Could agents fix the internet?

I kept waiting for what would come next as I read Miles Klee's essay in Wired, "Please Let The Internet Die." 

The essay is grounded in the consensus wisdon that AI is flooding the internet with so much slop that it won't be useful any longer. That does seem to be the way the tide is flowing!

But if the internet was really doomed, I wanted to know: what's next. I know no one could really say, but if you've got an expert who's so sure he knows what's coming, shouldn't he have some sense for what follows.

Do we go back to the mail? What's after, Miles!?

I have a bad guess, but it's based on a heuristic that seldom fails: When the world is changing fast, the consensus gets it wrong. 

Corollary: All the really important truths appear counterintuitive when they are found.

So. With that.

What if AI fixes the internet?

One of the reasons that the platforms proved so popular was because the internet was so hard. 

Web users wanted some combination of information and entertainment. It was so hard to remember all the sites you needed to go to get all those doses. 

Then platforms came along with their feeds, and you only needed to remember a few sites. Those few sites had everything. And if they got to know what you liked, they could serve up a cocktail just for you.

We all know how that's turned out. I won't walk through the mechanisms.

What if personal agents could make the open web easy again?

What if your feed became a selection that your agents hand picked for you from across the web, just based on knowing what you wanted to learn about, keep an eye on and liked? All via a local client on your own machine?

What if the way you participated in the conversation was by posting on your own personal URL, one that made it easy for other agents to come snag and spread around the bits their owners would like in a variety of formats? 

What if no one could spam you with comments or ads or ragebait because your agents only let through the engagement that came from actual humans, served at precisely the level of feedback, invective and joy that you had tolerance for? 

We would each live in our own little castles, our nodes in the badlands of the open web, but our castle would be well defended! And staffed by wise counselors, who know what pieces of news to bring us and what to thrown in the circular file. The castles will curate a gigantic library of the information we need, and just the memes we enjoy, from far and wide, all while remaining above the onslaught and torrents of nonsense outside.

Or on Facebook.

Maybe what the slop kills is the worst of the web as we have known it, the content treadmill, the platforms of conformity enforcement, the influencers. The knights. The mooks. Bluesky and Tik-Tok. 

It's a dream. God knows it won't be that good.

But maybe it won't be that bad?

At the very least, I don't think it will be bad in quite that way. 

—Brady Dale
October 30, 2026