There’s all this talk about AI and Google Zero effectively ending the internet as it has been known—creating a sole point-of-contact online to be an all-encompassing AI bot. The people who will profit from this are, of course, touting the possible ‘benefits’ from such a thing, and there are plenty of users out there who can’t live without something like ChatGPT telling them how to raise their children. I am against all of this, but as an example I will use something from internet history I personally detested—the Mommy Blogger.
Mommy Bloggers consisted of predominantly affluent, lonely housewives who shared every minute of their existence on personal journals which revolved around motherhood, housekeeping, and marriage. It was the kind of societal trend that rose to enough prominence to merit its own plotline on House by 2010. I didn’t give it much attention because I was basically the opposite of its target audience.
Now this demographic has moved on to social media or podcasts, but I can’t help but feel something was lost when that happened. The format of the blogs they were writing inherently required a sense of creativity and a forthrightness that, while possibly creating controversy, garnered camaraderie among other mothers. While the results can be similar in the world of podcasts, the off-the-cuff nature of just chatting feels far less heartfelt and more gossip-oriented. The inherent nature of what is being communicated gets reduced from meaningfully inquisitive from an individual perspective to a bland riff.
That’s what the ‘new internet’ and AI truly deliver: less creativity, less meaning, less potential for individuals to discover relationships with themselves and others alike through actually thinking about things. Considering yourself and others can be paths to empathy, social bonds, and overall feeling less lonely in the world. Silicon Valley tech has not only frayed those ends but is promising a world with even less possibility for those things (at least online). The internet will be reduced from a once-mecca of individual expression to a recursive loop of slop. Getting rid of search functions where people can actually discover the independent side of the internet only accelerates all of this.
There are still Mom Blogs out there, and a search over at DuckDuckGo will show as much. Yet it’s only a matter of time before people become unaware that this, or any type of personal expression, ever existed online to begin with. (The great irony being all of this is what fueled the ‘knowledge’ of AI bots to begin with.) There are many, far greater, crimes that AI and its proponents commit, but these sort of existential losses of potential creative outlets feel particularly damning of the road humanity is headed down from a purely meaningful perspective.
