BONUS PREVIEW: This is the dot-com crash all over again [Part 2]

What would the internet look like if major tech companies like Meta and Google were no longer usable? With Google more deeply integrating AI into Search and changing how it’s worked for the first time in 25 years, many fear “Google Zero,” where websites simply don’t receive any traffic from search anymore. But Google isn’t the only one. With so many companies going all-in on AI, replacing employees with AI and reorienting their products to cater toward AI use, Ryan presents his “Internet Zero” theory — what happens when companies that are pillars of the internet as we know it shift their core products wholly around AI? With the major players all taking part in this massive, speculative bubble, it’s bound to burst — just like we saw in the early-00s dot-com crash. This episode is a preview from our Patreon. Listen to the full version at https://www.patreon.com/PanicWorld — for just five bucks a month, you get exclusive content like this, extended and bonus episodes, Discord community access, and more. For Apple Podcast users, you can also find this and all of our bonus content — plus other great COURIER shows — with a subscription to COURIER+. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Ryan Broderick?

  All right, Grant, uh, welcome to Panic World, a show about how the internet warps our minds, our culture, and eventually, reality.

• 0:05Speaker 01

  I'm a huge fan. You should let the other guy speak more often. What's up?

• 0:26Ryan Broderick?

  Thanks for coming on. We typically do these bonuses where you basically do an episode at me. But I have been on vacation. Uh, video listeners will see that I'm extremely sunburned. Sitting on the beach for the last few days, just doing what I normally do, which is think about the internet. And so I want to ask you to imagine something and then describe it. I've become kind of exhilarated by this idea. What do you think the internet would look like if every major tech platform basically failed? And that includes Google. Describe a day in the life in the near future if every tech platform suddenly just kind of failed.

• 1:12Ryan Broderick?

  And maybe they haven't gone out of business, but you're no longer using them. A bunch of graveyard, AltaVista kind of places that you just don't go to anymore.

• 1:21Speaker 01

  Newsletters are probably crushing.

• 1:24Ryan Broderick?

  Do you think so?

• 1:25Speaker 01

  I think you'd get a lot of people trying to recreate a funneling system. That like immediately like, like they would just fill in like, this is what is familiar. I think you would get some iteration of chat rooms back.

• 1:42Speaker 01

  I think people would be still trying to do silly things that like people would just be ignoring. But I think that like, here's the things to check out. This email is going to link you to things you like and blogs would like really quickly repurpose themselves. Because people would go like, oh, but I'm like, I only know how to find about this through this. So like listservs and different sort of like. You should read this. You should read this. And maybe those things are actually video now.

• 2:12Ryan Broderick?

  Are they in this, do you think?

• 2:15Speaker 01

  It's not too hard to set up a website that

• 2:18Ryan Broderick?

  To watch it.

• 2:19Speaker 01

  To link a video.

• 2:20Ryan Broderick?

  To watch on your phone?

• 2:21Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:22Ryan Broderick?

  I mean, it's pretty difficult.

• 2:23Speaker 01

  Yeah? Okay. You would know better than I.

• 2:24Ryan Broderick?

  To watch a, just like a video file in a browser on your phone is possible, but it's extremely annoying, I will say.

• 2:31Speaker 01

  And I passed?

• 2:32Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah, there was no pass or fail. I think more than anything, I wanted to illustrate how difficult this is to imagine. But I do think beginning to imagine it is the most crucial thing people like you and me can be doing right now. And the reason I think that-

• 2:48Speaker 01

  In this iteration, do porn, does, do main porn sites go away?

• 2:52Ryan Broderick?

  No, porn exists. So like, uh, I, I, so, okay, let, let's start with this. Let's start with this. So over the last few months, it's become very clear to me that the major companies that run the internet, uh, at least the way the internet is used by most people. So your, your Metas, your Googles. I mean, that's kind of it, right? Like the, like your Meta and your Google. And to a lesser extent, TikTok, I suppose.

• 3:19Speaker 01

  What about your ChatGPTs and Claude's?

• 3:23Ryan Broderick?

  Well, no, we'll get there. We'll get there. So, so right now, Amazon, Meta and Google, the big three,

• 3:30Ryan Broderick?

  they're trying very hard to become AI companies. And what we've seen from the most recent update to Google's homepage, the Google search page, is that they are so interested in being AI companies that they're willing to jettison their core products. They're willing to cannibalize themselves. Uh, the new AI search, uh, feature on Google's homepage, the biggest update to Google in 25 years or whatever, that dropped last week. And I will tell you that like using Google is fundamentally worse than it was a week ago. Especially from someone who was trying to get around, I was in, I was in San Juan, Puerto Rico for about four days. Never been there before, trying to Google stuff. It was actually very difficult now.

• 4:11Ryan Broderick?

  Uh, not only does it just take up more processing power on your phone and need a better internet connection to work, it's not quite accurate. And Google is very invested in putting these AI features into their core products. They're popping up in Google Maps and Google Docs and Google Search. And it seems very clear to me that we are barreling towards some version of what people call Google Zero. Are you familiar with Google Zero?

• 4:31Speaker 01

  No, Ryan, what is Google Zero? I didn't read Garbage Day yesterday.

• 4:34Ryan Broderick?

  Uh, it was a week ago, but Google Zero is the possibility in the near future that websites no longer receive traffic from Google. And one of the main driving forces of a Google Zero future is chatbots. So they're just sort of aggregating and summarizing everything on the web. And then you read it in a chatbot and that website doesn't get any traffic. So if you think about Google Zero and you apply it to every other company, Amazon Zero, Facebook Zero. So a world where there are no longer any usable products to purchase on Amazon because it's filled with too much AI slop, or the inventories are fake or whatever, or a meta zero where all of the content on Facebook, all of the interactions on Instagram

• 5:17Ryan Broderick?

  are being driven by AI bots that are sort of just out of control and filled up with AI features that sort of remove you from seeing what your friends and your family are doing. This is the future I'm trying to imagine.

• 5:28Speaker 01

  Yeah. In this future, do they no longer give a shit about like me buying things?

• 5:33Ryan Broderick?

  Well, the, the, the assumption, and this is where I'm, this is where I ask, like, what if this all failed? The assumption from these companies is that these AI products will work. The question that I keep asking is what if it doesn't work? And what if?

• 5:46Speaker 01

  That's not my user experience.

• 5:47Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah. What if what ends up happening is the stretch to, to AI that's happening right now? The sort of attempt, the, the jump that they're all trying to make actually fails. Now, these companies might still exist. The dot com crash did not kill the concept of a website. But a lot of the websites that were part of the dot com crash are no longer around. Pets.com is probably the most famous sort of dot com bubble burst victim. But that is what I've been thinking deeply about recently, which is what if this whole AI era sort of fizzles?

• 6:24Ryan Broderick?

  And AI doesn't go away, you know, there are AI tools that work and people use them and it's fine and nobody gives a shit. What if this entire consumer and enterprise grade attempt at building AI tools just doesn't really work and the companies that weren't AI companies before that are now becoming AI companies, basically just eat away at their own relevance and nobody really uses them anymore. And a lot of the big boys like the Open EIs and the Clods that you mentioned before, they also implode. And I, I'm having a lot of fun thinking about this because I think we've, I'm, I'm a millennial. Are you a millennial, Grant?

• 6:58Speaker 01

  No, I'm Gen Z.

• 7:00Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah, clearly. Yeah, in spirit. The two of us have basically spent most of our adult lives living in a world that has been built on the assumption that this will work. The assumption that Silicon Valley will survive. And I am getting a little more comfortable thinking about a future where it doesn't work. And not because, I mean, you know, in a rightful world, you know, these guys would have been trust busted to hell and back and we would have had like a functioning economy again. But they have

• 7:32Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 7:33Ryan Broderick?

  put all their eggs in the attention economy basket, which is, you know, very volatile because people could just lose interest. And all across the web, I am sort of getting these weird signals that like, maybe this stuff just isn't gonna work this time. And uh, yeah, I'm having a lot of fun.

• 7:53Speaker 01

  It seems to not be working in the way that these things have historically not worked. Correct me if I'm wrong. Where like Silicon Valley is like, this is the fucking shit. This is, everyone's gonna love this. And then they roll it out and they're like, wait, this is not making money. This is not getting the adoption or is not like the like, underpants gnomes logic of like, something, something profit that they expect. And then it's kind of like roll back with their tails between their legs. Is that accurate?

• 8:21Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah, I don't think it's not accurate. I think let's start, let's start at the beginning, I think, of this era, which is the dot com bubble crash. I spent a little bit of time this week, just like going through photos on Getty of like old internet companies and like their advertisements and their Super Bowl commercials. And the dot com bubble crash produced one of the greatest URLs of all time, which was of course, computer.com. Uh, which I really wish we owned, actually.

• 8:48Speaker 01

  What's going for today?

• 8:49Ryan Broderick?

  Uh, let's see, let's, let's go to, let's go to computer.com and see if it's for sale.

• 8:56Ryan Broderick?

  Computer.com is unavailable, but if we want a computer dot store, that would cost $1,500. So I imagine computer.com is more expensive than.

• 9:06Speaker 01

  How much did WikiArmpits cost you?

• 9:08Ryan Broderick?

  Uh, like 20 bucks.

• 9:09Speaker 01

  Yeah, that was a better investment. By the way, we, we, we own WikiArmpits.com now.

• 9:13Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah, I own Wiki, it's WikiArmpit.com because of the same syntax as WikiFeet.com. But I guess feet is plural. So maybe it should have been WikiArmpits.com.

• 9:23Speaker 01

  Regardless, coming to an internet to you sometime, WikiArmpit.com.

• 9:27Ryan Broderick?

  Send your armpits for submission, grant@garbage day dot email. He would love to see those.

• 9:33Speaker 01

  Honestly, I've heard people about this and they were like, can I send you, like, people are.

• 9:37Ryan Broderick?

  People are fucking sickos, man. I don't know what to tell you. Um.

• 9:40Speaker 01

  I'm not complaining.

• 9:41Ryan Broderick?

  The point of today's bonus episode, the point of today's bonus episode is imagining not just a Google zero, but a Meta zero, an Amazon zero, and questioning that assumption, that very millennial assumption. And I'm not saying it's, it was a millennial's assumption, but like the assumption that most of our lives have been dictated by, which is that Silicon Valley will always sort of figure it out. And to your question of like, you know, is, is the AI revolution not going down the way the social media revolution went down?

• 10:12Speaker 01

  Wow. Would you like to know where the rest of this is going? Where the next 40ish minutes of conversation takes us now that we've left you on this huge cliffhanger? Patreon.com slash panic world or courier plus for you, apple heads. Where right now you don't have to find another podcast to listen to. You don't have to go, oh, Michael Hobbes hasn't come out with another episode on one of his many podcasts. What am I gonna do? I still have dishes. You can just give us $5 and continue to listen to us bullshit. The people who you listen to when Michael Hobbes doesn't do his thing. Patreon.com slash panic world, courier plus, apple, bye.