I guess we'll just move back into small, trusted - but isolated - online communities, like back in the BBS days, which isn't necessarily a bad thing. It's mainly social media which will be (or rather: already is) overrun by bots, but social media (or even the web) isn't "the internet".
> “Early in the Reticulum-thousands of years ago-it became almost useless because it was cluttered with faulty, obsolete, or downright misleading information,” Sammann said.
> “Crap, you once called it,” I reminded him.
> “Yes-a technical term. So crap filtering became important. Businesses were built around it. Some of those businesses came up with a clever plan to make more money: they poisoned the well. They began to put crap on the Reticulum deliberately, forcing people to use their products to filter that crap back out. They created syndevs whose sole purpose was to spew crap into the Reticulum. But it had to be good crap.”
> “What is good crap?” Arsibalt asked in a politely incredulous tone.
> “Well, bad crap would be an unformatted document consisting of random letters. Good crap would be a beautifully typeset, well-written document that contained a hundred correct, verifiable sentences and one that was subtly false. It’s a lot harder to generate good crap. At first they had to hire humans to churn it out. They mostly did it by taking legitimate documents and inserting errors-swapping one name for another, say. But it didn’t really take off until the military got interested.”
> “As a tactic for planting misinformation in the enemy’s reticules, you mean,” Osa said. “This I know about. You are referring to the Artificial Inanity programs of the mid-First Millennium A.R.”
> “Exactly!” Sammann said. “Artificial Inanity systems of enormous sophistication and power were built for exactly the purpose Fraa Osa has mentioned. In no time at all, the praxis leaked to the commercial sector and spread to the Rampant Orphan Botnet Ecologies. Never mind. The point is that there was a sort of Dark Age on the Reticulum that lasted until my Ita forerunners were able to bring matters in hand.”
So, the fantastical plot argument is that one can insert a singular hard-to-verify subtle error among a see of factually correct statements? That's not novel, it is a fact on about any decently sized compendium, \that there will be a typo, an out of date fact or error. That's supposed to be scary?
One of the underlying assumption behind these sci-fi ideas is that people believe weird things because of carefully constructed misleading chain of reasoning, when in fact they simply believe in things that are convenient to support their general world view. Climate denial, for example, is not about carefully planted false evidences, it is about adhering to a view point that avoids forcing you to reconsider your lifestyle.
Have you been paying attention to the proliferation of AI / LLM generated content on the web?
Things are about to get dark unless we have new methods for combating it. It has seemed like Google has been on a slow and steady decline, losing this battle with spammers. This takes it to a whole new level.
They are creating a context for why, (in a fututistic society with computers) that access to the internet and digital archives is largely only done by one group of people (Ita) because no one else has the experience or tool to sift through 100's of years of algorithmically produced junk.
I think the responses that something either will die or revert back to some simile of the good old days is a very human response that stems from the fact that in reality, it will mutate in forms that we can't really predict.
Or perhaps some visionaries can predict somewhat, but we can't really parse which of these predictions will be the one to pan out.
>I guess we'll just move back into small, trusted - but isolated
Until some member gets pissed and DDOSes you off the net and you can no longer afford the operational costs and/or the costs of keeping your platform up to date and secure are prohibitive.
The internet is going to turn into its own dark forest. IF your 'social' group wants to stay alive it will have to hide from the mega predators and the second you attract attention expect to be prey.
