The Algorithm Ate My Brain

The Internet is Turning to Sludge

I remember the old internet. The weird internet. The one where you’d fall down a rabbit hole at 2 AM, clicking from a weirdly specific GeoCities page about cultivating prize-winning petunias to a long, rambling forum post about the philosophical implications of Babylon 5. It was messy. It was human. It was full of texture.

Now? It’s becoming a smooth, gray, featureless sludge. And the sludge-maker has a name: AI summary.

Everywhere you look, it’s there. Google is rolling out AI-generated answers to replace links. Apps like Artifact promise to summarize the news for you so you don’t have to, you know, read it. Your browser wants to give you the "gist" of an article you just opened. We’re being sold a fantasy of ultimate efficiency: all the knowledge, none of the work.

What a sad, pathetic little dream.

This isn’t just about convenience. This is an attack on the very fabric of the web and, I’m not being dramatic here, an attack on our ability to think.

When you read a summary, you’re not gaining knowledge. You’re being handed a conclusion. Someone else’s—or worse, something else’s—interpretation of what matters.

Think about what’s lost. The author’s voice. The careful structure of an argument, with its deliberate build-up and nested subtleties. The "aha!" moment when you connect a detail in the third paragraph to an idea in the tenth. The delightful asides, the weird analogies, the personal anecdotes that infuse a piece of writing with life and make it stick in your brain.

All of that? GONE. Blended into a flavorless nutrient paste. It’s the Soylent of information. And it’s creating a generation of intellectual infants, fed pre-chewed content because we’ve been told that real reading is too much effort.

The Great Devaluation

It gets worse. This isn’t just about our brains turning to mush. It’s an economic disaster for the people who create the things the AI is "summarizing."

That brilliant, 3,000-word deep dive into the history of a niche video game? The one that a freelance writer spent 40 hours researching, writing, and polishing? Google’s AI will scrape it, regurgitate a sloppy, four-bullet-point summary, and slap it at the top of the search results. The user gets their "answer," the writer gets zero clicks, and the publisher who paid the writer gets zero ad revenue.

Who is going to pay for high-quality, in-depth writing in a world where the reward is having your work plagiarized by a trillion-dollar corporation for its own benefit? No one. That’s who.

We’re witnessing the wholesale devaluation of expertise, of writing, of craft. The open web was built on a fragile-but-functional promise: if you create something valuable, people will come to you, and you can build a business or a reputation from that attention. AI summaries break that promise. They sever the connection between creator and audience, turning the creators into uncredited, unpaid ghostwriters for a machine.

The result is a vicious cycle. As creators leave because they can no longer make a living, the quality of the source material for the AI dwindles. The internet becomes a funhouse mirror, with AIs summarizing other AIs, endlessly recycling the same homogenized slurry of facts, stripped of all context and meaning. The vibrant, weird, human internet dies, replaced by a perfectly efficient, perfectly boring, perfectly dead content farm.

You Can, and Should, Opt Out

I’m not a luddite. I get the appeal of a quick answer. But we need to see this for what it is: a trap. It’s the offer of a shortcut that leads off a cliff. We need to consciously and deliberately reject it.

When you see the option to get the "AI summary," don’t click it. Scroll down. Click a real link. Read a real person’s words. It takes 5 more minutes. Your brain will thank you for the exercise.

Pay for subscriptions to newspapers, magazines, and newsletters you value. Support the people doing the actual work. It’s the only way any of this survives.

We need to choose the texture of the real over the smoothness of the fake. We need to choose the messy, complicated, and sometimes inefficient process of actual reading. It’s not just about information. It’s about the experience of learning, of being challenged, of having our minds changed. It’s about being human.

Don’t let the algorithm eat your brain. It’s a bland and unsatisfying meal.