They say AI will replace the web as we know it, and this time they mean it. Here follows a short list of previous times they also meant it, starting way back in 1997.

Wired: March 1, 1997: “You can kiss your web browser goodbye” – Kevin Kelly and Gary Wolf, The Big Story.

Inspired by the success of PointCast, a clever application that displayed news headlines as a screensaver, our “Push!” story argued that Web browsers were about to become obsolete. 

(I repeat, this was 1997. The Wayback machine was roughly one year old. Primitive CSS was newly available in IE3, but most folks at the time continued to use the Netscape browser, which they bought on disc at their neighborhood computing store.)

Wired: May 1, 2004: “The Return of Push!” – Gary Wolf. 

Though I dubbed it “the worst story Wired ever published,” I quickly began to get feedback from readers who argued that the predictions in the piece were coming true after all. The inspiring technology this time is RSS, a specification that allows easy syndication of news, blogs, and other frequently updated sources.

There is a clear parallel between the excitement of the PointCast days and the enthusiasm for RSS today, one that goes further than easy harvesting of news headlines. Search engine results, product information, new music, notification of recent blog comments, and many other types of digital information are becoming available through RSS. This dialect of XML brings us the Web as an evolving environment: customizable, variable in intensity, and always on. This is the old promise of push. We can see the potential for radically new types of media – again.

To be fair, whereas the 1997 story made mountains out of an early “push” app, this 2004 second attempt to declare the web dead caught a moment of genuine game change as RSS, Atom, and XML provided dependable web standards (not a lone application, as in the 1997 piece) for syndication.

But syndication, of course, did not kill the web; it brought forward much of its inherent value. All praise to Dave Winer and his confederates for RSS and Atom, and to WaSP member Tim Bray and his colleagues for XML: here’s a contemporary history of how that standard came to be.

You’d think Wired would be tired (see what I did there?) of hyping the end of the platform that gave the magazine its relevance, but no:

Wired: August 17, 2018: “The Web Is Dead. Long Live the Internet.” – Chris Anderson and Michael Wolff, The Big Story.

Two decades after its inception, the World Wide Web has been eclipsed by Skype, Netflix, peer-to-peer, and a quarter-million other apps.

(Observation: A Wolf wrote or co-wrote the first two articles, and a Woolf co-wrote the third. A meaningless coincidence, but if this were politics instead of tech, there would doubtless be a whole QAnon-style conspiracy theory about it. Especially since Woolf is often a Jewish surname. But I digress.)

The web profoundly changed the world, for better and worse, with the jury still out on some charges, but one thing hasn’t changed: every few years someone in an intellectual leadership position declares the web kaput. It survived previous bubbles (starting with the dot-com crash) and has proved hardy enough to continue providing profound benefits and hazards to the entire world, absorbing and deepening new technologies rather than succumbing to them.

Look, I understand why AI is bigger than Pointcast and how it is disrupting anything it can be stuck in, but the web is not going away. ’Cause think about it for five minutes, which is four and a half minutes longer than the authors of the previous hype cycles appear to have done. If AI kills the web that provides the information AI sucks down, then there is no contemporary body of news and text for AI to suck down and regurgitate. It would be like a parasite that kills the host body. There are occasionally such things in nature, but mostly, life finds a way, mostly. And so will the web. Now a word about those self-driving cars….