[robbedpeter]

Not necessarily - federated media, webs of trust, and diligent curation across many smaller communities could allow for something that replaces Twitter, reddit, and centralized media hubs. Search within that context is easier - p2p/torrent streaming with crypto incentivized seeding can scale distribution.

The current state of adtech and near total surveillance isn't sustainable as more people wake up to the downsides, and as fake crap begins to accumulate.

Decentralization of social media, advertising, e-commerce and other web 2.0 staples will be a natural evolution of technology. The story goes "under Google's model of the walled garden web, SEO, spam, and bots achieved parity in all content metrics except actual meaningfulness to the user." Despite having all the compute and talent you could possibly bring together, Google is failing to uphold its core technology. They incentivized bad faith behavior, and are reaping the consequences of that. The acceleration of seo hacking and artificial worthless content is asymmetrical to the acceleration of the capabilities and market model Google has created.

A search engine can navigate self selected communities, human curated lists, and creatively bundle lists of lists to achieve high quality results based on actual humans self selecting and acting in their own interests. You can do things with higher quality classification and even provide regex over crawled data without huge technical barriers. Search agents will come about, whether locally or cloud hosted, and will eventually replace centralized engines like Google.

There are non doomed visions of the future. Maybe we won't suffer a digital trashocalypse.