Contributing to the internet used to feel magical. A blog post, or an open source project seemed like a genuine addition to the wild, weird and wonderful web of the past. You would never knew who would find it, or whether they would like it. You contributed because you had something interesting to share.
Then came the age of social media, and like buttons, and comments. Contributing to the internet became inextricably linked with ego, feedback, and attention. We put most of our creative output into walled gardens that gave us algorithmic propagation, analytics, and engagement metrics. You contributed for validation and visibility.
And now it feels like we're in the third age of the internet. It doesn't really matter where you contribute—humans won't even see it before the omnipresent vultures swoop in to pick the bones clean, and the ideas are subsumed into the vast and heaving underbelly of training data, to be regurgitated as credible sounding vomitial chunks on some desperate edge of the dead internet
We're looking into a future where the internet is a shallow and barren desert, swarming with crawlers and scrapers, harvesting information to take back to their agentic overlords. More fuel for the fires of the tech giants!
The willingness to freely share ideas has defined software engineering. There's a sad but poetic irony in the possibility that our enthusiasm for sharing code fuelled the beast that is currently chewing through software development. We did it without realising that was one of the risks.
It is tough to accept that we can't go back. I can't use the public facing internet to share an idea with other humans without also accepting that it will be used to improve the models. I can't open source my code without agents cold emailing my git address to try to sell me bugfixes. I can't even publish these words without them ending up as minute adjustments to colossal matrices of weights that no human will ever understand.
And yet, I find myself here, writing, and coding, and sharing regardless. Ideas and thoughts, art and experiments: these are the currencies that made the web such an incredible, imperfect medium for discovery and learning. Maybe it is fuel for the fire, but to stop contributing is to cede the web to to the vultures.