James Gleick on the Rotting of the Internet
| Once upon a time, the Internet was fun, if you can believe it. As James Gleick writes in the Review’s December 4 issue, assessing three recent books about the history of the World Wide Web, “people turned away from their television sets and discovered the thrills of surfing the web.… The world online promised to empower individuals and unleash a wave of creativity.” But of course, “any Internet chronicle will take a dark turn”: the free-spirited optimism of web pioneers like Tim Berners-Lee, who invented the “link,” and with it the possibility of a network of information connected not by hierarchies but by relationships, has given way to the relentless drive for profit, as embodied by someone like Marc Andreessen, “the quintessential technocrat” who happily crows that “software is eating the world.” Gleick has lately been putting together a history of science and technology for the Review, writing about everything from the invention of clocks to Buckminster Fuller to AI delusions. Below, alongside his newest essay, are selections from what might be called Gleick’s chronicles of the machine age. The Internet was not meant to suck. “AIs don’t write essays or anything else—the use of that verb shows how easily we anthropomorphize. Chatbots regurgitate and rearrange fragments mined from all the text previously written. As plagiarists, they obscure and randomize their sources but do not transcend them. Writing is something else: a creative act, ‘embodied thinking,’ as the poet and critic Dan Chiasson eloquently puts it; ‘no phase of it can be delegated to a machine.’ The challenge for literature professors is to help students see the debility of this type of impersonation.” —July 24, 2025 “AI experts call errors like this ‘hallucinations’—a sexy term that implies a degree of sentience. The word is misleading. It suggests that the chatbot mostly produces factual information but occasionally goes haywire. That’s not what’s happening. The large language models consistently generate streams of text that are untethered to reality. If an output is relatively accurate or truthful, that’s because it’s based on large datasets of text that humans previously created, much of which was relatively accurate or truthful.” —November 23, 2024 “Over the past two decades, scientists studying optics have considered invisibility not just as a fantasy but as a practical possibility.” —August 17, 2023 “Buckminster Fuller can be remembered as a crank and a charlatan and a prophet and a visionary.” —November 3, 2022 “From the first, rulers used the clock as a means of control or even subjugation.… A clock in a high tower sends a message: Here is the knowledge. Here is the authority.” —September 23, 2021 Special Offer
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