Anil DashYou must picture Sam Altman holding a knife to Tim Berner-Lee's throat. We are in a truly existential level of danger when it comes to the survival of the open web, across every front. This year is when it all comes to a head. https://anildash.com/2026/03/27/endgame-open-web/
rogue_corq@anildash If Altman touches a HAIR on Tim Berner-Lee's head, I will peronally hunt Altman.
elle
gmoke
Sriram "sri" Ramkrishna - 😼@anildash a lot of this is a complete lack of regulation of AI by world govts. But eventually the content trade consortiums like MPAA and the RIAA will be putting in lawsuits. Because it is far too easy to make content trained on copyrighted material
zl2todTim Berners-Lee interviewed on Radio New Zealand yesterday:
When he launched the World Wide Web in December 1990, how did its inventor, Tim Berners-Lee, think it would all go?
His aim was to create a democratic network built on good principles - which was free to use - where anyone with a computer and internet connection could freely share ideas.
But decades later, the World Wide Web has taken on a new life - and has been optimised in harmful ways.
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2qx 🔻Of the organizations listed, only The Internet Archive is able to list a plain pay-to-public key hash style bitcoin address.
WHY? Because someone put a gun to everyone's head and told them they could not accept money.
If they can't accept internet money, then yes, the internet is lost.
Anyone that wants the internet and money should put up a donation address or accept that the endgame is lost.
An "Error 402" is one way to deal with AI bot abuse. It could go a long way toward fixing content and saving journalism too. It could simplify supporting good organizations and open source projects as well.
But if people aren't going to implement those solutions because they're scared, then the open internet never really was what people claimed it to be, and we were only building tools for people to be oppressed.
Alfredo James Pacino
Toni Aittoniemi@anildash Western people had it too good for too long. From the inside it looked like #power was not what mattered
#Technology companies talked in the language of co-operation, while the power that enabled our ivory tower was directed towards the Global South
It was a ruse as old as time: Oppressors don’t take over strong systems built by egalitarians by force, they take over them by #deceit. They adapt the culture & speech of cooperation, then twist it to appear they were always there
v@anildash agree with your diagnosis but not the prescription. Conditions that brought about the seemingly impossible open web do not exist now that it has matured. I dont know what collective action could even be mobilized toward specifically, vis-a-vis preserving what's been, but even that is largely moot imo because the userbase of the modern internet is such a different set of cats to herd. (1/3)
@anildash My expectation is a new, less centralized internet will form. Possibly not http or even tcp/ip, almost midway between internet and sneakernet. More reliant on human networking to establish collaborations - making this slop spamming obsolete - and more dependent on geography for content discovery - making scraping, malicious or otherwise, largely obsolete at least in the way its been done before. In short: less open, but more trusting and more human
(2/3)
(2/3)
degenerating degenerate> Open source software projects, which power the vast majority of the internet's infrastructure, are now beleaguered by constant slop code submissions being made by automated AI code agents.
I think the era of trash submissions in order to try squeeze some prize money some of the time, has gone.
AI-powered vuln reports I get on my FOSS project for the last months have been accurate, scary and valuable. It will vastly improve security, if you survive the next months un0wned.