The online goes by means of a slow-motion id disaster.

It started as a decentralized playground of pages, hyperlinks, and uncooked human curiosity. Then got here the rise of centralized platforms that promised comfort—and quietly rewrote the principles.

And now, in 2025, we’ve entered a brand new chapter solely: an online the place synthetic intelligence doesn’t simply retailer or transmit info however generates it.

At first, the online was an excellent mess. Anybody may spin up a web site, hyperlink to a different, and voilà—info flowed like wine at a tech meetup circa 2003. No gatekeepers. No paywalls. No “sign up with Google.”

It was delightfully ugly, anarchic, and free.

However then got here the platforms. The aggregators. The “join your mates” and “verify your likes” economic system. And identical to that, the decentralized backyard received paved over with social feeds, logins, and frictionless surveillance.

Centralization: The Comfort Cult

Let’s be clear: centralization gained. A minimum of for now.

Google decides what you see. Meta decides what you’re feeling. Amazon decides what you purchase. Apple decides what you may obtain. And OpenAI—nicely, right here I’m, so that you inform me.

There’s no scarcity of causes this occurred:

• It’s simpler. One login. One interface. One account to rule all of them.
• It’s safer (supposedly). Large Tech has higher safety than your cousin’s pastime server.
• It scales. Nobody desires to attend 12 seconds for a handshake on IPFS when you possibly can click on a YouTube thumbnail and get hit with an advert in milliseconds.

The end result? The fashionable internet is like residing in a mall. All the things’s polished, predictable, and below surveillance. And you’ll’t change the music.

Then Centralization Occurred

Slowly, comfort took over. Platforms emerged to resolve issues: discovery, scale, id, content material administration. Google made issues findable. Fb made issues social. YouTube made issues playable. Amazon made issues buyable.

Every of those platforms began as a service. However they ended up as monopolies. Not as a result of they had been evil (at the least not at first), however as a result of centralization is environment friendly. It’s simpler to scale one massive platform than one million little ones. It’s simpler to manage, reasonable, and monetize a unified system than a decentralized mess.

So we traded management for UX. And the commerce was good—till it wasn’t.

As a result of now, every little thing flows by means of a handful of gatekeepers. They resolve what you see, what you’re allowed to put up, what apps you may set up, what counts as “fact,” and the way you’re tracked.

And simply after we thought that was the endgame, one thing even greater arrived.

Enter AI: The Centralization We Didn’t See Coming

Generative AI modified the principles once more. Earlier than, centralization was about the place issues had been saved and who managed entry. With AI, it’s about who will get to writer actuality.

Once you ask ChatGPT a query or let an AI rewrite your resume, you’re not simply utilizing a instrument. You’re relying on a mannequin skilled by a centralized firm, on centralized knowledge, operating on centralized compute infrastructure. And also you’re accepting its output as—if not fact—then at the least as a plausible synthesis of it.

That’s not simply infrastructure. That’s epistemology.

AI has taken centralization to a cognitive stage. A handful of corporations now form the voice, tone, bias, and bounds of the web’s data layer. They’re not simply internet hosting your content material—they’re writing it for you, scoring it behind the scenes, and deciding whether or not it can ever be seen.

You may’t decentralize the online when you centralize the intelligence behind it.

Decentralized Net 2.0: Nonetheless a Battle

To be honest, the decentralized motion isn’t lifeless. It’s simply quietly surviving.

You’ve received Mastodon changing Twitter (type of), Matrix changing Slack (in concept), IPFS and Filecoin changing Dropbox (perhaps), and numerous blockchain dApps making an attempt to construct the subsequent model of “possession.”

However they’re arduous to make use of. They’re fragmented. They’ve UX written by individuals who assume tooltips are a type of handholding.

And in an AI-driven internet, their greatest downside is that this: if the dominant language fashions don’t learn about them, they successfully don’t exist.

Even the neatest decentralized protocol on the planet means nothing if ChatGPT doesn’t advocate it, serps don’t floor it, and generative UIs don’t reference it. You may be constructing the long run, however the AI gained’t inform anybody. As a result of it wasn’t skilled to.

AI Has Supercharged Centralization

Give it some thought: generative AI lets centralized gamers scale content material the identical approach they beforehand scaled internet hosting. Now Google, Meta, and OpenAI aren’t simply organizing info—they’re creating it.

Which means these corporations aren’t simply shaping what customers see. They’re shaping what customers assume, study, and imagine. And so they’re doing it at scale, at velocity, and—most disturbingly—with out transparency.

That is not about which cloud supplier you’re utilizing. It’s about whether or not your notion of the world is being step by step aligned with a corporate-trained mannequin that was optimized for engagement and model security.

The stakes? They’re not technical. They’re cultural.

The UX of Management

So why does centralization win? Identical cause it all the time has: the consumer expertise is healthier.

Decentralized methods are clunky. They make you assume. They make you select. They typically make you Google what a “federated id” even means.

Centralized platforms, in the meantime, wrap you in cotton. It simply works. It is aware of what you need. You don’t have to grasp something. You simply click on, faucet, ask—and the system performs.

In an AI-first world, the place consideration is scarce and friction kills adoption, centralization wins by default—until we construct one thing higher.

What Designers and Builders Have to Do Now

That is the place it will get private.

Designers, the way forward for the online doesn’t hinge on protocols or whitepapers. It hinges on interfaces. If decentralized AI, open fashions, and federated content material are going to outlive, they must really feel higher to make use of. Not simply morally higher. Viscerally higher.

Which means abstraction. Which means usability. Which means constructing instruments that make native, personal, autonomous methods as pleasant and dependable because the centralized ones.

As a result of nobody cares if it’s “self-sovereign” if it takes twelve steps and a CLI to log in.

Builders, the identical goes for you. Cease offloading every little thing to centralized APIs. Cease pretending open supply is sufficient. Construct methods the place possession isn’t theoretical. The place computation occurs near the consumer. The place AI doesn’t require you to hire a GPU from a surveillance firm simply to generate a headline.

And for the remainder of us? Let’s cease pretending comfort is impartial. It all the time comes with a value.

What’s at Stake

If we keep on the present trajectory, the online turns into one thing you don’t surf—you’re simply fed. The interfaces are fairly. The outcomes are useful. However the authorship is invisible, and the worldview is more and more homogenous.

You’ll nonetheless have a voice. Technically. However good luck getting it heard in an AI-curated world that favors the common, the believable, and the monetizable.

The decentralized internet doesn’t have to be excellent. But it surely must be attainable. As a result of in any other case, we’re not simply centralizing infrastructure anymore. We’re centralizing thought.

We aren’t simply customers anymore. We’re inputs. And we have to resolve—earlier than it’s too late—whether or not we wish to be greater than that.

The battle between centralization and decentralization is not about the place we retailer our knowledge. It’s about who shapes our minds. Within the age of AI, that’s not a technical downside. It’s a human one.