confusion

I started drafting this post back in early March. I never finished it in part because that draft became a trip down memory lane. I spent way too much time recalling the various incarnations of The Internet I have used over the years. But, it’s also because I had a hard time putting into words how exactly I see AI as threatening the Web.

My original opening was about Google’s announcement of AI summaries. I said:

I think the marriage of Gen AI with search is the end of this incarnation of the Internet. The Internet, as it is in my head. That version of the internet has been fading for a while but it’s what I think of as “The Internet”. Though I don’ think it’s the best version of The Internet.

And then blah blah blah about the text based pre-web Internet, Mosaic and Netscape, AOL, IRC, blogs, and so on and so forth. So, this post sat unfinished for months. Then, this week I read this article in The Economist: To survive the AI age, the web needs a new business model [economist.com]. Maybe because they are focused on the economics of it, maybe because they are professional journalist, they have managed summarize the issue in a way that got me back to this post. Here is how they describe the threat:

As AI-powered search engines remove the need for people to trawl the web looking for sites with answers, they are stopping the flow of traffic to those pages. Those lost visitors mean lost money. The danger is that, as answer-engines take readers away, they are removing the incentive for content to be created. The technology that is opening up the web also threatens to kill it.

[…]

Human traffic—monetised with ads—is the economic fuel of much of the internet. A steady flow of traffic is also needed to build online communities. Wikipedia, whose visitor numbers have fallen by 8% in the past year by one measure, warns that AI summaries without attribution could deter people from contributing. Stack Overflow, a coding community whose traffic has more than halved, reports that fewer questions are being asked on its chat boards. Reddit, another giant forum, saw its share price fall by half earlier this year over concerns about bumpy search referrals.

The Economist, in To survive the AI age, the web needs a new business model [economist.com]

I’m not sure the death of the ad supported internet is a bad thing. In fact, I would not shed a tear over the end of the ‘everything is free! But just look at this ad real quick. And this ad. And these ones here…’ model. I remember how newspapers and magazines became more and more ads and less and less content as their business model died. Now it seems every site one The Internet is doing the same. Remember kids; if you aren’t paying for it, you are not the customer…).

On the other hand, I’m not sure an everything is paywalled because capitalism is a beast which cannot be satisfied Internet would be a very nice place either.

As the old model buckles, the web is changing. It is becoming less open, as formerly ad-funded content is hidden from bots, behind paywalls. Content firms are reaching people through channels other than search, from email newsletters to social media and in-person events. They are pushing into audio and video, which are harder for AI to summarise than text. Big brands are striking content-licensing deals with AI companies. Plenty of other transactions and lawsuits are going on. … Hundreds of millions of small sites—the internet’s collectively invaluable long tail—lack the clout to do this.

That paragraph sums up what I took like ten paragraphs to say while rambling about other versions of The Internet already lost. The multi-trillion dollar companies have already choked off most of the open, individual Internet. As AI drives the few remaining small-time creators off the open internet onto closed platforms and the everything else behind paywalls it’s going to be lonely place.

I still prefer the longer form of blogs to the short form videos of Instagram or Tik Tok, to the limited length text of X or Threads. But, most of the blogs I have followed over the past two decades have long been abandoned. Most are gone, 404’ed or domain squatted into un-being. Only accessible via the Wayback Machine. Some are still online but frozen in time. A few are still going, screening into the void.

I plan to continue. I’m just short of 25 years squatting here on Confusion.cc, navel gazing and ranting. I started this blog to keep in touch with people I knew in college while I, and other friends, were studying and traveling overseas. I not in contact with any of those people anymore. I doubt any of them ever read these posts, very few people do or ever have. I do post these to various social media sites (or apps these days), as that’s how most people consume the internet and maybe a few will read my rants. I don’t style myself a ‘content creator’ this is all just me sharing my thoughts and photography, and documenting my own journey: no ads included.

This week I dropped my oldest daughter off in Melbourne to start her adventures in higher education. She’s just about to turn 17, and she is starting a Foundation Year program. An intensive year that replaces the final couple of years of high school or A-Levels or whatever your local final pre-college schooling is. Assuming she passes, she will go straight into the University next year.

I hope she has a great time. I believe, and have always told my daughters, that they should “get away from home” for college. Because, I saw what a difference distance made to the experience. When I was at George Mason I had a couple of friends who were local, in the sense that their family was a commute away not a trip away. They could go home any night for dinner, laundry or to fix their parent’s computer issues. And they did.

This created a situation where they never really left home. Parent want to see their kids, and free laundry (done for you!) and home cooking are a powerful sirens call for college kids. But, in the end, this created a situation where people struggled to cut the umbilical cord, where it was easy to put off adulting a little longer. In the end this was suffocating. I had one friend that realised this, and he transferred to another school several hours away. It made a world of difference for him. So we all came the conclusion that if you are going to go to college, go. Go far. Go far enough that you can’t run home on a whim or in an emergency, you can’t stop by for dinner or spend the weekend in your bedroom at home. You have to grow up and deal with it all yourself.

Now, I’m watching my daughter put into practice this oft repeated pearl of parental wisdom, and it’s hard. In addition to being my daughter, for the past few years she has been a great friend. Countless morning sitting at our local Starbucks during Covid lockdowns. Sitting at home and watching so many movies: sharing the classics —Monty Python and the Holy Grail, The Thing, Alien, even 2001: A Space Odyssey— and discovering new classics. Hours of playing BotW and TotK, and Hollow Knight.

Being able to be a parent and also being a friend has been amazing.

So it’s with a little sadness —and a few tears— and a whole lot of excitement and joy that I said “bye for now” to her today. I wish her good luck, the best of luck. I hope she has a wonderful adventure, makes lifelong friends and some new core memories. But I can’t wait until she comes home on breaks to visit and we can sit at Starbucks or watch a new movie. I’m counting the days till her first break.

If you listen real close, you can hear them
whisper their legacy to you. Go on, lean in. Listen, you hear it? – Carpe – hear it? – Carpe, Carpe Diem, seize the day [Tori],
make your [life] extraordinary.

John Keating, in Dead Poets Society

Continuing on my 2024 end-of-year holiday posts (see here for Osaka [confusion.cc]), I want to cover some day-trips we did, before I dive into Kyoto. Over the two plus weeks we spent in Osaka and Kyoto we took three day trips: to Himeji, Nara and Uji. Nara and Uji are so close they almost don’t count as trips. Just a short train ride away, but we had a very relaxed schedule so even when they were close we got a late start and took our time to make a day of it.

I’ve been to all these places before. I first visited Nara was in March 2004, when J███████ S██████ and I went to visit J██ while he was living in Japan. That was my first ever trip to Japan (and my first time using a digital camera, the as the photos clearly show). You can see my blog entry and photos here [confusion.cc].

I visited Nara again, as well as Himeji and Uji for the first time a year and a half later, in December 2005 [confusion.cc]. J███████ invited me, along with Candice, to join him, his wife, K██, and J██, S██████, for a return visit.

So, 20 years from my first trip to Japan, I revisited these places with my daughters. So let’s have a little fun and compare the photos I took 2 decades ago with those from this trip.

Himeji

The first day trip we took, from Osaka, was to Himeji-shi [wikipeida.org] (Himeji city), home to Himeji-jō (Himeji castle). Himeji-jō one of the best preserved Japanese castles, having survived various natural and man-made disasters in it’s 400 plus years. The stark white walls of the main keep, the Tenshu, which sits atop a prominent hill, are visible from most of the city. The striking white color gives the castle its nicknames: Hakuro-jō, “White Egret Castle” or Shirasagi-jō, “White Heron Castle”.

By coincidence the castle was free to enter the day we arrived. Apparently celebrating its UNESCO World Heritage [whc.unesco.org] status. I guess its a thing they do every year? As Himeji-jō was inscribed in 1993 so 2024 would be the 31st anniversary, which doesn’t seem like a particularly important anniversary.

After touring around the castle grounds and making our way through the buildings, up to the top of the main keep and back down its steep stairs. We were rewarded with a rainbow over the castle as we walked back to the train station. Not a very bright one but a nice rainbow nevertheless.

For some comparison, the image on the left below I took in 2005 and the one on the right is from this trip in 2024, 19 years apart. Setting aside better equipment, having a better eye for photography and my greater skill at editing photos. It’s fun to see how little Japan changes.

Nara

Our second day trip, from Osaka was to Nara-shi [wikipeida.org]. Nara-shi was the capital of Japan, where the emperor lived for most of the 700s. As such there is a long and rich history of temples and shrines. Not as deep as Kyoto, given it’s 1100 years as the capital but impressive.

The two key attractions are the tame sika deer that roam around and Tōdai-ji, home of Daibutsu.

The deer are everywhere in Nara Park where most of the temples and shrines that are part of the UNESCO site are located. Tourists, local and foreign alike, buy deer crackers to feed them. Some of the deer will even bow to the people feeding them. But you also see a lot of skittish people being mobbed by several deer at a time, getting overwhelmed, dropping their crackers, sometimes even getting a gentle headbutt from a deer when they fail to hand over a cracker fast enough. All cute and funny but apparently the deer in Nara Park are malnourished and stunted as they eat too many of these deer crackers and not enough wild foliage.

Tōdai-ji [wikipedia.org], “The Great Eastern Temple” is a Buddhist temple that houses Daibutsu or “The Great Buddha”, a massive bronze status of the Buddha Vairocana. The building the Buddha sits in, the Daibutsuden or “Great Buddha Hall” and was the largest wooden building in the world until 1998. The current building dates to 1709 having been rebuild, some 30% smaller than the original, which burned down.

The temple sells roof tiles that you can write on for the ongoing repairs. My friends and I bought one back in 2004, and this time I got one from my daughters to sign and date. So, somewhere on the roof of the Great Buddha Hall there are tiles with my name and my daughter’s names.

Here are two shots of the Daibutsu, fairly close in composition to compare. One from my first trip to Japan in 2004 and one from 2024:

Uji

The last day trip we took was to Uji-shi [wikipedia.org]. Uji is famous for a few things, it’s a major setting in The Tale of Genji [wikipedia.org] a Japanese novel written in the 11th century. Uji is also famous for it’s cultivation of green tea, it’s home to the oldest tea house in Japan (and the 30th oldest company on earth) you wouldn’t know that passing this unassuming building on your way to the other major site: Byōdō-in [wikipedia.org].

Other than to drink green tea, Byōdō-in is why we went to Uji. It’s a Buddhist temple. According to Wikipedia the building was built in 998 as a villa and converted to a temple in 1052. The main building was completed in 1053 and is commonly called the Hōō-dō or Phoenix Hall, though officially it is Amida-dō. This is the building that has been on the back of the 10 Yen coin since 1951. The building and grounds are beautiful, and you have to go just so you can say you’ve been there every time you show someone a 10 Yen coin.

Anyway, wondering around the temple grounds and shopping for green tea were the only things we really did in Uji. It was a relaxing day and not too crowded. And once again, the late autumn was in our favor as there was a lot of colorful foliage around the temple.

For comparison, below is a shot from 2005 of the Phoenix Hall, and one from 2024 taken from almost the same position. You can see how much renovation work has been done to the Phoenix Hall in the past two decades.

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You can see the full photos set from Himeji [flickr.com], Nara [flickr.com] and Uji [flickr.com] on Flickr, or browse the galleries below.