Involution (or, weaving the Interwebz)
So ubiquitous is the conversation around obsolescence of technology, that it seems now almost a feature of technology to constantly outpace itself.
The latest in the crosshairs of this demise is the web as a platform of websites. With the advent of AI there have been accusations from all quarters that this new layer is somehow going to accelerate the demise of websites and the interwebz culture that the web has fostered so far.
There is some merit to this. What AI is, in its most current and mainstream incarnation, is an additional layer of abstraction between the user and the infrastructure. In a sense, it's not that different than when platforms like facebook tried to break into emerging markets and monopolise new internet usage by funneling all web experiences directly through their own platform.
The difference now is that rather than requiring the commercial force of a major corporation to drive adoption, the ease of use (albeit backed by the financial weight of venture) that AI platforms and applications provide, especially for previously technical tasks, has driven adoption all on its own.
This is where I think AI really shines: as a new breed of interface; that, just as the GUI abstracted the complexity and memory gymnastics needed to track operations and the order of processes away from a predominantly CLI-based digital experience, AI has now stepped in to further abstract even the complexities of a GUI away into a far more reflexive approach: natural language.
No longer is the muscle memory required to understand buttons and various patterns of interface composition a hurdle in the adoption of technology; which, in the case of the web, is especially true. The web has always been a medium of production: publishing documents, creating content, exchanging files, etc. This meant that to participate in this new economy, one still had to learn new frameworks of effort. Digital literacy was a layer required on top of fundamental literacy — to engage with commercial processes, one had to be able to read and write digital patterns.
And just as literacy itself was once a significant hurdle and filter in determining the capacity and scope of one's economic participation and commercial relevance, so too is digital literacy.
However, as with all progress, eventually the new economic institutions and platforms that sophistication produces in any sphere gradually congeal to drive greater accessibility and adoption. As basic education became widespread, basic digital education also became integrated into this framework. And, of course, the actual on-ground proliferation of technology from their vaulted chambers to family homes, to the pocket of nearly every individual provides further context and relevance for this education — reinforcing the value of digital literacy.
This is where AI is at the present moment; from being a sci-fi concept far removed from the machinations of daily life to something so ubiquitous that being able to differentiate between real and generated content/information is a daily concern. But, something to note here, is that all of this essentially rides on the ubiquity of the internet as a medium. Without the immediacy and rippling possibilities engendered by the internet, none of this would be possible.
The internet, thus, is now a fundamental institution of modern life. The fact that we have managed to create and sustain a worldwide network of near-instantaneous access is a feat that has fundamentally changed us as a species. We have created a new base-layer for the human experience; almost as if summoning a mushroom god from some parallel dimension — and allowing it free reign and immediate control over all our sensory interactions.
In other words, we have created a virtually living entity that undergirds all experience of modern reality.
Further, this synthetic creature, in its phases of evolution, seems to reflect the phases of our own. It mutates in response to changing environments and then sustains advantageous mutations to alter its most basic structure.
Already, we have seen this play out multiple times over; the internet has matured quite a bit since its conception and initial implementation. And, like ants working to compound the sophistication of their colony, we, too, seem to scramble night and day to constantly add to the complexity of the internet, and its capacity to sustain further sophistication in response to the shifting climate of our priorities.
A prime example of this process of evolution through branching and adapting and absorbing can be seen in one of the first major shifts in the internet's fundamental structure: the rise and proliferation of the responsive web.
What was initially implemented as a parallel system — a folder 'm' in parallel with the traditional 'www' meant to host a website's files — has since become absorbed into the essential infrastructure of the web: core web technologies like HTML and CSS have mutated to facilitate an intrinsic capacity for responsive design that has made the initial parallel implementation obsolete. As more people accessed the web through their phones, it became necessary to think of websites not as monolithic entities of horizontal composition, but as dynamic entities that shifted to a now-ubiquitous aspect of the digital experience: screens.
That is to say, as mobile screens began to overtake desktop screens, the environment that the internet had to adapt to shifted; and the internet evolved to become more efficient in accommodating this shift in the paradigm of digital reality. The responsive web that emerged from this gradual, and virtually fractal process, of maturity became an essential aspect of the experience of the web itself.
Now, as the nuance shifts further, and screens are supplemented with AI-based interfaces just beneath the surface, the climate shifts again. As the tree of life spawns new branches borne by the evolutionary pressure of shifts in the natural phenomena encountered, the internet spawns new extensions of digital composition under the evolutionary pressure of human behavioural and technological phenomena.
Websites, as the hubs of this digital experience, will most readily exhibit this adaptation. We have already seen this in multiple instances: the facilitation of new protocols (e.g.: tor, torrents, https, ssh, ftp), the evolution of components and ecosystems to address specialised use cases (e.g.: UI frameworks, the cloud, CDNs), the evolution of the fundamental composition of the server to accommodate the escalating sophistication of interaction and expectation (APIs, RSS/Atom), and so on.
This is what I think will happen with the absorption of AI into the web as well. Just as each age added another interface or modified an existing one in the essential structure of the web (and websites as its units) — with www, m, APIs, https, and so on — the era of AI too will encourage mutation.
Maybe this is a subtle change, like adding another page to host the RSS feed of your site; maybe its intermediate, like optimizing your website to operate as a PWA; or maybe it is something advanced, like creating a standard for the implementation of components directly focused on AI technologies integrated into webspace.
I think even non-commercial or non-mainstream shifts like the emergence of the indieweb movement, I2P, the fediverse, the tildeverse, and even the gemini protocol (no relation to Google's gemini) show us that this is the natural tendency and shape of the internet's evolution. They have each become branches extending from the main stream of web evolution; relying largely on the same infrastructure to facilitate access and operation — just as the body evolves its many organs in parallel and then concentrates them as a whole, maintaining a parallel but phased evolution beyond a certain point. A trajectory that rarely gestates obsolescence at any significant capacity; instead, constantly adapting, mutating, and reaching for purpose with every interwoven component of organic complexity.
We have, in connecting ourselves at such magnitude, disconnected our reflexive communion with the rest of our evolutionary siblings and counterparts. What detriments or benefits this provides us as a species will always become clear only in retrospect but, for now, this is clear: that the evolution of this network seems to reflect the evolution of life itself. The internet is to the intrinsic capacity of humans what the termite mound is to the intrinsic capacity of termites.
Obsolescence, then, is a far too mechanical and material consideration to apply directly to the increasingly ambiguous, amorphous, and nearly absurd thing that the internet grows into every day. Even vestigial components provide a site for a spectrum of new possibilities. As no creature in the tree of life is truly isolated, neither is any specific component of the internet; and, as evolution is never done, neither is the internet.