The link opening rate on social networks and other media, from Twitter to Substack, is very low. We settle for the summary or the slogan or the parody of the attached information, which we ignore, because going to it would be abandoning the scroll that hypnotizes us. The culture of the link, the hyperlink, the hypertext as a fascinating labyrinth has died thirty years after its birth. And the new relationship with the Internet is no longer one of multiple connections, but of unique responses.
Google surrendered to the evidence a long time ago and, after any search, began to show a summary of the news or Wikipedia on the main screen. Or endless ads. That is to say, Google long ago stopped being an intermediary, a search engine for possible answers, to become a search engine, a seeker, an ambush, the source of unique answers: an end in itself.
In this way he began to dig his own grave: he changed his status as a disordered encyclopedia to that of an oracle. And ChatGPT, Bard or Copilot, due to their conversational nature and language generation, have more virtues to create the illusion that they are your Tiresias, your Delphi, your personal tutor, the machine to produce the answers you think you need. We are going to move, therefore, from the culture of the link to the culture of the single and condensed story, for which we suspend our credulity. Not in vain, one of the actions most asked of generative AI is to make summaries of texts that we will not read. Or to translate us into languages that we do not master.
Thus, what Alessandro Baricco highlighted about Google in The Barbarians is lost: he changed the direct relationship between search and result for a journey through unexpected detours. We return to a more direct, immediate link with the information. Google would therefore be a parenthesis, a transition between the paper library and AI. The good news is that maybe we can get out of a monopoly; The bad news is that the rate of all algorithms is increasing.
In the latest installment of Mission Impossible – that television series from sixty years ago that, three decades ago, became a film – the enemy is no longer Russia or China, but The Entity, a very powerful artificial intelligence. The only way to defeat it is to return to analog technologies. Right now, the best way to be truly informed is to read traditional media or frequent bookstores and libraries. Only there has the data been contrasted, verified. And the model that inspired the link culture is still alive: the endless doors, connections, rereadings, translations that we metaphorize as a forest or labyrinth before thinking of it as a network. It has now become the safety net that welcomes us every time we fall, with its texture of slow but sure time, while digital does not stop accelerating towards post-truth.
