TikTok is the future of web browsing. You won’t surf the web; it will be served to you “algorithmically” instead. After a while you’ll be served the content you want and it will feel like it was your idea all along.
AI is the engine to do this. The AI feed will repackage the web, all of the books, all of the recorded audio, and all of the video (which it has already consumed) and deliver it in a feed. You will open the browser and the content will appear. You will scroll and new content will appear.
This is basically the Facebook News Feed or TikTok FYP, but there is a crucial difference. Content there still leads users away from the source. People make the content (or prompt it); people (or their scripts) post the content. They need you to click on it and they want you to follow them off the feed. It’s a dialectic twisted around revenue. Facebook and TikTok want you to keep scrolling so your eyeballs roll over their ads, but Facebook and TikTok need content from users to keep you coming back. Creators who post there want you to click on their content so your eyeballs roll over their ads (or you send them money directly, but they need Facebook or TikTok to put your butt in the seat.
The AI Feed will certainly be burdened by its own internal contradictions, but it will escape this dialectic. Users will stay on the feed because it can endlessly generate content in a way that makes them feel like they’re unique, living on the cutting edge of information, and in control. Creators may post on their own sites (like this one!) but, lacking the “algorithm” and the network effects of a major platform, they will labor in obscurity. Further, the Feed will just consume their content and repackage it.
Maybe the Small Web will come back. Maybe print media will come back. I’ve explored both of those ideas in this blog at many points in the last ten years. Or maybe the AI Feed will be amazing. Who knows? The only certainty is change, change, change.
C.B. Crenshaw 