# The End of the Internet — Ben Thompson

- **Publication**: [From the Dumpster Fire](https://fromthedumpsterfire.com/) · [Haul 002: Goalless exploration](https://fromthedumpsterfire.com/haul/2)
- **Canonical URL**: https://fromthedumpsterfire.com/haul/2/the-end-of-the-internet
- **Type**: Essay (The opening)
- **Creator**: Ben Thompson
- **Original Source**: [Stratechery](https://stratechery.com/2026/the-end-of-the-internet/) (26 October 2026) · 13 minutes
- **Published**: 2026-11-08

## Why it's here (Editor — Bhuvanesh)

The Internet was once nice, weird, wacky and wonderful. Now it sucks.

I’m going to make a willing mistake and compress its history into three phases. In the 1990s, it was a frontier: days of frantic experimentation, of hacking things together, when the future was unwritten and the early pioneers fought a battle of ideas over what the Internet should be. In the 2000s, things settled down. Blogging platforms like Blogger and WordPress gave the Internet a shape, cheaper computers and connections brought more people online, and the wild west was tamed into cozy suburbs. Blogging in that era was gourmet. Artisanal. You set up your own site, wrote things and shared things.

Then, from the mid-2000s, came Facebook, Twitter and the rest, and the Internet urbanized. Big tech colonized vast swaths of it and built megalopolises, and the peasants and serfs of the rural Internet had to migrate there. If you wanted your online life to mean anything, if you wanted anyone to give a shit about who you were, you had to move, because that’s where all your friends were. Stay behind and you were stuck in some dusty village with three people. Network effects kicked in, and the cities grew at an astounding pace, with no plan and no structure. And like any city that grows too fast, it went to shit.

Algorithms became the zoning laws of these cities, and at the scale of billions of people, they were unavoidable. But scale brought out human nature in all its vividness, and it distorted the incentives. We crave attention, and the platforms were the only place to get it, so a race to the bottom began. At first you could get noticed with quaint, cute little things. But as everyone copied each other, you had to keep amping up the performance. Soon we were all strippers twerking for digital bucks, the currency of the realm being attention. We went from posting good mornings and what we ate for lunch to fighting about politics, race and religion, endlessly, like the stick figure in [XKCD](https://xkcd.com/386/) who can’t come to bed because “someone is wrong on the Internet.”

The result is influencer culture. I don’t mean influencers in the textbook sense, anyone with the ability to influence, but these Internet-native strippers doing ever louder, crazier and more grotesque things to grab attention, in the hope of mining it for a few real-world dollars. If you participate, you have to play that game. If you lurk, your feed is full of its output.

Scott Alexander explained why in [his seminal essay](https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/12/17/the-toxoplasma-of-rage/), and once you read it, you can’t look at the Internet the same way again. If everyone agrees on something, there’s nothing to argue about, so it never spreads. When was the last time you saw a fight over whether murdering innocent people is wrong? There’s no constituency, no PETA, for murder. But anything even mildly controversial mutates, like toxoplasma, a parasite that can only reproduce in cats. Cats shed it in their poop, rats pick it up, and it rewires their brains so they lose their fear of cats; infected rats are even drawn to the smell of cat urine. A cat eats the rat, and the cycle continues. Outrage works the same way, with two hosts: one side’s fury is what carries a story to the other side, whose counter-fury carries it back. So what spreads is the loudest, craziest, vilest and dumbest opinion. Sane, logical things that sane people agree on don’t stand a chance.

If the Internet were a person, it would be middle-aged and fighting a serious infection that keeps getting worse. Listen to how people talk about it: it’s almost always negative. The algorithms, the fighting, the way it drives people mad, influencers, AI slop, bots, spam, dark patterns. The era of the mass, open Internet, of digital town squares, is dying. As WIRED’s [Miles Klee writes](https://www.wired.com/story/let-the-internet-die/), drawing on John West’s new book, *The Internet Will Die, and So Will You*, we also make the mistake of treating the Internet as a permanent archive. It isn’t. It’s born, grows up, lives and dies like the rest of us. Pew found that [38% of web pages from 2013](https://www.pewresearch.org/data-labs/2024/05/17/when-online-content-disappears/) were gone a decade later: sites, papers, videos and podcasts vanished because owners stopped paying for hosting, let domains lapse or went out of business. And what dies becomes compost for whatever comes next.

AI may be the final blow. As I wrote earlier, LLMs are snorting up everything we create without permission and sending no traffic back. If bloggers, podcasters and video makers get neither readers nor pay, who in their right mind keeps creating for the open web just to feed the machines?

So what comes after? Ben Thompson’s answer is small, and I agree. He describes the brief window after 2000 when many of today’s Internet celebrities, writers especially, started out blogging, became reasonably popular, and then rode social media’s free distribution to massive popularity. That model is dead. Instead, people are retreating into what Venkatesh Rao calls the “cozyweb”: group chats on WhatsApp, Discord servers, Instagram DMs. I first noticed this in the Reuters Institute’s Digital News Reports a few years ago, though it started well before I caught on. Business models will shrink too. Kevin Kelly’s [1,000 true fans](https://kk.org/thetechnium/1000-true-fans/) might become Li Jin’s 100.

[Dan Silver’s Substack note](https://substack.com/@thesilverlining3/note/c-381497557) explains what all of this does to the people making things, and I see it in myself. Silver distinguishes berries grown for pleasure from berries grown to sell: they taste the same, but one answers to the market. Writing is the same once it becomes “content.” As Adam Smith put it in 1776:

“Every man thus lives by exchanging, or becomes in some measure a merchant.”

On platforms, Silver says, we all become, in some measure, influencers. I tell myself I write only for myself and would keep going even if nobody read it. But I’m human, with the vanity gene like everyone else online. I still want people to read and engage with my work. I still want the likes and the reposts, even if I want them less than I used to. And that deep evolutionary craving for attention bends your reasons for doing the work, pushing you to post more and create more, even when you’re not happy with what you’re making.

The Internet isn’t dead yet. Whether it chokes and dies or recovers as something new is anybody’s guess. What comes next is unwritten.

## Verbatim Excerpt (The End of the Internet, matched word for word)

> At the same time, what this entails is that the public Internet, to an even greater extent than now, will be a battle zone at best (i.e. social media), and a wasteland at worst (everything else). Some of this is economic, as AI consumes everything — both content and attention — without giving any of the traffic back that Google did, but it is also technical: it was already a dodgy proposition to stand up your own site or app, which was the very promise of the Internet, given the hacking risks; in the age of AI it’s madness.
> 
> It is sad. When I was a kid we called up BBS’s that were hosted in people’s homes; when I was in high school we downloaded music from public FTP addresses; when I was in college we set up our own websites. Anyone could set up a server, and that server was just as much a part of the Internet as any other server; that’s simply not viable any longer, even if you weren’t worried about making money. The Internet as we knew it is dead.
> 
> There are, however, green shoots of possibility, and once again the answer is to go smaller. When anyone can make an app, the answer is not to try and make a quick buck in the App Store; in fact, the surge in slop will make the market worse for everyone. Rather, it’s to make something for yourself and a small group of trusted friends and colleagues.