Almost 50% of all internet traffic are non-human already. Unchecked, it could lead to a zombie internet.
I have a theory: Most people from mine and slightly older generations (early 80s kids) still remember the first time we went online unsupervised.
It was late 2001, I was 18 years old, which was an admittedly belated entry into cyberspace compared to my peers, but the fact that I remember when and where it happened, and what websites I visited, should underscore my point, especially to younger readers: the internet felt like a revelation.
Why would I bestow such gravitas and import to that one hour over two decades ago, in a tiny internet cafe, on Internet Explorer of all things?
This was when I had finally decided what I was going to do with my life: I wanted to be a filmmaker. But I was in Sri Lanka, and had little access to the resources I would need; what films and filmmakers to study, how films were made in the first place, such things were mysterious and secretive in my pre-internet life.
On that day in 2001, in that one hour, I realized how wrong I was. Everything I wanted to learn about film was just a Yahoo! search away. The internet had lived up to its hype: it was the promised land for the insatiably curious. Today, the kids would call it a nerdgasm.
I start this essay with this flashback because I want to carry out a thought experiment: All other things about me being equal, what would an 18 year old me dreaming of films and film-making, encounter on the internet in 2025? I encourage my younger readers (those born in the 2000s) to do the opposite: imagine if you were old enough to encounter the pre-social media, pre-SEO spam, pre-AI sludge filled internet.
Full article here on ItsFOSS.com:
https://news.itsfoss.com/internet-is-dying/
Nanooks Stories 