AI Is Eating The Internet Whole

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A Love Letter to the Web

Dear internet, this is a love letter to everything you were. You were a wild, and vibrant place. A patchwork of personal websites, forums, and quirky communities stitched together by curiosity and creativity. In those fun pages of highlighter neon text and dancing GIFs, we found fun. We, the users, had the autonomy to explore unfiltered content, from niche fanfiction archives to passionate hobby sites crafted by someone with a story to tell. It wasn’t polished or corporate, and that was the beauty. The early web felt like a sprawling market, where you never knew what you would get, but it was undeniably human.

I remember wandering through GeoCities neighbourhoods as a kid, never knowing what I’d find next, maybe a political zine one moment, or some teenager’s anime art gallery from South America the next. It was a world where anyone could stake out a little corner, put up a home, and create something weird or wonderful. Sure, it was disorganised, I mean the search was kind of primitive, and discovering sites often meant following one blogroll or webring link to another, but that journey was part of the fun. We were explorers on the open web, and every click felt like walking into someone’s own home. Content wasn’t optimised for engagement or SEO because those concepts didn’t completely rule our lives yet. You wrote online just because you wanted to, not to game an algorithm, and reading was interactive; you might sign a guestbook or join a forum, and real communities formed across the world.

That early internet was far from perfect, it was really slow and unorganised, but it was a community space at heart. It treated knowledge and culture as a public commons, not a commodity. I really do miss that openness, when the web felt like it actually belonged to its users, not the other way around, where we’re stuck inside walled gardens. What I’m talking about isn’t just about nostalgia; but a reminder that the internet can still be a collaborative, creative space, and that vision is worth fighting for.

How AI Flattens the Internet

And now let’s talk about today, where the online landscape has changed dramatically. For many searches, Google no longer just points you to other sites, it tries to answer you itself. Type in a question and you might see a big, AI-generated summary at the top of the page, giving you the info you asked for before you’ve even clicked a single link. What’s convenient for users has become a curse for the open web. Those instant answers aren’t just coming out of thin air, they’re being pulled from someone’s website, yet often you’ll never visit it. Google’s search results have morphed from a gateway into a walled garden where Google keeps you longer. The effect has been dramatic, where well over half of all Google searches now end without any click through to the wider internet. Traffic that used to flow to independent websites is drying up, captured by Google’s own features. Bloggers, journalists, and site owners see their visitor counts plunge. Even the big hitters that used to get floods of hits find themselves suddenly overshadowed by Google’s answer box hovering above them.

This shift flattens the rich diversity of the web into homogenized, bite-sized garbage responses. An AI-generated summary might draw on multiple sources, but it mashes them into one voice, which is often a bland, generic one. The nuances and unique flair of individual sources and voices get lost. It’s as if the rich stew of online perspectives is being boiled down to a thin, flavourless broth. You ask a complex question, and the AI gives a single, supposedly perfect answer, leaving out the fact that there might be ten different opinions or approaches out there. Context and humanity get completely smoothed over. Gone is the charm of stumbling upon a personal anecdote or an unconventional viewpoint in your search results; and in it’s place everything reading in the same soulless tone. One first glance, it can feel efficient, because I guess there’s no need to open five tabs and compare viewpoints, but you realise it’s mostly just slop, it’s suffocating. The search engine that once served as a portal to countless perspectives has become a gatekeeper, preferring to do the talking itself.

The Great Enclosure

What we’re seeing now is a new enclosure of the digital landscape, like landowners fencing off public fields centuries ago, today a tech giant is fencing off our shared digital knowledge. Google takes the content of the open web, like articles, posts, videos created by countless people, and feeds it into its AI-driven answers. Knowledge that used to send people outward to diverse websites is now captured and served back within Google’s walled garden, with no credit or reward to those who created it.

It’s a complete reversal of the internet’s early promise of decentralisation where the web was supposed to empower creators at the edges, but instead what we’re seeing is power consolidating right back in the centre. Google’s dominance in search (in many countries over 90% of queries) has pretty much made it the editor-in-chief of the entire internet. And with AI summaries(and that fucking new AI mode), Google doesn’t even have to send you off to read other sites, it just presents the knowledge of many as it’s own, and turns it into a product. This is just a massive extraction of value, like imagine a journalist in a war-torn country who publishes a deeply researched story online. If Google’s AI plucks facts from it to answer users’ questions, many readers will never click through to the source, and see the humanity. Google captures the attention (and maybe ad impressions), while the journalist gets nothing. Multiply that by millions of pieces of content, and you see how wealth and traffic are siphoned away from original creators into one corporate platform.

This dynamic is called digital colonialism. I really do like that analogy because in the colonial era, empires extracted raw materials from diverse lands and amassed wealth at the centre, leaving local communities exploited and depleted. In the digital era, a company like Google can just extract knowledge and creative content from communities worldwide and consolidate it inside their own AI models and services. The riches of the global web, like our stories, ideas, and creations, have become a resource mined to feed a centralised AI. Meanwhile, the people who produced that content become increasingly invisible, their websites bypassed and their voices drowned out unless they conform to the platform’s rules. In this new data empire, Google positions itself as the ultimate arbiter of knowledge, much like an imperial power setting the terms of exchange.

Where Local Voices Disappear

The flattening of the web by AI search has especially harsher effects on non-English and local-language content. The internet may feel global, yes, but in reality about half of all web content is in English, and much of the rest is dominated by a few other major languages. If you speak a language with a smaller web presence, Google’s algorithms usually just funnel you toward content from the big languages anyway. And AI tools, which are trained predominantly on English information, tend to default to an Anglo-American perspective. Researchers have found that a question posed in different languages can yield strikingly different answers, and that an AI like ChatGPT will often present a viewpoint skewed by the English data it knows best. In practice, this means whole chunks of local knowledge get overlooked or filtered out. A search phrased in Bengali or Swahili might still get results drawn from English sources, simply because the algorithm finds more “authoritative” data there. The rich context and nuance of local perspectives get lost in translation, if they ever appear at all.

And that contributes to a cultural monoculture online, where everything is being sanded down to the same dull tone. The pressure to rank on Google means creators around the world often feel they have to write in the same style, or even the language, that the algorithm favours. A blogger in Ecuador might switch to publishing in English to gain more hits, while an African news site might mimic Western outlets’ tone to avoid being downranked. As a result, the internet’s content starts looking and sounding the same, no matter where in the world it comes from. Unique local voices and weird, wonderful idiosyncrasies are completely and utterly drowned out by SEO-driven uniformity. Imagine a forum in Thailand in where innovative tips are shared in Thai, it could be a goldmine of knowledge for others in that region. But if Google’s AI decides to answer their local questions with generic advice pulled from a big English language site, that local wisdom remains hidden. Bit by bit, the diverse accents of the web are fading, replaced by one homogenous voice refined for clicks and simplicity. It’s a loss not just of information, but of culture.

Resistance and Digital Sovereignty

So, what can we do in the face of this AI-driven homogenisation? The good news is that not all doom and gloom. There’s a renewed energy behind the indie web, a movement of people building and maintaining their own websites and online spaces, just like in the old days. It’s a push to make the web weird and personal again. Instead of pouring all our thoughts into Xitter or Facebook or whatever giant platform is in vogue, more folks are dusting off their HTML skills (or using simple blogging tools) to create sites on their own terms. When you run your own little corner of the internet, you don’t have to chase viral trends or bow to an algorithm’s whims. You can just post a long, rambling essay or a hand-drawn comic or even your cats photos without worrying whether it’s going to get likes or views by the people that you don’t want to. In an online world that already kinda feels cookie-cutter, carving out your own personal web space is a small splash of colour on a dull canvas, it injects personality and autonomy back into the mix.

Another growing act of resistance is completely degoogling your digital life. That means consciously reducing reliance on Google and other big gatekeepers. For instance, try using alternative search engines that respect your privacy and don’t filter the world through one company’s lens. There’s Startpage, which cleverly gives you Google search results but strips out the tracking and personalization. There’s Qwant, built in Europe with an emphasis on neutrality and local content, or Kagi, where you pay, but have complete privacy and everything is opt out. There’s DuckDuckGo, or Brave Search; and for the truly tech-savvy, there’s Searx, an open-source metasearch engine you can even host yourself, pulling results from many sources and giving you control. Instead of using gmail. I personally use Proton Mail, where I know I’m not being constantly being watched and read through. For Browsers, you can start by ditching Google Chrome and try something like Firefox to begin with. By diversifying where we search, we chip away at Google’s monopoly on information. Likewise, we can choose non-corporate email, maps, and cloud services, or use browser extensions that block trackers. Each small step rebalances power, even if only a little, and sends a message that we won’t just go along with the centralisation of the web.

We can also revive and embrace the tools that made the old web so rich and self-directed. Remember RSS feeds, those little orange wifi looking icons that let you subscribe to a site’s updates? They still exist, and they’re a fantastic way to keep up with blogs and news without an algorithm deciding what you see. Using an RSS reader (I recommend Feedbro) to follow independent sites is like creating your own custom newspaper that includes voices that might never make it to Google’s curated top results. Along with newsletters, personal mailing lists, and even old-school web rings, these tools let us curate our own internet experience. And there’s a broader shift towards self-hosting and open-source platforms, you’ve got people setting up their own community forums again, running their own Mastodon social servers as an alternative to corporate social media, and sharing files via peer-to-peer networks. All of this is about maintaining control over our digital lives, and about choosing transparency and autonomy whenever possible, rather than just convenience.

Crucially, opting out of the AI-mediated, big-tech-controlled ecosystem isn’t about retreating from technology at all, far from it actually. It’s about reclaiming some agency over it, and saying that we, as users and creators, want a say in how the internet works. By supporting indie websites, using open web tools, and seeking out diverse and various sources of information, we vote with our clicks for a more communal online culture. We remind the giants that the internet’s value comes from us, the millions of creators and readers, not the other way around. And in doing so, we begin to regain a sense of digital sovereignty that our online world is ours to shape, not just something served to us by an AI in some big tech silo.

One Small, Weird Site at a Time

Despite everything I’ve talked about, I remain optimistic about the web’s future. For one thing, these issues are no longer flying under the radar. I see people all over the world starting to talk about them. Finally you’re starting to see journalists, scholars, and even policymakers beginning to question the wisdom of letting a few companies control the information commons. There’s a growing understanding that something incredibly precious is at stake. And at the regular level, everyday internet users are waking up too. I see it in online discussions, the rise of digital rights activism, and in the simple choices people make, like switching their default web browser or supporting laws that demand more transparency from big tech. The fact that we’re having this conversation at all means the monoculture hasn’t won yet.

On a personal level, we each have the power to nudge the web in a better direction. I’ve started making a point to seek out and share the genuinely fun, enriching and independent websites that I find. It actually feels so nice to go web surfing again, letting one interesting website lead me to another in a chain of discovery. And I know I’m not alone, because there’s a small but noticeable renaissance of personal sites and newsletters and DIY online projects, there’s creators that are realising that they don’t have to chase the algorithm on a giant platform; they can cultivate a smaller, genuine audience on their own turf and be way happier. We probably won’t return to the exact anarchic web of the 90s (the internet is much bigger now, and times have changed), but we can certainly carry its spirit forward in new ways.

In the end, the internet is too important to leave entirely in the hands of big companies or AI systems. It belongs to all of us who use it, build it, and care about it. Every single action, like starting a personal site, supporting an indie creator, or bookmarking a cute little webcomic instead of relying on Facebook to show it to you, is like planting a seed. One seed might not seem like much, but thousands of them can grow into a forest. One handmade site at a time, we can rebuild a web that feels like home again. The giants may have staked out their territory, but the rest of us can still claim our own little plots and connect them together. Link by link, we can keep the web’s wild, diverse, and wonderful spirit alive for generations to come.