"The End of the Internet": for Ben Thompson, AI completes the open Web, but opens the era of software for yourself and your loved ones

After a week of serial critical flaws, the author of Stratechery believes that hosting his own site becomes unreasonable, and sees the future in small group software.

Ben Thompson starts with a memory: in 2003, he installed WordPress on a server himself, without knowing anything about security, and it was no problem. The remote code execution flaw affecting all versions of PHP, revealed last week among a series of other vulnerabilities, makes him say that those days are over. Attackers have been limited by their time and ingenuity until now; AI, tireless and capable of replacing trick with iteration, is changing the game. He expects the situation to get worse before it gets better, as defenders also have agents.

It traces the already known cycle of the Web: every space open to all, from blogs to social networks, ended up drowning in abundance, with aggregators capturing value. The outcomes that worked consisted of shrinking: subscription for a loyal niche, then private discussion groups. The public Web would now become a battlefield at best, a desert at worst, especially since AI consumes content and attention without returning traffic.

The path of hope follows the same logic. Since AI makes software creation almost free, it becomes possible to develop applications for a single person or a small team: Stratechery already uses several in-house, from podcast production to calendar management, which will never be published. Thompson sees this as a potentially larger market than that of consumer applications.