On convenience, abdication, and the quiet erosion of the open web. The internet isn’t dying. That’s the problem. In 2026, over half of all web traffic is generated by bots, not humans ( Computing, 2026 ). The most damning part is not the rise of the bots. It is that most of us did not notice when the internet stopped being… ours. The early 1990s. You typed a command, pressed enter, and suddenly — information . Not what your library had. Not what the evening news chose to show you. Everything. Or at least, the closest thing to everything that had ever existed in human history. For those who remember Archie and Veronica — the earliest search tools, long before Google was even a thought — or the raw, strange communities of IRC , there was something almost sacred about it. You were navigating knowledge. Meeting strangers on the other side of the world who cared about the exact same obscure thing you cared about. I used to talk about always on as something revolutionary. A permanent, universal library. A global conversation. It was magic. I was right that it was revolutionary. I was completely naive about what that revolution would ultimately serve. How we got here Thirty years is a long time. Long enough to build an infrastructure of knowledge, habits, and regulations. Long enough to forget what you were building it for. The early internet carried a foundational promise: openness . Net neutrality — the principle that every bit of information travels equally, that no voice is technically privileged at the network layer over another — was not a regulatory footnote. It was the architecture of digital democracy. The Voltairean bargain made digital: you defend the right of people to say things you disagree with precisely because that is the only way to protect the right to say anything at all. For a while, it held. Then came the workaround. Private commercial platforms stepped in as curators. And unlike editors at a newspaper, who at least operate with some transparency about their perspective, these new curators were algorithms. Optimised not to inform, but to capture attention . Not to diversify thinking, but to monetise it. Not to serve the reader, but to extract from them. Research consistently found that algorithmic exposure to opposing political content often hardened, rather than softened, existing positions — the backfire effect most pronounced among users already embedded in ideologically homogeneous networks ( Bail et al., 2018 ). Bots amplified the signal because scale was cheap. Spirals of silence took hold: people holding nuanced or minority positions self-censored for fear of pile-ons, shrinking the visible range of views and narrowing the very debate the platform was supposed to enable. We built the most powerful communication infrastructure in human history. We handed it to engagement metrics. That damage is still unfolding. But something larger just happened.We stopped clicking We stopped clicking A click was never just a click. It was a handshake — between a reader and a writer who had no idea the other existed. It was the signal that said: this is worth making, this is worth publishing, this is worth maintaining. The economic foundation beneath every independent journalist, every niche expert, every specialist site that survived on the attention of a small, passionate audience. It was also an act of exploration . The wrong turn. The unexpected article. The author whose name you had never heard who changed how you thought about something. The internet rewarded wandering. AI does not. AI often compresses exploration into answers. When an AI assistant answers your question before you have had time to ask it properly, all of that disappears. You receive a pre-digested summary of sources you will never read, written by authors you will never encounter, filtered through a model whose training data, biases, and internal reasoning are largely opaque. And increasingly, you do not question this. Because it is fast. Because it