The days of the early web were a time of incredible creativity and possibility. The web of the 90s and 00s was a new frontier where anyone could create a website or blog, share their ideas, their identity and interests. There was a sense of a democratising and transformative potential of a new medium as this intriguing David Bowie interview highlights. Early cyberspace felt weird, experimental, open, and seemed destined to reshape society in positive ways.
But in recent years the talk of “online harms”, “dark forests“, and “walled gardens”, and crypto-web3 ownership, portrays a contrasting vision, where the early web’s openness has given way to a more enclosed, controlled, and fragmented online landscape. Much of the internet has become dominated by a handful of giant tech platforms – the “walled gardens” – which seek to keep users within their own proprietary ecosystems, feeding them content, and services personalised by algorithms and now AI, that many feel cause more harm than good.
Outside these gardens lie the “dark forests”, the parts of the web that are harder to find, less engaged with, and more prone to misinformation, conspiracy theories, extremism, and crime. The internet has lost its early innocence and has instead become a place where power is concentrated, surveillance is pervasive, and genuinely positive communities are hard to find. At the same time, the dark forest metaphor also hints at the persistence of spaces outside the mainstream, where subcultures and alternative communities do still thrive. The places beyond the walls may be a refuge for those seeking to escape the conformity and of the “walled gardens,” even as they present their own risks.
The inexorable rise of giant social platforms and AI have set the stage for perhaps the final battle over the future of the web. On one side are those who believe that AI-powered tools, for all their potential risks, can still be harnessed to make the web more useful, efficient, and accessible as we saw at Google I/O this week. Google argue that AI can help users navigate the vast quantities of online information, surface high-quality content, and even spur new forms of creativity, expression, and agency.
On the other side are those who fear that AI poses an existential threat, and Google is presiding over a managed decline of the web. They worry that AI-generated content will drown out human voices, that AI-powered platforms will further concentrate power, and that the widespread use of AI will undermine the advertising model that has long sustained the web. Some analysts predict that new AI search could contribute to a significant decline in website traffic.
As AI systems become more advanced, autonomous and good at their job, they may also begin to erode the very foundations upon which they were built – the human-created content and interactions that serve as their training data. AI is displacing the vibrant, diverse, and unpredictable web that gave rise to it. Will these machines born of the forest, finally extinguish it’s dying light? Or will they create a new web of their own? WebSim takes AI generation and makes it an artform; an infinite number of websites and apps are being generated as we speak (by Claude 3), try it out; type in any imagined URL, and enter a strange new web.
A decaying web could also have profound implications for businesses. In this environment, they may find it increasingly difficult to reach and engage with customers organically, as their content gets lost in a sea of AI-generated noise. They may become more dependent on paid advertising and promotion through dominant platforms, which could drive up costs and reduce margins. Businesses that rely heavily on web traffic for their revenue, such as online publishers and e-commerce sites, could see their income streams dry up as users spend more time within walled gardens and less time exploring the open web. There is even talk today of optimising websites not for their human visitors but for autonomous agents. At the same time, the proliferation of AI-generated content and deepfakes could erode trust, making it harder for businesses to establish credibility and build relationships with customers.
Takeaways: The battle for the web’s future is a battle for the soul of the digital age. Will the web remain an open platform for collective intelligence and self-expression, will it be ‘rewilded‘, or will it become an ever more homogenised medium, shaped by a few AI-powered gatekeepers, navigated only by extractive data gathering agents feeding information back to their users’ bubbles?
Those who depend on web search traffic for their business or their livelihoods need to pay close attention and start preparing a plan B. How can we respond? Firstly, we should continue to create human content. At ExoBrain we spend a bit of time each week trying to write useful thoughts on the news, assisted by AI in the research and review, but not simply generated by our agents. We should all also embrace interoperability by using technologies that reduce reliance on centralised power, allowing for greater user control and data portability, such as the open-weight AI models we often highlight. We should lobby governments to take public digital infrastructure and web regulation more seriously. And we should foster digital literacy in our society and particularly the younger generations, and help them make informed choices about using AI and the big algorithmic systems.