Oct 26, 2026 · 17 min
AI could rebuild the internet at human scale
The End of the Internet
The episode frames artificial intelligence as a chance to replace today’s concentrated internet with a more local and diverse economic model.
- 1The original internet made independent publishing and community-building unusually accessible before platforms concentrated attention and infrastructure.
- 2AI may expand cognitive capacity enough to satisfy needs that markets and institutions previously left unaddressed.
- 3A smaller internet could support many local markets and richer associational life instead of extending one globally scaled system.
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Thompson turns his concern about the internet’s lost independence into an optimistic wager that AI could enable smaller, local markets and communities.
The brief
Ben Thompson revisits the early internet that shaped his blogging career, when individuals could host servers, publish independently, and build communities outside dominant platforms.
Drawing on Venkatesh Rao’s account of abundant intelligence, Thompson presents AI as a transformation comparable to agriculture or industry: cognition could become plentiful rather than subsistence.
The obstacle is economic scale. Global markets and giant corporations make a decentralized future difficult to imagine, especially beside Alexis de Tocqueville’s account of local American associations.
Thompson acknowledges that his own livelihood depends on the internet’s changed form, yet argues its next phase could make software, social life, and markets smaller again.
The episode’s central wager is that AI will not merely strengthen centralized platforms; it could supply the cognitive capacity for a more diverse, local internet.
Books & mentions
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