Machines talking to machines: The future of the internet

Listen to this episode from The Culture Journalist on Spotify. CUJO is a podcast about culture in the age of platforms. Episodes drop every other week, but if you want the full experience — including access to our CUJOPLEX Discord and our eternal parasocial friendship — we recommend signing up for a paid subscription.Paid subscribers also get access to The Weather Report, a new monthly episode series where we take stock of where the cultural winds are blowing and tell you what’s rained into our brains. In the first installment, we wax philosophical about Ari Aster’s Eddington, the future of search, and the alleged returned of Butt Rock. These days, it feels like the web is becoming… less of a web. Websites aren’t getting visitors anymore, employees are worried that they’re going to be replaced by AI agents, and the search tools we used to rely on to pull up the information we need are deliberately enshittifying themselves. It’s like the internet as we know it — fundamentally, a thing that connects people with other people — is being swallowed up by AI and smooshed down into the cramped, impersonal space of a chatbot interface, whether we like it or not.Or, as New York Magazine tech journalist John Herrman recently put it, “The World Wide Web … has been going through something akin to ecological collapse.” John has been keeping close tabs on these developments in his excellent column “Screen Time,” where he recently reported on the emerging field of generative-engine optimization, or GEO. Think: SEO, but for the AI-consolidated internet.We invited John on the show for a wide-ranging conversation about the strange new chapter of the internet that is materializing before our eyes—and what our experience of the web might look like a world where conversational AI becomes our main portal to the digital realm. We discuss the shift from SEO to GEO, why we’re all reading Reddit a lot more now, and what we stand to lose (and, in some cases, gain) in a world where we summon our information from chatbots.Finally, we get into what New York Times writer Mike Isaac is calling the dawn of Silicon Valley’s “Hard Tech” era: a vibe shift away from the consumer-focused, employee-friendly, optimistic culture of the 2010s to the more cutthroat, bossist, AI and data center-obsessed tech culture of the present.Follow John on BlueskyRead “Screen Time” at New York Magazine’s Intelligencer More by John: “What’s the deal with GPT-5?”“SEO is dead. Say hello to GEO.”“The AI boom is expanding Google’s dominance” “Why you are reading Reddit a lot more these days”“At work, in school, and online, it’s now AI versus AI” To hear more, visit theculturejournalist.substack.com