We Built the Internet for Machines, Not People. Just Like Our Cities.
How to end the AI loop
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After World War II, America redesigned its cities to accommodate cars, not people. Sidewalks disappeared, highways cut through neighborhoods, and everything spread out. The goal? Make transportation fast and efficient. However, the result was cities where people were disconnected, dependent on cars, and lacking communal spaces.
Many older cities at least had a history of being walkable. So, even in a car-focused world, we still feel the pull toward human-centered spaces. But the internet? It never had a past to return to. Almost from the start, it was built around machines, not people.
Optimizing for Machines, Not Meaning
In the few years of the public internet before search engines, content was largely hand-curated. Websites linked to other sites, forums, and bulletin boards helped users find valuable content. Reputation and expertise mattered more than gaming an algorithm. People explored the web in a way that encouraged discovery, surprise, and deeper engagement.
Search engines changed that. They made information easier to find and reshaped the internet to prioritize rankings over actual knowledge. To be clear: this shift wasn’t all bad, or even mostly bad—search engines made the web searchable at an enormous scale. But, like all technologies, it had tradeoffs:
Discovery gave way to optimization—Instead of stumbling onto something new, content is now designed to rank well rather than inform.
Depth gave way to speed—Search engines reward quick, surface-level answers, not deep, thoughtful discussions.
Human curation gave way to algorithmic control—Machines decide what we see, prioritizing engagement metrics over real value.
AI is making these tradeoffs even more pronounced. If search engines cause humans to reshape content for ranking, AI generates optimized content outright. Machines feed off their output, creating an endless loop of recycled, shallow information.
Without meaningful direction, AI doesn’t discover new knowledge—it repurposes what’s already out there, often flattening nuance and reinforcing biases. As AI-generated content floods the web, search engines index it, and the cycle repeats. If search engines turned the internet into a highway system, AI threatens to make it a closed-loop maze—where everything looks familiar, but nothing leads anywhere new. The exurbs of the digital age are upon us.
The Tradeoff: Efficiency Over Experience
But it’s not just changing what we see—it’s changing how we think.
Just like car-centric cities made walking inconvenient, machine-optimized content has made deep thinking online rare. The more we optimize for speed, the more we lose depth, originality, and genuine connection.
From active seeking to passive consumption—Instead of searching and exploring, we wait for AI-driven feeds to serve pre-selected content that reinforces our beliefs.
From thoughtful discourse to reactionary engagement—Online discussion now rewards outrage and hot takes instead of careful, thoughtful debate.
From long-form thinking to fractured attention—Algorithms push quick dopamine hits over deep reading, making it harder to focus and engage critically.
The tradeoff is clear: machine-driven content has made us less curious, less thoughtful, and less in control of the knowledge we consume. Like I mentioned in my article last week, it’s easy to get dragged into the media consumption we are given, rather than digging deeper, exploring a myriad of sources, and coming up with our own conclusions.
Rebuilding the Internet for People: What You Can Do
People are working to reclaim cities by making them human-focused again. The internet needs the same shift—but where to even begin? Here’s how you can take back control of your online experience:
Break free from algorithmic feeds—Subscribe to newsletters, visit websites directly, and avoid endless scrolling. Rather than pulling you into another auto-generated suggestion, look for content that ends.
Prioritize human curation—Follow trusted writers, blogs, and discussion-based communities where real people decide what’s valuable, not algorithms.
Engage with long-form content—Read books, essays, and in-depth articles instead of relying on headlines and social media snippets.
Contribute, don’t just consume—Write, discuss, and create rather than passively scrolling. Human conversation is the antidote to machine-generated noise.
The way we use the Internet shapes the future of knowledge. We built cities for cars and lost sight of people. Let’s not do the same with the Internet.