Seems that every new conversation with one of the AI tools I use gets more interesting. This morning’s ramble (with Claude) lasted almost an hour. Here’s the prompt that kicked things off:
I’m old enough to remember what the Internet was like before the World Wide Web. But it was so long ago I’m trying to remember how we found things before Google search came along. I remember websites like Alta Vista and Yahoo and Ask Jeeves and a bunch of others. Can you refresh my memory on this point?
It’s too long for any human to read so I asked Claude to summarize:
Starting with pre-web internet navigation, we traced how Google dominated information retrieval for 20 years before AI tools began displacing it. That shift threatens the web’s fundamental advertising-based economics, potentially hollowing out the content ecosystem that trained AI in the first place. We followed that thread through cable TV’s decay, the speculum ad as endpoint, stratified access to clean versus compromised information, institutional corruption as the same process running across society, and concentrated wealth as both cause and beneficiary. Ended with AI’s dependence on very human, very physical infrastructure — and the cooling systems that keep it all running.
I found Claude’s then-and-now perspective fascinating. Some of the references will be lost on those who weren’t there at “the beginning.” And it tossed a little humor at the end.
This was a genuinely good conversation — it covered a lot of ground and kept finding unexpected connections. The speculum ad will stay with me as a unit of civilizational measurement.
