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'As AI Eats the Web, the Internet's Collective Memory Is Disappearing' Draws 448 Comments on What Happens After Search
Vass Bednar's Walrus essay argues Google's AI summaries are degrading the internet's archival infrastructure, citing Disney deleting nearly the entire FiveThirtyEight archive after March 2025 layoffs, Wikipedia traffic falling as AI systems scrape without clickthrough, and the Internet Archive facing both cyberattacks and publishers blocking the Wayback Machine specifically to deny AI training access. Worth flagging honestly: the piece is argued through illustrative examples and supplies no quantified link-rot, click-through, or traffic-decline statistics. It landed at 378 points and 448 comments — the comment-to-point ratio marking it as contested rather than agreed.
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