The last time I had a blog was about 15 years ago when I was an MBA student at Cornell. Our Energy Economics professor Ben Ho (former lead energy economist at the White House) gave us extra credit if we did a blog entry about an energy topic. At the time there was a very interesting debate going on about Peak Oil on a forum called The Oil Drum. I did some blog entries about energy and oil depletion and quickly found a group of interesting people with similar blogs. In the years that followed, the internet, and the sites people used to discuss energy issues, changed in dramatic ways. Apple introduced the iPhone app store in 2008 and content slowly shifted from websites to apps. Individual blogs were replaced by social media apps. What blogging remained then shifted to platforms like Substack and Medium. The pendulum has now swung so far towards these apps that almost nobody maintains an individual blog any more. But I believe there are some important forces at play that will swing the pendulum back.
First, social media apps have been overrun with bots. In the early days, bad actors would use these bot farms to simply boost posts by giving them hundreds of likes and replying with one-word responses like “agreed!” But starting in November of 2022, with the release of ChatGPT and other LLM AIs, these bots have now evolved to where they hold entire conversations with people (and each other) in order to boost certain viewpoints and suppress opposing viewpoints. This is explained extremely well by UT Professor Samuel Woolley in his book The Reality Game. In a vicious cycle, these bots pollute the comment sections and drown out the conversations taking place between real people; this discourages most average users, so the only people who remain tend to have stronger or more fringe opinions. This vicious cycle has caused discussions to devolve into the remaining (more extreme) users and bots simply yelling at each other. Look at any energy debate on any social media site and the “signal to noise” ratio has gotten so out of whack that these apps have become almost unusable for discussing energy policy. Cory Doctorow calls it the “enshittification” of the internet, and it seems to be accelerating.
Second, search engines are also being overrun with bots. A decade ago people were trying to game the results of search engines by creating thousands of pages of drivel content to try to hit all the keywords and rank higher on search engines. Many of these pages were generated by content mills that paid freelance writers to hastily churn out reams of low-quality gibberish. This is why now whenever you search for a recipe online you have to scroll down through a thousand word screed before you finally get to the actual recipe. Since the introduction of LLM AIs in November of 2022 the companies that try to game search engines have shifted to using chat bots to push out content at an exponentially higher rate. Google has become so unusable that people now append “reddit” to the end of search queries in an attempt to see content written by actual people. Extending this to it’s logical extreme would result in something resembling the “dead internet theory” where it becomes nearly impossible to find real discussions from real people taking place. Making matter worse, it was recently revealed via a leak of their API documentation that Google demotes search results for small personal sites and blogs, like this one. It’ll probably get worse before it gets better, but this collapse of search engines has also made it extremely difficult to find relevant information on energy debates.
Third, if you don’t pay for the service you are the product. Social media and blogging apps don’t exist to show you the best content, they exist to show you the content that is statistically most likely to keep you on the app as long as possible so you view as many ads as possible. Users of these “walled gardens” have no control over the algorithm or visibility into how the algorithm determines what content is relevant to them. Beyond control over what they see, users of these apps also have no control over their own content. People regularly get locked out of their own accounts or have accounts disabled without any recourse; sometimes this happens simply because their account has been inactive for too long. Moreover, the centralization of the internet has resulted in people’s data being concentrated into fewer and fewer hands. Today almost half of all internet traffic goes to just six companies. Yanis Varoufakis calls this “Technofeudalism” and I personally believe we should be doing everything we can to reverse this trend and re-decentralize the internet.
So what’s the solution to all of this? Creating a Web 1.0 blog of course! The best way to combat an internet that is increasingly centralized and overrun with bots is to go back to the early days of the internet where content was decentralized and generated by real people. I love to talk with people about energy and decarbonization and I’m hoping this blog will give me an avenue for thinking through ideas and connecting with people who are similarly as nerdy as I am about energy topics.