The Toilet Theory of the Internet

> The toilet theory is mostly a reminder to myself that the internet is a huge place that is visited countless times each day by billions of people in between and during all the mundane things they have to do.

And billions of times by people who literally make it their lives through leisure or business.

> but also that my imagined audience of undistracted, fully engaged readers is an idealized one.

I can understand this perspective from any artist but it sounds exceptionally hollow to me when delivered from inside the belly of a large commercial multimedia publisher like The Atlantic.

> and then, in some cases, gaming them in order to try to rank higher in Google’s results.

Indeed.

>Sometimes I read deeply, but the majority of my nonwork surfing involves inattentively scrolling through clicky articles to find the morsel that catches my eye, or pecking out some typo-

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Having your publisher's flawed monetization strategy dash the attention you've so carefully built, in the middle of a paragraph about how difficult building that attention is, is... something, for sure. Yes, I see the archive link. That's beside the point.

I prefer "the shitmus test" - it's been my yardstick for evaluating (some) startups over the last ~decade: if people will open your app while they're poopin', then you pass the litmus/shitmus test :)

> Google’s zero-click effect may soon create a CliffNotes version of the web,

This has already happened. I have given up the idea that Google will ever return a dense, high quality information source for more advanced queries. Instead, it will return twelve nearly identical articles, each with 15 ads and 30 paragraphs of factually sparse AI generated smoke, and no primary sources...

> and any efforts to stop this from happening would probably involve turning away from generative AI altogether.

This is doubtful. The problem with the AI articles is that they use really cheap AI and have no sources. There are now RAG pipelines that do much much better.

And many primary sources are much better than anything an AI will generate.

I have an effort in mind that uses AI to find suitable primary sources on the library Genesis.

There are huge tracts of knowledge, like math, which the surface Internet does not touch, but where the library Genesis will really remain relevant for decades to come.

Once AI has 100% accurate of all the facts in the library Genesis, I believe that becomes an unbeatable platform for restarting genuine knowledge production in the early to mid 21st century.

Me on toilet reading the first paragraph: well played sir, well played.

Absolute gem of an opening paragraph!

I like the implicit double meaning

A new spin on Enshitification...