The Internet Is Dead. Long Live the Internets.

On the personalization of reality and the collapse of consensus

There’s a TikTok by @askcatgpt making the rounds through my own social circles. In it, Cat outlines six potential futures for social media in a post-AI world.

It’s smart stuff. Totally worth the 3-minute watch if you have the tiem!

But as I watched it, I found myself thinking, “Jesus, these aren’t futures. They’re parallel realities that are already happening!”

The Age of Choose-Your-Own-Reality

The “futures” Cat outlined aren’t mutually exclusive scenarios in my opinion. They’re existing coping mechanisms we’ve self-selected into which shape our own individual corners of the internet:

• Humans stand up against the slop!: In a sea of AI slop, anything with human fingerprints—voice notes, messy essays, long pauses—gains cultural currency. Realness becomes premium.

• Humans get lost in the slop!: Social platforms degrade into SEO bait and click-farm content. Discovery dies. The best creators whisper into the void.

• The internet becomes unusable!: Search breaks. Everything is duplicated or fake. Ironically, misinformation loses power—not because we solved it, but because we trust nothing.

• Fake news collapses!: As platforms lose influence, disinformation loses oxygen. But the fix isn’t truth—it’s apathy.

• The analog renaissance!: People crave the tactile: in-person salons, eye contact, presence, over pixelated forms of connection.

• Nostalgia loops!: We retreat into early-2000s aesthetics, sitcom reruns, vinyl—chasing the emotional baseline of a simpler time.

Be honest. You probably know someone in each one of these versions of digital realities right now.

Just look at how we’re all processing the two big babies fighting.

Ozempic for Your Feed

There’s one actual digital future that I’d add to Cat’s list that I see missing from her damn near comprehensive list.

I call it the “Ozempic for our digital diets”.

These would be apps and tools that promise to clean up our social media feeds, block bots, and filter out slop.

It’s essentially escape by curation.

On the surface, it feels like self protection. But look closer and it’s just another form of control. We start asking algorithms to save us from the very problems algorithms created in the first place.

They don’t exist yet, but I can totally see a world where an opportunistic technologist and a group of VCs get together to create some new app for filtering slop.

The Internet Has Balkanized

All of that is to say, there is no singular internet anymore.

There are internets—plural.

And while this sounds like postmodern philosophy, the stakes are entirely real.

We are not just experiencing information overload. We are witnessing epistemic fragmentation: the slow erosion of any shared understanding of what happened, what’s happening, and what will happen .

We got our first glimpses of this in the 2016 US Elections. Twitter feeds that looked like they were from different planets. Voters who couldn’t agree on basic facts, let alone policy.

Now, with AI, it has the potential to get worse.

What keeps me up at night thinking about all of this is that shared reality is the substrate everything modern society depends on.

And shared reality—the very foundation of democracy, governance, and coordination—is cracking:

• Democracy requires shared truth.

• Governance requires shared stakes.

• Global cooperation requires shared timelines.

Without these, our institutions fail.

Information Without Borders

The nation-state—especially in the West—was built on this idea of territorial sovereignty, national identity, shared language, and a unified epistemology.

But digital life doesn’t respect borders. Information isn’t bound by geography.

What happens when a teenager in Nairobi has more in common—culturally, politically, spiritually—with someone in Berlin than with their next-door neighbor?

You get nations with no shared belief system. Governments attempting to govern populations that no longer share a single version of the world. Institutions built to coordinate across geography now trying to make sense of platform-balkanized publics.

And just as states lose their grip on consensus, platforms aren’t stepping up to govern either. Tech companies can’t even agree on what content is. How do you fact-check when “facts” themselves are personalized? How do you enforce community standards when every user sees a different community?

It could mean the end of hegemony: the soft power that once flowed from dominant cultural producers, global institutions, and national mythologies.

I remember talking about this a lot in my International Relations 101 class in undergrad, post-9/11. But a post-AI future feels more appropriate to this argument that the age of the nation-state is over. If every reality is tailored to the individual’s preference, there is no shared stage on which a hegemonic narrative can dominate.

The West once projected soft power through Hollywood, news media, and democratic ideals. But when everyone is watching different shows, listening to different podcasters, and trusting different influencers, hegemony gets the boot.

The result? There is no longer a “center” to hold.

The Rise of Fourth Spaces

And yet, this isn’t entirely dystopian.

Some good is happening too. An opposing force, if you will.

Because while shared reality may be fracturing, connection isn’t. We are still forming new communities in fourth spaces.

We’re gathering in micro-communities: Discord servers, private Substacks and Whatsapps, listening to niche podcasts. We essentially have started affiliating not by geography, but by worldview.

The people I trust most for information in a post-internet age for my fact checking? They’re curators. Sensemakers. Writers and moderators building small-but-coherent communities or thought platforms for meaning making.

In that sense, information sovereignty is shifting: from states to platforms, and increasingly, back to the people!

A Co-Authored Future

The reason Cat’s video is so poignant to me is that it articulates the fear that we have that it’s not just that the internet is getting worse. It’s that we no longer know how to live together as humans inside this split reality.

We tend to talk about the internet as if it’s a place we go. But increasingly, it’s something that comes to us, shaped by our patterns, our fears, our affinities. The systems governing our digital lives feed not just on data, but on consciousness itself. They metabolize attention and reinforce belief, not because they are malicious, but because they are designed to mirror us back to ourselves.

In that sense, the realities we inhabit are not inevitable. They are selected. If these platforms are built to respond to our choices, then perhaps choosing differently still matters and holds immense weight. Perhaps there is quiet power in opting into slower, more generous modes of connection and in aligning ourselves with voices that build coherence rather than erode it.

Maybe the future isn’t destined to fragment. Maybe it’s waiting to be co-authored!

All of that is to say I don’t pretend to have all the answers.
But I’m certain these are the right questions to be asking.

If you're navigating your own transition toward a portfolio career, I invite you to join the community at Build with Brie, where we're supporting each other through this evolution. For those interested in my personal journey through this territory, my three-part essay series which I am calling "Portfolio Career Love Letters" offers an unfiltered account of my own 20-year path toward my own professional reclamation.