My rough take is that the internet as we know it (web 1.0 or 2.0 depending on your taste/age) is over. It ended for me when I found myself in the uncanny valle

My rough take is that the internet as we know it (web 1.0 or 2.0 depending on your taste/age) is over. It ended for me when I found myself in the uncanny valley moderating a Facebook group (while not personally being on Facebook). A user was acting very bot-like. I went to ban them but thought I should look into what the account was first and found conversations they had with others, who were also probably bots given the strange shallowness of the discussion. The uncanniness was that “real” Facebook conversations seemed strange and shallow to me already and I couldn’t rule out this account being real. In that moment though, I also couldn’t know for sure whether I’d ever seen a real conversation or human on Facebook, or most darkly, the difference didn’t matter because the real people on a platform or medium amenable to “bot-ification” become themselves “bot-ified“ and speak just like them. I’m old enough to remember feeling and talking about the shallowness of internet text messaging, and heard those conversations in my head again. From the excitement of connecting with interesting people in the 90s, this was a dark turn for me. And now that World Wide Web of interesting people is dead. We may retain special guarded fortresses and hopefully manage to keep them alive. But also, maybe good riddance. If the internet evolved in a monstrous direction, maybe it wasn’t worth it in the first place or it’s at least worth letting go …