Welcome to the internet

A lecture series on how the infrastructure of the internet is changing — and why that matters to anyone who reads the web, publishes on it, takes data from it, or builds agents that go out into it. Coming soon.

We talk a great deal about what AI does. We talk much less about the environment it evolves alongside. Models are trained on the web, search it, cite it, and increasingly stand between it and the reader — and the web is changing in response, in what gets crawled, what stays indexed, which interfaces remain open, and what is therefore reachable at all. That second half of the pair deserves the same attention as the first, because it is where the assumptions sit.

The internet is a large shadow on the wall of Plato’s cave. It is a model of the world, and a strange one: everything that reaches you through it has passed through decisions about what was published, what was collected, what was ranked, and what was shown. Those decisions are the assumptions of the model. Reading anything off the web with the right amount of trust means knowing what they are, and noticing when they change.

I wrote my master’s thesis on these systems. That does not make me right about every detail, or my experiment methodologically flawless, much as I worked at it. It does mean I have read most of the current research literature on the subject, and these lectures are an attempt to hand on what is in it.

The lectures will be published here in English, free and open to anyone.