Throwing Rocks At The Internet

The Internet was never perfect. It was always a work in progress. That’s usually considered a phrase with a good connotation. But that depends on the side of the coin you’re looking at. It always begs the question, progress for whom?

Calling it enhshittification is apt, but it’s also an insufficient description. It implies that the mess can be cleaned up. I don’t think that’s the case. We’re too deep in the shit.

Implementing Artificial Intelligence into everything has mucked up most things the same way that inserting ad-tech into everything did back in the early days of that craze. I’d wager that in the days of the ad-tech explosion 8 times out of 10 most of the updates we downloaded or were subjected to dealt more with ad-tech than “bug fixes and improving reliability.”

It reminds me of the early days of DRM when there was a constant wack-a-mole game, trying to maintain and protect media copy protection schemes.  I want to think that it cost more to keep fixing things than it ever yielded in profits, but that’s obviously naive on my part.

We’re currently seeing the same with AI. The models are changing so rapidly that today’s new release or bug fix is probably outdated by the time it reaches most computers or smartphones. The pace is maddening and the disruptions for every day users even more so, including those who don’t even use the stuff.

Given how things are going I don’t think even the purveyors of AI know what they are actually releasing. They feel like little kids trying to see who can throw a rock the farthest. Eventually, someone breaks a window.

We really never know when a web service chooses to update, things just break. (Looking at you WordPress.) We rarely know what most updates to apps really mean. It’s becoming a rare thing to see a real list of bug fixes published alongside a release. The developers who do so deserve your business.

The difference in this rock throwing frenzy is that many of the geeks who in the past worked hard to defeat copy protection and ad-tech are only too eager to help the AI purveyors throw their rocks further. There’s a lot of would be Oppenheimers out there.

Set aside the potential dangers of using this tech for military use and malicious attacks. For everyday users of the Internet, the bitch of it is many of the AI changes we’re starting to see and those we will certainly see more of the in the future will be to further serve ad-tech as the AI industry inevitably pours that on to try and recoup some of its out of control costs.

That’s an incestuous marriage that I’m not looking forward to seeing the rock throwing delinquents it spawns.

(Image from on Kristine Jones on Shutterstock)

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