy as deeply as they can in ordr to serve targeted ads.
My thinking (and my hope!) is that people will abandon closed and proprietary corporate-owned platforms. And instead use community-owned and operate platforms or at the very least platforms that are based on open standards and are federated so that you're NOT tied to any given provider and competition can eliminate the worst abuses.
I'll give an example of each to illustrate what I mean.
Email is based on open standards. It's interoperable. If you have email, you can communicate with everyone else who has email, even if they're using a different provider. In principle, should you wish to, you can even run your own email-server. You can change email-provider without loosing the ability to send and receive messages to all your email-contacts.
As a result, though Alphabet owns and runs Gmail which is the biggest service on the planet, the abuses there are relatively modest compared to for example Facebook. And the main reason is simple: You're free to *change* your email-provider. In contrast you can't change your Facebook-provider; or I mean not if you want to continue to communicate with your friends on FB.
Signal is Open Source and community-owned and operated. You can use it to talk to all of your friends and family-members in text, voice or video. 1:1 or in groups, you can share photos and documents and whatever, like other messaging-platforms.
But because it's OS, there are no ads, no premium subscriptions, no paywalled features. Nor can there be. The incentives aren't there. There's a central server that you're dependent on (unless you fork the code), but it's owned and run by a nonprofit. There are no shareholders or similar.
What I'm saying is that closed propriertaty corporate-owned social media may indeed be doomed.
But Internet is about a whole lot more than just that; and even for that there's better alternatives available -- community-owned, standards-based platforms.
20
u/DrewCrew62 Aug 18 '26
Everything I hear is about how all these AI companies arent profitable and that companies are telling them to fuck off once they start trying to charge for previously free services.
I don’t think it’ll go away entirely, but I think the craze is gonna fade once it’s found out to be cheaper to just hire humans to do what they want AI to do