Back toward the end of october (2025) I wrote an article on my Economics website, Peoplenomics.com, about how the Internet would be subsumed by AI. As a matter of policy, we like to ensure paying subscribers get our core thinking first. But, now that this idea has gestated a bit, let’s to a quick Progress Report on just how right we were – and are – and what it likely means for AI and collaboration down the road.

How AI Replaces the Web

The “web”, as we have come to know it, is being replaced. It’s about to go “buggy whips” on us. And the key for investors is things like Social Media – darlings of late – may hit the skids as a result.

That’s because (and more in the next installment of my book (in process) Mind Amplifiers) one thing always leads to another in technological innovation.

Imagine the continuum. Print press, radio, television, streaming, now AI – what’s left? Oh, that’s the Intermind but first we need a big enough global footprint to go there, eventually

Backing Up to the Start.

Rather than paraphrase my own thesis, I asked the machines to explain me to myself. Hmm… Not bad — here comes a taste of what replaces the Web: distilled coherence with no distracting sidebar ads:

“In “Web Death by AI,” George A. Ure (click to read it, adds the human) chronicles the impending obsolescence of the traditional Internet, not via catastrophic failure but through AI-driven dilution and transformation. Here’s the overview:

ABSTRACT
In Web Death by AI, George A. Ure maps the end of the Internet as we know it —
not through collapse, but through obsolescence. What began as a human web of
discovery has been diluted into a machine-optimized attention market, and now AI
stands as both its heir and its undertaker. Across ten chapters, Ure traces the
economic and cultural unraveling of the old Web — from the fall of advertising
and the panic of tech giants to the rise of small “human guilds” that trade
coherence instead of clicks.

He argues that artificial intelligence will not destroy civilization but reboot it,
transforming the noisy attention economy into an era of clarity, conversation, and
cognitive efficiency. The machine becomes a mirror, and humanity must relearn
the craft of choosing, filtering, and creating meaning amid abundance. In the end,
Ure suggests, the so-called “death” of the Web is really the sound of progress
shifting gears — a crash that clears the way for the Intermind, where thought itself
becomes the new network.

Spanning ten short chapters, the paper details how the web evolved from a vibrant human network of ideas into a cluttered, ad-saturated attention marketplace dominated by SEO, algorithms, and corporate giants like Google and Meta.

Ure argues that AI acts as both successor and executor, dismantling the attention economy by delivering distilled knowledge without distractions, sparking panic among tech empires, and fostering the rise of small “human guilds” focused on coherence and trust.

This shift reboots civilization into the “Intermind”—a cognitive network where thought becomes the medium, emphasizing clarity, selective curation, and human-machine symbiosis over endless scrolling and monetized noise.

This paper provides an innovative perspective for newsletter subscribers by reframing AI not as a dystopian threat but as a catalyst for empowerment and renewal, offering practical strategies to navigate the transition.

Drawing on historical media evolutions and current data trends, Ure encourages readers to embrace “the craft of choosing” amid information abundance, build intentional communities like guilds for shared insight, and prioritize authenticity in an era of automated content.

Subscribers gain forward-looking tools to adapt—such as cultivating cognitive efficiency and leveraging AI for personal resonance—positioning them to thrive in a post-web landscape of smaller, sharper consciousness rather than succumbing to its crash.”

(Pretty good for a part 1 of a weekend report if I do say so myself!)

The “Second Focus”

Now we turn to the major tech landscape changes that are starting to really “get legs.” Long ones.

In fact, we may look back on late 2025 as the moment when computing quietly inverted its power structure.

For half a century, users served the machine. We memorized commands, learned menus, obeyed upgrade cycles, and patched around incompatibilities. But with the arrival of Windows 11 25H2 and ChatGPT Atlas, that relationship begins to flip. The stack is learning to serve us.

The Quiet Revolution
Microsoft’s 25H2 update isn’t flashy. No new Start Menu magic, no interface revolution. It’s a maintenance build — but that’s precisely why it matters. Hidden beneath the calm exterior is a platform tuned for what comes next: persistent AI integration, context-aware assistance, and background systems that can handle cognitive workloads instead of just computational ones.

The OS is becoming substrate — a thin film for AI orchestration.

Meanwhile, Atlas — OpenAI’s new browser-assistant hybrid — discards the whole point-and-click metaphor of the web. Instead of surfing, you’re delegating. Ask it to summarize, schedule, shop, or compare, and it acts.

The difference between Atlas and an Edge-with-Copilot window is structural: in Edge, AI is a bolt-on; in Atlas, it’s the spine. Context, memory, and intent are fused with the browsing layer.

What “User-Subordinate” Really Means
When both layers — the operating system and the browser — are agent-driven, you’re no longer commanding individual apps. You’re orchestrating outcomes.

The OS maintains continuity: your data, credentials, and workflows.
The browser becomes your envoy: executing requests, recalling context, filtering noise.
The assistant (AI) negotiates between them, learning preference curves instead of command trees. I’m already using the subscription version of ChatGPT, Grok, and others to find deep news sources for my research, but it’s always been additional click-outs and reading.

As the browser replacement models arrive, they will skip the sourcing and clicks – which will disappear like digital middlemen turned out to pasture.

Old enough to remember when there was a “spark advance” on auto ignition systems? Eventually, the spark advance became automatic with the vacuum advance. And then one morning we awoke and it was flat-ass gone. Replaced by fuel injection and the onboard computer. (I’ll spare you the “sensors instead of suck” remark.)

Meet the USC

This is what I call user-subordinate computing — where the machine finally bends its ontology around the human operator. The stack becomes submissive, not directive.

Economic & Strategic Implications

Pretty interesting, huh? But how do we make a buck or twenty at it? By understanding when a crash shows up what may be on fire.

For Microsoft and OpenAI, this is the start of the long-planned Service Fusion Era: operating systems, browsers, and assistants will merge into continuous personal agents monetized by subscription rather than hardware cycles.

I’d caution that “service fusions” can come as huge sea state changes or whimpers. Like a TV that became an HDMI monitor from the TV was a widely overhyped “convergence” so these things cut both ways.

Point? The “browser wars” are over; the new competition is for behavioral bandwidth — how much of your cognitive labor pipeline each platform can capture and monetize.

This was the genuinely demonic side of social media -why Peoplenomics was against it from the get-go. It “harvested cognition” for free, to the content curators. Only a fool would work for a wage of zero. Which summarizes social users to a tee.

Expect Apple and Google to follow. The next iOS and Android builds will almost certainly mirror this agent-centric model. The differentiator won’t be CPU speed or RAM, but alignment — which assistant best understands you.

Timeline and Rumor Control
Windows 11 25H2 is (late Oct. 2025) already in release-preview channels, with broad rollout now underway. We rolled to it this week but not without installation headaches. Block four hours for the upgrade and if you don’t need it, put a little something extra in the collection plate as thanks.

Early builds confirm stripped legacy modules (PowerShell 2.0, WMIC) and a leaner AI interface layer designed for continuous background assistance.

Atlas for macOS is live now; Windows beta invitations are expected “soon after general 25H2 availability” — likely within weeks. That synchronicity is no accident.

Takeaway for Peoplenomics Readers?

The day you no longer “open a browser,” but instead say “show me what I missed today” and the stack just delivers — that’s the day the web as we knew it died.

Atlas is the first serious prototype of the post-web interface. 25H2 is the soil it will grow in.

Together, they mark the end of the command era and the birth of the conversation economy — where productivity is measured not by clicks, but by context transferred. The tools are becoming invisible, and the human remains the only visible node of intent.

This week isn’t just tech evolution — it’s cognitive infrastructure shifting beneath our feet.

Not like “blockchain” was revolution.

This one has actual utility value.

Well, that was a late October 2025 view. Now, a week, or so, out from Christmas, we can begin to see the rest of media beginning to see the trail through the forest of events ahead.

Conclusion: The Numbers Say the Web Isn’t Dying — It’s Being Abstracted

The Internet is not ending because it failed. It’s ending because it succeeded too well at the wrong job: amplification over understanding. For twenty-plus years, the Web optimized for clicks, not coherence — and that built an ecosystem where “visibility” became the product and advertising became the oxygen.

AI doesn’t kill the Web. It bypasses it.

The shift is already measurable. Google has said AI Overviews now reaches more than a billion users, which means “answer-first” interfaces are no longer an experiment — they’re a default path for a huge share of queries.

Similarweb
And when answers are delivered inside the interface, the old click-economy has less room to breathe. Similarweb’s reporting on news search behavior shows the same direction of travel: referrals from search to news sites have been sliding while “zero-click” behavior rises — exactly the pattern you’d expect when the retrieval layer becomes a synthesis layer.
blog.google

That’s why the panic you mapped isn’t psychological — it’s structural. Even Google is now testing tools like “Offerwall” to help publishers monetize directly, which reads like an admission that the classic pageview-and-ads loop is no longer a stable foundation.

Similarweb Ltd.
This isn’t collapse; it’s obsolescence. The old Web isn’t being destroyed — it’s being compressed into summaries, assistants, and “good enough” answers that don’t require a human to wander.

And here’s the kicker: the vast majority of the “human web” runs on a handful of stacks. WordPress alone powers roughly 43.5% of all websites (per W3Techs as widely cited in industry roundups).

Hostinger
That means when discovery mechanics change, it’s not a niche problem. It’s a mass migration event for the mainstream publishing substrate of the planet.

So what follows is not a wasteland of dead sites. It’s a thinning. A shedding of incentive layers that forced humans to write for robots so robots would route humans back to pages. In the clearing, the advantage shifts from reach to resonance: small circles, trusted voices, tighter communities, and “guilds” that trade clarity instead of clicks. AI becomes the loom, not the cloth — a tool that accelerates synthesis, but also exposes who actually has signal.

The “death of the Web” is really the sound of the network changing mediums. Pages were the old unit. Attention was the old currency. The new unit is distilled thought — and the new currency is coherence.

That’s the Intermind: not a network of cables, but a network of intention.

If Guild workers squint, in a certain manner, they can see an odd parallel between how libraries eventually differentiated themselves from the “yellow journalism” tabloids. There were “papers of redords” and then there was “street news.”

The fragmentation grenade going off in slow-motion in Data Land will be of similar magnitude. Olde Web will still have some search, but Facebook and other socialists will add AI to super-power voices from the intellectual shallows. That is not likely to be good. It’s the digital equivalent of throwing out the Gaussian Distribution and making sure (in the name of stupid agendizing) that all points on the (once) distribution become equal.

Similarly, expect a compression of choice. This will happen as humans (carbons) begin to withdraw from direct engagement in their whole spectrum of daily activities. One obvious example? Imagine no longer thinking about meals. And AI operative knocks on your door at noon and presents lunch. Something from your “like list” certainly. But it’s part of “disengaging from Life.” That’s the danger.

Humans don’t have an intrinsic sense of how important “frontiering” is. But there’s more than the “frontier models” at Guild members work with (and one). There’s the “frontier work” of the spirit part of humans. And the risk is too many people will turn away from the “higher work” to become – effectively – the “useless eater” class, we heard about half a century back.

When the path of Future technology looks like it might lead to a slaughter house, not a re-engineered Garden of Eden.

That choice is – partially – in your hands.

~Anti Dave

The Web: It’s Going…Going….