Let’s look beyond the specifics for a moment and consider what happened here.
A beloved, useful, free website, run carefully by a competent, honest person for nearly thirty years, was crushed between two features of the new AI economy.
Unsustainable machine traffic hammered it from above, and in all likelihood a financially motivated intruder, operating in a world where breaking into websites has never been easier, took it down.
Bruce’s business and livelihood survived only because the website was not the whole business.
Others have not been so fortunate. Just last week, ZEGO, a German textile firm that had been in business for 37 years, filed for insolvency after a single cyberattack in March shut down its production for six weeks. Unlike The Numbers, they had no other business to fall back on.
The web is full of independent archives, hobby databases, local news sites, forums, reference works. Decades of accumulated human effort, running on old code, maintained by small teams or single individuals, quietly holding up far more of our shared knowledge than anyone acknowledges.
The Numbers is coming back, better built than before. I would encourage you to keep using it, keep supporting it, and, if you are one of the many people who emailed Bruce in fury about a missing page, perhaps send a kinder one now you know why it was missing.
Context:
If you work in or around the film industry, there is a decent chance you have used the work of The Numbers this month, whether you realise it or not.
Its hand-researched data is the highest quality, tracking box office grosses, budgets, home video and streaming across more than 78,000 films and 236,000 people. It gets north of eight million visitors a year, and is treated as THE definitive authority by journalists, academics, filmmakers, prediction markets, and even Guinness World Records.
AI tools are some of the most powerful and destructive things humans have ever created. And they are being effectively tested by the public in real time in the real world. When the Manhattan Project was trying to work out the power of their atomic tech, they did not do so by sending everyone the specs each morning and seeing which houses blew up.
Honestly, this. In their desperate attempt to break even, AI companies are throwing everything they can at the wall to see what sticks, without any due regard as to its effects on society at large…
Which unfortunately have proven time and time again to be horribly corrosive towards human culture.
In this case, we are a little behind schedule, but working to rapidly catch up.
In the Cyberpunk TTRPG universe, the original internet (known as the Net) collapsed during a catastrophic event called the DataKrash, which occurred on June 3, 2022.
And the new net will be ID-gated for everyone. Everything said and done will be tracked and known to state actors.
For the children. You have to think of the children.
/s but also actually what they say.
Poor title, but pretty interesting article. The future of the internet is going to be wild.
What future?
Slaves?
I meant the Internet doesn’t have a future, it’s already half dead
Oh.
The Internet itself surely will continue, but yes the “free and open” version is already gone (how to test this: attempt to self-host a website now, like a Lemmy instance, and see how long until AI scrapers bring it to its knees).
Yea, like the matrix, the Internet is now an intrinsically dangerous place where anyone is potentially some highly capable AI with potentially very malicious intent.
deleted by creator
