# How the web became a wasteland **Opening (not a real abstract):** When I first got a smartphone, I remember thinking: “I’ll never be bored again.” How wrong that was. The internet now leaves me cold. My daily browsing has shrunk to a few websites – the Atlantic, Reddit, BBC News – and I have replaced social media with newsletters, including the New Statesman’s excellent Saturday Read. The open web has been degrading for years and is now a wasteland of ugly adverts, intrusive marketing, hallucinated sources and plausible deepfakes. This is tragic. I’m old enough to remember a time when Google results were useful. Then they were gamed by SEO wizards, who found tricks to juice their website’s rankings at the expense of useful information. Next, Google pumped the first page full of adverts: never try searching for a named hotel, all you’ll see are its competitors. And now, **Authors:** [[NEW STATESMAN]]