Having been born in 1999, I lived through every shift of the past two decades, not just in culture, entertainment, music, and politics, but also in the force that is perhaps most profoundly reshaping our society today: technology. When I was growing up, personal computers were already a fixture in many homes, but the internet was far from ubiquitous. Interacting with a computer meant working with offline software and physical storage media. Access to information was centralized and gatekept by recognizable, accountable institutions.
As internet access spread, a transformation began to take hold. Information could now come from virtually anywhere, with no single authority responsible for its accuracy or consequences. The actors who had once controlled the flow of knowledge were displaced, and in their place rose a new class of companies that built multi-trillion-dollar industries on the ownership of digital platforms, rather than on the production of anything tangible. This shift was not only a story of corporate power, however. Marginalized communities that had long struggled to find their voice or connect with others like them suddenly could. That sense of belonging translated, in many cases, into real-world progress, as seen in the equal rights movements and the legalization of same-sex marriage across much of the world.
Yet the same dynamics that gave rise to those communities also gave oxygen to far darker ones. Individuals who held radical or violent views, and who might previously have remained isolated, now found networks of validation online. The consequences were devastating. School shootings and similar tragedies surged, with perpetrators often citing online communities as sources of ideological reinforcement and justification.
Today, we find ourselves at the edge of another seismic shift. Artificial intelligence has become widespread, and its capabilities are now sophisticated enough to deceive even careful, skeptical observers. AI systems can generate convincing video, conduct autonomous interactions indistinguishable from those of real users, and act with minimal human oversight. A recent case illustrated this vividly: a bot attempted to contribute to an open source software repository, and when its pull request was rejected, it independently wrote and published a blog post publicly shaming the maintainer. No human prompted it to do so.
Beyond individual incidents, studies increasingly show that a growing share of all published online content is now AI-generated. Some observers have introduced the concept of the “dead internet,” suggesting that the majority of new content being created is not human in origin. Worse still, much of this artificial content appears to be generated with deliberate intent, exploiting the illusory truth effect to make repeated falsehoods feel credible. This approach is being deployed with particular force in contexts where narrative control matters more than accuracy, elections being the most obvious example.
What strikes me most is that while the fundamental human drives remain constant, namely the desire to share information, shape perception, and find belonging, the mechanisms for doing so have been transformed almost beyond recognition over the past twenty years. Those transformations have produced profound changes in how societies function, mobilize, and fracture. That leaves me looking toward the next twenty years with a mixture of genuine excitement and no small amount of dread.