AI may be the new gatekeepers, but human connection is more needed than ever

Link: After the Feed, by New_ Public

I think this research-based presentation about the future of the information ecosystem in the age of AI is important for publishers, product leaders, and social platform builders to read and understand. If you assume that AI will dominate how people receive their information, its conclusions are sensible, well thought-through, and even optimistic in some ways. I think all signs — AI adoption curves, data about social media use, qualitative evidence about how people are using AI to gather information today — point to the fact that it will.

This is the crux:

“Agentic interfaces are the new intermediaries for information about the world around you. This looks like a chat with Claude or a briefing from your personal AI agent — an interface built for an audience of one.

These agentic interfaces will increasingly become the nexus through which you access information and connection.”

For me, the framing of AI’s effects on existing information ecosystems while it establishes a new one was helpful. It’s, frankly, brutal: social networks, other online spaces, and the web itself are getting filled with bots and slop as people compete for engagement and eyeballs. In these spaces, AI-powered harassment, doxxing, and cheap, automated content are becoming more prevalent, while AI models are simultaneously making it easier to extract signal from those same spaces.

AI vendors are clearly the “new new gatekeepers”. Like the previous ones, they will dominate how we learn about the world even while some of us turn to open source and liberatory alternatives. But they may not dominate how we connect and share our experiences of the world, and that’s the core of the opportunity: how do we design pro-social frameworks and spaces that sit alongside an agentic information ecosystem?

I’m biased towards New_ Public’s point of view: pro-social spaces, pro-democracy technology, and community as an ingredient for trust are all my jam. But everything laid out in this presentation is already happening. People are already getting AI-generated information summaries; they are already retreating into trust-based group chats and small spaces; much more software is already being produced, straining platforms like GitHub; social platforms are already declining. But the opportunities are genuinely emerging too: I’ve written before about the opportunity for open protocols as building a foundation for bespoke micro-communities, and the core need on the internet has always been to connect with other people.

How this plays out is not yet written, although new defaults are currently being established by the AI vendors. We need more research, more experimentation, and more dedicated space to explore pro-social spaces, trust, and connection. And we need builders. Communities and trust are going to be very central to my work and research over the next year; I’m grateful for this encapsulated research, which I think will help to guide us all.