We Didn't Ask For This Internet

What a post-social media internet looks like...

I’ll be honest, when I wrote last week about why I felt like personal websites would eventually replace social media I wasn’t expecting it to hit the way it did for so many of you.

I mean, aside from it being long form, it re-introduced the idea that old technology would become new again. Not necessarily the sexiest topic if I must say so myself. Still… it hit home with so many here and on threads that I felt like it might be appropriate to further the discussion. To move from the thesis to the “What might this even look like?”

Because the truth is it starts with a domain name and maybe some type of website builder but it ends with something that is far greater.

The follow used to actually mean something. It meant “what are you up to?” or “I want to hear your thoughts.” A “shout out,” if you will, that signaled I’m on the same wavelength as this person.

Now it means nothing. Or worse—you once clicked a button, and now you’re trapped in someone else’s content loop, receiving updates from people you barely remember following, while the people you actually care about disappear into algorithmic silence.

Social media promised us connection. What it delivered was optimization—for engagement, for ad inventory, for keeping us scrolling just a little bit longer. And somewhere in that translation, we lost something critical: the ability to maintain meaningful presence and connection in a way that respects both creative process and human attention.

This tension is what I want to work through because we can’t design what your corner of the internet looks like now without addressing what is broken.

It’s the only way we don’t repeat the same mistakes of the social media era.

Here’s how I’m thinking about this….

What’s Actually Broken

First, let me name what’s breaking, because I think we’re still using the old language to describe new problems.

1. The Death of the Follow

The follow has become a worthless currency. When I ask people what their follower count means to them now, the most common answer is some version of “I don’t know anymore.” The number goes up or down seemingly at random. People with hundreds of thousands of followers get less engagement than they did with a few thousand.

The metric that was supposed to represent connection now represents what, exactly? Potential? Hope? A historical record of interest that may no longer exist?

The consequence isn’t just wasted effort. It’s the opportunity cost of not building something more durable while we still had the energy and attention to do so.

2. The AI Slop Problem

At the same time, the internet is being flooded with synthetic content. I’m not talking about the obvious stuff—spam accounts and auto-generated articles. I’m talking about the slow creep of “good enough” content that’s indistinguishable from human work until you notice it doesn’t quite have a point of view. Until you realize you can’t trace it back to a person who was trying to say something specific.

When everything might be AI-generated, how do you know what’s worth your attention? How do you know what was made by a human who cares, versus something optimized to fill space and harvest clicks?

What this trains us to do is stop trusting what we encounter. We start skimming everything, believing nothing, building calluses against sincerity because sincerity and simulation are getting harder to distinguish.

The hidden cost isn’t just bad writing—it’s the erosion of our ability to discern authentic human work. And once that’s gone, what do we have left?

3. The Algorithm Will Never Be Your Friend

Here’s what I keep coming back to: the platforms can’t actually deliver what they promised us, because the incentive structure prevents it.

Connection is small, specific, and mutual.
Attention is broad, extractable, and monetizable.

So the platforms optimized for attention and called it connection. And we believed them for a while because it worked well enough.

But structure shapes behavior, and the structure of algorithmic feeds optimized for engagement will always prioritize what keeps you scrolling over what serves your actual relationships.

This isn’t a bug.
It’s not something that can be fixed with better moderation or different features.
It’s what the system was built to do.

What we normalize today becomes invisible tomorrow. We’ve normalized algorithmic mediation of our relationships to the point where it feels natural to have a feed “curate” who we hear from. But there’s nothing natural about an advertising platform deciding which of your friends you get to see.

The Pattern Underneath: Visual-First to Agentic-First

There’s a deeper shift happening that most people haven’t articulated yet—seemingly unrelated inflection points in our culture and recent news that explain a lot.

The Old Paradigm: Visual-First Internet

For the last twenty years, we’ve lived in a visual-first internet. This means:

• Humans sit in browsers, looking at screens

• UX is designed to capture attention and generate clicks

• Success is measured in monthly active users, time on site, conversion rates

• The goal is to “own the user” through engagement loops and network effects

This is the paradigm that social media, e-commerce, SaaS—basically all of consumer internet—was built on. And it worked, for what it was designed to do. It worked extremely well.

But what’s ahead is something totally different.

The Emerging Paradigm: Agentic-First Internet

I’ve been watching tools like Clawbot, Moltbook, Cowork—these agentic web interfaces where AI agents are the primary users, not humans. And it’s making me rethink what the internet actually is.

In an agentic-first internet:

• Agents are the primary interface layer between humans and information

• UX shifts from pixels to policies, permissions, and contracts

• Network effects get measured by agent capabilities, not human MAUs

• The valuable asset isn’t “owning the user”—it’s owning the agent relationship

This is a different kind of internet. Not better or worse, necessarily. Just structurally different.

Why This Changes Everything

To bring this home: your personal website will be your hub in more ways than one.

Not just a place to store your bio or resume. Not just for your blog. Not even just a single source of truth so that you can rank in AI instead of search.

Your personal website will be all these things and more. It will be the verified interface in how the world interacts with you.

Many people are anti-AI and I don’t blame you. Many of us see the risks clearly. But my time in Silicon Valley has taught me that this is a train the powers that be have no intention of slowing down. It’s not just the capital invested or the money circulating between the top 10 most valuable companies—it’s the egos and who gets recorded in history as winning this race.

We know this to be true because we can see it playing out in front of us every day.

So the conversation becomes less “I hate AI and want my stuff on my own website” and more “I see what’s already happening and I want ownership and agency over who I am for what’s to come.”

Here’s what’s critical: agents need something to connect to. They need spaces with clear provenance, well-defined structure, and explicit authorship. They need to know: Who made this? Why? With what point of view? Under what terms can this be accessed, referenced, used?

An algorithmic feed can’t answer those questions. A social media profile can’t answer those questions. These platforms were built for human eyeballs, not machine-readable contracts.

So there’s a tension that doesn’t resolve easily. Technology is shifting toward agentic interfaces, and we need to build the architecture for what comes next. But we’re still operating with structures designed for the old paradigm.

Which brings me to what I think is actually emerging….

What I’ve Been Thinking About:
The Three-Layer Architecture

I’ve been thinking on this idea for how digital presence and connection might work when social media is done. Not as a final answer—I’m still working this out—but as a way to think about what we’re building toward.

Layer 1: Discovery (Outposts)

Social media doesn’t disappear. It changes function.

Instead of being the destination—the place where you maintain presence and build relationships—it becomes distribution. Just another outpost where people might encounter your work. A place that leads them somewhere else.

Think of it like this: someone sees a fragment of your thinking on Instagram, TikTok, LinkedIn, wherever. That fragment is interesting enough that they want more. But “more” doesn’t mean scrolling your feed. It means going to where your actual work lives.

This is already happening. People are treating social platforms as preview channels, not primary spaces. We can see this in the growth strategies of some of the most viewed media online. It’s why you see clips for different aspects of the same show across different owned and un-owned social media channels.

They post a snippet and link elsewhere—usually a platform like YouTube or Substack. They analyze the data, then they use platform features to drive people owned channels.

The new function of this layer: lead people to owned space versus circulating them amongst walled gardens.

Layer 2: Destination (Owned Experiential Space)

This is where it gets interesting, and where I think most people haven’t fully imagined what’s possible yet.

The question isn’t “do you need a website?” The question is: What should a personal website be in 2026 and beyond?

Not a bio page. Not a resume. Not even a blog, though it might contain one. Those are all artifacts of the old paradigm—flat, static, designed to be scanned quickly by humans who are already moving on to the next thing.

What I’m talking about is an experiential space. A place that embodies your values, not just states them. A world that represents how you want to be encountered.

This is what MySpace and Geocities offered that LinkedIn and Instagram can’t: personality, curation, atmosphere. The sense that you’ve entered someone’s space, designed on their terms, operating on their tempo. No algorithm deciding what you see first. No dark patterns trying to keep you engaged longer than you intended.

Just—a place. A digital place that feels like it belongs to someone.

I come at this having spent years inside these systems, building products and companies, and what I notice is how much we’ve lost by centralizing everything into platforms. We traded sovereignty for convenience. We traded presence for reach. And for a while, it seemed worth it.

But in an agentic-first world, this layer becomes critical infrastructure.

Here’s why: agents need somewhere to point. When they’re gathering information, making recommendations, connecting people—they need sources with clear provenance. They need to know this piece of writing came from this person, with this perspective, under these terms. They need machine-readable structure underneath human-centered design.

Your personal website, in this context, isn’t just for humans browsing. It’s for agents querying. It’s both a world someone can experience and a structured source agents can reference. The design challenge is making those two things work together.

What this means practically:

• Clear authorship and attribution baked in

• Machine-readable metadata alongside human narrative

• Explicit terms for how your work can be used, referenced, remixed

• A place that updates on your timeline, not a feed’s timeline

• Embeddings of select works or points of view from third-party hosts

• Something designed to be returned to, not consumed once and forgotten

When everything is abundant and synthetic, the rare and authentic becomes premium. A personal website built this way—with provenance, structure, and care—becomes valuable exactly because it’s not optimized for algorithmic distribution. It’s optimized for durability, connection, and self-expression.

Layer 3: Connection (The Intelligent Anti-Algorithm)

This is the hardest piece to visualize because it doesn’t exist yet. Not really.

Here’s the problem: someone finds you through an outpost, comes to your owned space, resonates with your work—and then what? How do they stay connected in a way that respects both your creative process and their attention?

Not through an email newsletter. That’s still broadcast. Still noisy. Still built on the assumption that you owe your audience constant output or that they must open a correspondence from you.

Not through social media notifications. We just established that’s broken.

Not through RSS, which is too passive and requires too much management from the reader.

What we need is something that doesn’t exist yet. Something that:

• Respects creative process (doesn’t demand constant output)

• Respects notification boundaries (doesn’t flood people with updates)

• Is intelligent and consent-based at every layer

• Allows asynchronous depth without real-time pressure

• Carries context and memory across interactions

I think the shape of this might be personal agents.

Not agents that scrape and summarize without permission. Agents that you explicitly grant permission to carry your point of view, your frameworks, your processes. Agents that can maintain connection on behalf of both creator and audience, within clear boundaries that both parties set.

Imagine: someone wants to stay connected to your work, so they authorize their agent to monitor your space (with your permission). When you publish something new, their agent evaluates whether it’s relevant to what they care about right now. If it is, it surfaces it contextually—not as a push notification, but as part of their agent’s regular sense-making. If it’s not, it archives it for later without cluttering their attention.

On your side, you’re not managing a distribution list. You’re not timing posts for optimal engagement. You’re just publishing when you have something to say, in your owned space, and the connection layer handles the rest.

This is what I mean by the ultimate anti-algorithm. It’s consensual at every point. Intelligent enough to filter signal from noise. Respectful of both parties’ boundaries and rhythms.

And here’s the part that feels most interesting to me: these agents could carry more than just notifications. They could carry your thinking itself. Your frameworks, your processes, your ways of analyzing problems. Not as static content, but as something (an asset if you will) that can be licensed and that people can engage with asynchronously.

This is something more dynamic and based on lived experience or expertise. Not an e-book or a course. Lord knows we’ve gotten our fill of those.

This is speculative. I don’t know if this is exactly what it looks like. But I know we need something in this layer that isn’t email, isn’t social, isn’t RSS. Something built for depth and sovereignty, not scale and extraction.

I’m still thinking this one through but I think the makings of something like this is there.
If you’re interested in following how I might incubate this concept you can signup to be notified here.

What This Makes Possible

If this three-layer architecture actually works: outposts for discovery, owned space for presence, intelligent agents for connection—what does it enable?

Provenance as Premium: In a world flooded with AI-generated content, work with clear human authorship becomes more valuable, not less. When you can verify that a piece of writing or creative work came from a specific person, with a specific point of view, built on years of thinking through these problems that’s worth something. Authenticity, ownership, authorship become differentiators again.

Depth Over Performance: Work designed for an owned space, meant to be returned to, built to compound in value over time…that’s different. That’s ideas as artifacts and creative works, not content as disposable fuel for an algorithm. This changes what you make and how you make it. You’re no longer asking “will this perform on Tuesday?” You’re asking “will this matter in six months?”

Agency Restored: For creators, you control your presence, your tempo, your terms of connection. You’re not subject to algorithmic whims or platform policy changes. For audiences, you choose signal over noise, depth over breadth, meaningful connection over parasocial performance. For all of us, we exit algorithmic dependency. We stop hoping that the next platform will be different, that the next algorithm update will favor us, that the metrics will finally mean what they’re supposed to mean.

There’s something deeply relieving (and exciting) about that. I’d bet that many of us would suddenly like to create more.

New Forms of Presence: This isn’t influencer. This isn’t personal brand. This is something else. It’s: I am a web of ideas, experiences, and relationships. My website is a world I’ve built to represent how I think. My agent carries my perspective and can engage on my behalf. You can encounter me in fragments on platforms, but if you want the full picture, here’s where to find it.

Your digital presence stops being about accumulation—more followers, more content, more engagement—and starts being about coherence. What you’ve built. How it fits together. What it makes possible for people to think with.

The Tradeoffs

I don’t want to oversell this so let me go ahead and name what’s hard.

What We Gain: Sovereignty over our presence. Meaningful connection without algorithmic mediation. Work that compounds instead of disappears. The ability to be found by people who are actually looking for what we offer.

These aren’t small things.

What We Lose (Or What Gets Harder): Easy discoverability. There’s no algorithm working on your behalf. You have to be more intentional about your outpost strategy—where you show up, how you lead people to your owned space.

Passive audience growth. You can’t just post and hope the algorithm picks it up. You have to build slowly, through word of mouth, through people who care enough to share your work.

The illusion of scale without effort. Building this way takes time. It requires thinking about infrastructure, not just content. It means accepting that reach and resonance might be inversely correlated—that the work that travels furthest might not be the work that matters most.

The Honest Question: Is this worth the tradeoff?

It depends on what you value. If you want maximum reach with minimum infrastructure—if you want the possibility of something going viral and reaching millions—the platform model still offers that, sometimes, if you’re lucky.

But if you want durability, sovereignty, and connection that isn’t subject to algorithmic whim—if you want to build something that lasts longer than a news cycle—then yes, I think this is worth it.

And here’s what I keep coming back to: if the old system is collapsing anyway, do we actually have a choice?

We can keep building on a foundation we know is unstable, hoping it holds long enough to extract value. Or we can start building something else. Something designed for what’s coming, not what’s already half-broken.

Let’s Be Practical

So what does this mean for you, right now?

Not “you need to build all three layers immediately.” That’s not realistic and it’s not how change actually happens.

But maybe it means auditing where your presence lives. Asking yourself: if social media disappeared tomorrow, how would people find my work? How would they stay connected to it? What would be lost?

Maybe it means considering what your owned space needs to be—not just what it should contain. Not a list of projects or a bio page, but an actual representation of how you want to be encountered.

Maybe it means experimenting with one small piece of this. Setting up a simple personal site. Trying a different approach to connection that doesn’t rely on email blasts or social posts. Seeing what happens when you optimize for durability instead of reach.

The question isn’t whether you’re ready to abandon platforms entirely. The question is whether you’re building something that could survive their degradation. Whether you’re creating infrastructure for yourself, or just feeding someone else’s infrastructure with your work.

Start there.

Where I’m Landing (For Now)

This is where my head’s at on this.

I don’t think we’ve seen the final form of any of these layers yet. The outpost layer is still dominated by legacy platforms fighting their own obsolescence. The owned space layer is mostly people rebuilding old blog formats without reimagining what’s possible. The connection layer barely exists in the form I’m describing.

But I’m watching the pieces move. I’m seeing people quietly exit the platform dependency model. I’m seeing early experiments with agentic interfaces. I’m seeing the provenance problem become more salient as AI makes authenticity harder to verify.

What I’m certain of: the old architecture is breaking. The follow is dead. The algorithm can’t deliver what it promised. The metrics don’t mean what they used to mean.

What replaces it is still being built. By all of us. Every time we choose where to publish, how to connect, what infrastructure to depend on—we’re voting on what the next internet looks like.

The question isn’t whether the internet changes. It always does. Structure shapes behavior, and when the structure breaks, behavior shifts.

The question is whether we participate in shaping what it becomes, or whether we let the next structure get built for us, again, by people with incentives that don’t align with ours.

I’m still working this out. But I think the shape is there: outposts for discovery, owned space for presence, intelligent agents for connection. A three-layer architecture built for sovereignty, not extraction. For durability, not virality. For depth, not performance.

This feels unfinished, but in a useful way.

Curious about your thoughts on this…

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If you made it this far thanks for reading. This is an idea I’m still forming. If it resonates, I’d be interested to hear where you see gaps in the thinking, or where your experience maps onto (or contradicts) what I’m proposing. You can subscribe to my YouTube to view video essays that touch on this topic and others. The thought continues.