The internet's collective memory is disappearing — and AI is both the culprit and the casualty. A provocative essay from The Walrus argues that the infrastructure that once made the web a reliable repository of human knowledge is breaking down in real time, and the implications go far beyond bad search results.
The Retrieval Crisis
You've probably noticed it: Google searches increasingly return AI summaries that are confidently wrong. One Colorado resident set up an outdoor projector to watch a sunset, only to find that Google's AI had told them the sunset had already happened. It hadn't. The AI simply invented a time.
This isn't a minor bug. It's a symptom of a deeper problem: the web's knowledge infrastructure is degrading. Link rot erases pages daily. The Library of Congress briefly lost key sections of the U.S. Constitution due to a coding error. And the systems we've built to find and retrieve information are increasingly replaced by systems that generate plausible-sounding answers instead.
The Wikipedia Problem
