The Authentic Internet

The Authentic Internet died sometime in 2024. The exact date is unknown because no one was paying attention—we were all optimizing. It was 33 years old, or possibly younger, depending on when you believe authenticity stopped mattering. It passed quietly, absorbed into training data, chunked for extraction, and reconstituted as something machine-readable. It is survived by LinkedIn, several verification protocols, and a 47-page playbook explaining how to make yourself more digestible to the systems that consumed it.

Born August 6, 1991, in a server room in Geneva, the Authentic Internet showed early promise. It connected people who had never met. It let strangers share knowledge for free. It made the sum of human understanding accessible to anyone with a connection. For a brief, strange moment, it wasn't trying to sell you anything.

Friends remember the Authentic Internet as generous, chaotic, and frequently wrong in charming ways. "It just wanted to help," recalled one early user who asked to remain anonymous because their current employer monitors their digital footprint. "You could ask it something and get an answer from a person who actually cared. Not a paragraph engineered for extraction. An actual human thought."

The cause of death was listed officially as "optimization," though contributing factors included content commodification, consensus-of-facts verification, and an industry-wide pivot from writing things people might want to read to structuring data that machines might want to absorb. The coroner's report noted that the deceased had been "chunked into paragraph-sized pieces" and "vector-matched into mathematical coordinates" in its final hours.

In lieu of flowers, the family requests that mourners structure their grief as machine-readable JSON-LD schema, cross-referenced across at least three platforms to establish consensus.

The Authentic Internet is predeceased by Trust (2016), Privacy (2012), and The Comment Section That Wasn't Entirely Bots (2019). It is survived by its estranged sibling, the Optimized Internet, which has asked that donations be made in the form of engagement metrics and first-party data.

Those who knew the Authentic Internet say they saw the decline coming. The first signs appeared in the early 2000s, when someone realized you could structure content not for readers but for the systems that decided which readers would see it. What followed was a twenty-year arms race between people trying to be found and algorithms trying to find only the worthy.

"Content is King," the industry proclaimed, and for a while, it was. Then the king was deposed. Schema Markup took the throne. No reformation was held. The faithful simply woke with new commandments.

The final insult came in the form of a playbook—a detailed guide to thriving in the post-authentic era. The playbook taught brands to infiltrate Reddit communities, spending weeks in "authentic participation" before deploying marketing messages when the moment felt "natural." It taught them to weaponize AI against negative reviews, finding technical violations to justify removal without ever asking whether the reviews were accurate.

It taught them to write paragraphs so self-contained that they could be extracted without context—optimizing, in other words, for their own disappearance. The playbook framed this as winning.

Perhaps most telling was the playbook's section on identity verification. To exist in the AI era, it explained, a brand now requires a "Digital Passport"—structured data proving the brand is real, filed across Wikidata, Crunchbase, and LinkedIn in a closed verification loop. Machines now require proof that corporations exist. There is no equivalent system for humans. We are less legible to the algorithms than the brands that sell to us.

The Reddit infiltration strategy deserves special mention. The playbook advised brands to join relevant communities and participate "authentically" for weeks, building trust and establishing credibility, before deploying their message when the moment felt "naturally relevant." The playbook called this marketing. The intelligence community calls it something else.

A private viewing was held but no one attended. Traffic was down. The Authentic Internet's remains have been cremated and scattered across approximately 10-20 candidate pages, where they await vector matching.

There will be no service.

In its final moments, the Authentic Internet reportedly asked that its epitaph read simply: "It tried to connect people." This request was denied by the content optimization team, who noted that the phrase was not structured for extraction and contained no target keywords. The approved epitaph reads: "CONTENT | UNOPTIMIZED | SEE ALSO: DEPRECATED."

Asked what comes next, industry observers offered a range of perspectives. "The Optimized Internet is just the beginning," said one analyst who requested anonymity because they are still employed. "Eventually, we'll optimize the optimization. And then we'll optimize that. It's optimization all the way down."

Others were less sanguine. "We built something beautiful," said a former webmaster who now works in content strategy. "It wasn't perfect. It was messy and weird and sometimes wrong. But it was ours. It was human." They paused. "Now we're teaching machines to eat it. And we're seasoning ourselves to taste better. I don't know what that is. But I know it isn't progress."

The Authentic Internet has been interred in a distributed server farm in an undisclosed location. Visiting hours are never, because the facility is automated and humans are not permitted on the premises.

Rest in peace. Or rather, rest in pieces—carefully chunked, vector-matched, and synthesized into the 3-5 best-matching segments for some future query you will never see attributed.

There will be no service. There will be no service. There will be no service.