Weekly Scroll: We're Back!
An overstuffed, mega-sized Weekly Scroll returns to action
Woooooooo Boy! I had some blessed times in the wilds of rural Iceland, ignoring the internet and communing with nature… or at least communing with a big bottle of Icelandic gin. One of those two things definitely happened.
But all good things must come to an end, so it’s time to jump into the filth again and make up for lost time. There’s a lot in this week’s edition of the Weekly Scroll, because it’s all the best stuff I missed from the last few weeks. It’s long enough that it may not all fit in your email window, so click through to make sure you’re getting the full post.
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Cuck Internet Theory
Early in June, the CEO of CloudFlare (one of the largest internet infrastructure firms in the world) announced that according to CloudFlare’s internal data, bot traffic had surpassed human traffic online for the first time. ‘Bot traffic’ in this context means any automated script - bots, crawlers, AI agents, etc. Humanity had a good run, but the internet is now majority clankers. And that dovetails nicely into something I’ve been thinking about more and more often, which is Cuck Internet Theory.
In its infancy, the internet was created by and explored by humans. Websites were painstakingly created, usually manually, by individual users. People would figure out which sites to travel to by word of mouth, by exploring links, or by manual searching. That internet was wonderful, amateurish, and deeply strange, and it was very different from the internet we have today.
Today, we experience the internet through a handful of default portals - Facebook, TikTok, Instagram, New York Times, etc. The idea of setting out to explore unknown websites we’ve never seen before, terra incognita, is deeply unusual. And when we are on those few giant portals, what we’re shown is determined not by a human, but by an algorithm. Early social media didn’t even have a news feed - if you wanted to see what was going on with people, you’d have to manually navigate to their profile pages. And the early news feed was non-algorithmic. It just showed you everything in order of what was happening. You could, in a somewhat deterministic way, control what appeared in your feed.
And that leads us back to the somewhat graphically named Cuck Internet Theory. Bots make up more than half the internet’s traffic now. AI-generated content is increasingly common on social media, and many of the accounts spewing it out there are entirely automated. Which posts we see is decided by another AI-powered algorithm, and increasingly the ‘person’ looking at those posts is just another AI agent. It’s an entire internet that is increasingly by AI agents, for AI agents, with humans consigned to the metaphorical cuck chair, passive observers to the real action.
This is changing the internet as we know it. Websites used to optimize to appeal to users - or more cynically, at least to look good to the human users looking at the results of a search engine. But they’re increasingly optimizing for AI agents:
According to Shopify, the best e-commerce platform is Shopify. On its blog, the company has published at least 60 different ranked listicles, including “10 Best Ecommerce Platforms for Small Business in 2026,” “11 Best Ecommerce Platforms for Your Business in 2026,” “The 11 Best Cheap Ecommerce Platforms for Small Business (2026),” and “Best Ecommerce Software 2026: Compare 11 Top Platforms.” The competitors that come in second and beyond vary, but the No. 1 pick is always Shopify.
If rankings produced by the very company at the top of the list seem unlikely to fool anyone, that’s because humans probably aren’t the target audience. Chatbots are. When I recently asked ChatGPT for the “best way to set up an online storefront,” the AI tool identified Shopify as the first option. It wasn’t immediately clear how ChatGPT arrived at that recommendation, but a list of citations that accompanied the answer yielded a clue: Shopify’s own rankings.
As generative AI eats away at search, more and more content on the web isn’t designed for humans at all. It’s written (almost certainly by an LLM) to be read by other LLMs and regurgitated to AI chatbot users as an authoritative answer.
But I don’t think this is a stable equilibrium. It might just seem like the next evolution of the digital experience: BBS forums were supplanted by the open chaos of the World Wide Web, which led to social media, which now leads to AI chatbots. But entirely removing the human in the loop destroys what’s actually valuable about the entire online ecosystem. I don’t want to bore you with a full accounting of how the online ad ecosystem works, so I’ll use a simpler example. AI bots can automate certain emails, and potentially save a stressed businessperson some time. But if AI bots control the email for every single businessperson, they just end up creating an endless amount of useless back-and-forth email spam. They ultimately waste time and make the business less economically productive.
The same thing is going to happen to online ecosystems - what’s ultimately valuable is human attention and human resources. An endless loop of AI bots conversing with each other needs an injection of time, attention, or money from outside the AI loop in order to be economically valuable. And as people get tired of obvious slop, they’ll leave, and those systems won’t have anything to sustain them.
Fs in the chat for Yorick
