Internet Renoviction
Renovating the Internet With Artificial Intelligence and Model Context Protocol
We tend to think of the internet as one thing, but over time the internet has changed a lot and is now made up of many things, even exotic semi-understood maybe-kinda-exists areas such as the 'dark web'. We used to have a nice fun Internet, e.g. MySpace *cough*, but now it is much different, and indeed will change even more…thanks to AI.
In recent times, the internet has largely been dominated by social networks and application programming interfaces (APIs), consumed largely through web browsers, and searched via Google. However, all of this has the potential to be turned on its head by Artificial Intelligence and its newfound ability to access these pre-existing, highly useful APIs in AI-specific ways using AI-specific tools, such as the recently created Model Context Protocol (MCP).
Whether MCP is the winning ‘AI to API’ technology or not, it seems that we are in for a significant change in terms of the 'interface' of the internet.
Above is an X post by Jeff Weinstein quoting a message from Anthropic about how Claude can now use MCP tools directly. He suggests, as others have, that this is the beginning of a new form of Internet.
AI can't really use APIs directly. They need an intermediary, at least for now. That intermediary will either be MCP (mostly likely given its momentum) or something similar. That means we'll be able to act and use the greater Internet, including all the APIs via the intermediary from within the AI interface we're using, whether that's the ubiquitous and clumsy chatbot model, or through agents that work for us and present information in multiple ways, perhaps through audio or visual methods, or even by rewriting our computer or phone screen entirely (as I've discussed before).
Somewhere between the late 2000’s aggregator sites and the contemporary For You Page, we lost our ability to curate the web. [1]
The internet today is not great. We've lost a lot of the beauty and variety we used to have, and now it's a little less, and it's not clear where it's going. In that sense, some change would be good. Where might this combination of AI and tools take us? Hard to say, but some change is coming, that's for sure.
Point Form
Here's a quick points just to warm up the old brainpan.
Search can be done via AI chat interfaces, or agents
Agents/bots are crawling the web at an unprecedented rate
AI "slop" creating more and more content
Though, that said, AI facilitates content creation
MCP enables "better" use of AI to interact with APIs, and less need to interact with the web via a browser
We used to have websites... do we still? There's a significant lack of curation.
[1] https://www.fromjason.xyz/p/notebook/where-have-all-the-websites-gone/