This week the Web changed forever with the introduction of AI browsers liker ChatGPT Atlas and Chrome with AI. Soon you will not search or browse the internet, you will ask a question and they will answer.
Very soon you will become so accustomed to the process that you will not know, or care, whether the answer is correct or even based on verifiable data. It’s the classic Silicon Valley boiling frogs strategy.
Is the is the end for independent creators?
Actually, I think this might be the beginning of something new.
I’m old enough to remember punk. Back then rock music had become so pompous and boring, the big rock bands seemed to have it all tied up.
In my teenage bedroom, I was frustrated by The Rolling Stones, Genesis, Pink Floyd and their like. In my teenage bedroom, I came up with “UgRock” – my vision of a blend of fast rock, and reggae – but I couldn’t quite enthuse any friends to join me in the experiment.
And then came the magical summer of 77. The Police came out with their blend of rock and reggae and the Sex Pistols added the outrage that set fire to the whole music scene, making it raw and exciting again.
Later, I had the same feeling at the start of the Web. Anything was possible. Write a bit of HTML and you were away – your own publisher!
There was a second wave in 97 when MP3.com began. Load up your music and start your own station – fantastic! I began a children’s story channel called Picture Book Radio. It was such fun, but so ahead of its time – there was no audience back then.
Then came YouTube – a wild-west show if ever there was one. Google took control eventually and it became a grind – all data driven algorithms – all the fun taken out of it.
I guess I was a bit of an early adopter geeky type.
Neither Facebook, Instagram or TikTok had the same grass roots excitement – they were controlled by algorithms from the start.
And now agentic AI browsers are closing everything down… or are they?
I spent a little while feeling downhearted. Where would views and clicks come from now? How would anyone ever find me or any other real human creator (Human Intelligence?) on a web of AI slop and untrustworthy answers?
Then an idea came back to me from the early 1990s
– The WEBRING.
Early search engines like Altavista and Yahoo! were quite slow and not easy to navigate, Like-minded Web Masters – as we liked to be called back then – could join a themed webring to help them be found. If you had a site all about knitting, you could add a knitting webring badge to your page. The badge had a next site button, that would take you on to the next site in the themed ring, and so you would get to sample all there was to be had on the web about knitting.
WordPress, the blogging software, is sort of there already with Jetpack plugins and enhancements – It’s only this morning that I’ve understood the potential of the WordPress Showcase – It’s a start, but it needs a lot of work and expansion.
WordPress is a wonderful way for creators to stay Sovereign – to own the farm, be the farmer and sell from the farm gate. To do what they like and never mind the algorithms.
The Showcase page or a webring plugin would bring the sites together in interest groups to be found, appreciated and, more importantly, supported.
Jetpack allows you to add funding buttons to pages, a bit like SubStack, but you can make the page all your own and not subject to the boring SubStack design. Independence is the thing.
Then we have Cloudflare, who are set up to defend creator’s sites from attack and now, more importantly from stealing content for training.
It looks to me like a punk revolution waiting to happen.
The more that AI slop drowns the web and the more that real people realise they are not being served properly or honestly by AI or algorithms, the more they will start searching for real human intelligence.
Let’s be there, ready and waiting for them.
Are you ready for it? Let me know.