The Internet will have to be reimagined.
Generative AI has made software an aggregation layer that benefits from everybody’s labor without giving back, reminiscent of the most unjust instantiations of capitalism.
The pattern predates the current thing. Between 2010 and ’15 men and women of otherworldly intellect built a corpus of knowledge on Quora unmatched in the history of the Web. The company, headed by early Facebook CTO Adam D’Angelo, had much brain power. But a monetisation strategy failed to emerge. The billion dollar valuation was attained. However, the galaxy of polymaths, unique to Quora, failed to make dough themselves.
Some such as Venkatesh Rao of Ribbonfarm and Jason Lemkin of SaaStr walked away with fame. Not revenues, but name recognition within a certain lucrative niche. That’s not nothing.
The public Web had similar stories. Adwords made few rich, but the search-engine-as-gateway-to-the-Internet model led to fame that could be monetised elsewhere. Consider Slate Star Codex or (again) Venkatesh Rao’s Ribbonfarm. There’s much to be said about the vulgarity that is SEO sites and the hero that lived too long — Google, but ad-supported content made much of the human civilisational output free or low cost.
GPT-n wouldn’t have given Venkatesh Rao or Jason Lemkin or Slate Star Codex even the renown. The gold star content would have gone into a digital shredder, stripped of provenance and the context that the author’s history carries, and reconstituted as an ersatz equivalent. Jason Lemkin’s heuristics on B2B SaaS are borne of a lifetime of leaps of faith, failure, and introspection. They just aren’t a bag of words and numbers.
How much should an entrepreneur budget for customer acquisition? What is the right way to think about CAC? This cannot be had without the very specific path charted by a real person far off the Internet, far off the prying eyes of crawlers. The Web is not just a bag of words. The Web is people communicating asynchronously across space and time through the limited medium of language. Any string of words is irrevocably tied to the author’s vantage point. Beyond the most trivial data, such as flight schedules, there is no disembodied language.
The Jason Lemkin of 2023 has no incentive to write or record on the public Web. There are just LinkedIn and Twitter, walled gardens all. No walled garden, not even the most gargantuan, can be the public Web. The intent of the founders, commercial concerns that inevitably privilege advertisers over users, and pure happenstance of history make every network good for a particular kind of content. Who would have thought that a quarter century after GeoCities the text Web would be dead?
What could be the 2023 equivalent of Adwords and Adsense? There are no easy answers. The monetisation event isn’t a straightforward click. And generation costs a lot more than retrieval. It’s going to be a weird, weird decade. #ai
