Fighting the Good Fight: I Will Continue Doing My Bit to Keep the Internet Human

A good article in The Atlantic, “Is This How Reddit Ends?” reflects my concerns about an increasingly alien internet; plagued by spam, optimized for Google searches, awash with clickbait advertorials and infotainment, along with advertisements and God-knows what else generated by AI. Visiting some sites is little more than a cruel joke or a pointless obstacle course, and even more so via smartphone.

Every day, I receive between five and 10 emails asking me to accept sponsored articles on my page and dofollow links (this is 2025, for goodness’ sake!) from all kinds from agencies, freelancers, scammers and spammers, offering me the moon and the stars. The same goes for inserting ads — “top brands, mind you” — on my Facebook page, which I only access once a day to share my article and which I only keep up because every now and then one of my followers there shows signs of life. I systematically block all these emails, but every day five or 10 new ones come in. Searching on Amazon has long since involved wading through reams of stuff I didn’t ask to see, and social networks are a cesspit.

As the Atlantic article notes, Reddit’s position as one of the few reservoirs of humanity on the internet is under mounting threat.“Tell me something I don’t know,” I thought after reading it: I sit in front of this keyboard every day, scanning articles about what has happened during the previous 24 hours until I come across something that inspires me to write. I do not use generative AI to do this, although it comes in handy for finding sources or some specific data, because I want my page to be human, visited by real people who discuss my work in a reasonably polite way (most of the time).

On the other hand, one has to keep experimenting. When people started talking about generative AI, I tried writing a couple of articles with it, asking it to imitate my style, and of course, I let my readers know this. At the same time, I’ve been playing with NotebookML for several months now, using it to generate deep dive podcasts of my articles in English, feeding them with the article itself and its sources, and I let my listeners know how it’s been made.

My page features articles written by me, about topics I choose that reflect my concerns and biases. Recently, some readers have expressed concern that there have been more articles about what we might loosely call “politics”. My response is that firstly, it’s a difficult topic to avoid given the times we are living through, and secondly, politics is inseparable from technology. Discussing the waning of US hegemony, is that politics? Possibly, but it is related to many things, from decarbonization, which is a technological issue, to soft power, which is exercised through social networks and other technologies. I’m sorry, but I’m interested in the subject, it has a relationship with technology, and it always seems to be tie in with what I write about. In any case, the comments section is there to let me know if you really think I go too far.

I have been writing for a long time about our increasingly dystopian internet, which is being steadily taken over by bots; a hostile environment for humans, which is why the Atlantic article caught my attention. In fact, I was talking about this issue at a round table with academics on Medium on Wednesday, another site that prides itself on only hosting content created by humans.

For my part, I will continue to fight the good fight, using my brain and these hands on this keyboard, bring what I hope is some humanity to the internet. And although my readers sometimes like to put me in my place — which I welcome — I hope to continue counting on your participation. Let’s keep trying to make the internet what it should be, a dialogue between people.

(En español, aquí)

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This post was previously published on MEDIUM.COM.

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