Today's track: In The Waiting Line — Zero 7

I was talking to my father the other day and we both landed on the same thing: it feels like there's almost nothing left to grab onto out there.

Twitter. Social media. TV. Movies. Just — surface. Easy. Gone in ten seconds.

For a while I thought it was me. ADD brain, too much going on, can't slow down enough to appreciate anything.

Then I looked at the data.

According to Imperva's 2025 Bad Bot Report, automated systems accounted for 51% of all web traffic last year. First time in history bots outnumbered people online. And that's not some fringe stat — that's a trillion-request dataset across thousands of domains.

Bad bots alone — scrapers, fraud tools, manipulation engines — now account for 37% of all traffic. Up from 30% the year before.

Ahrefs analyzed 900,000 newly published web pages in April 2025. 74% contained AI-generated content. Only a quarter of new content is purely human-written.

One Menlo Ventures partner put it plainly: "About half of the internet is AI-written. Chatbots and AI tools summarize that material and hand it back to you. You end up reading machines summarizing other machines."

You weren't imagining the emptiness. You were feeling it accurately.

The internet isn't a place where humans talk to humans anymore. It's mostly machines generating content for algorithms to index, scrapers to harvest, and AI to train on — which then generates more content for more machines. Around and around.

And it's getting worse. 30–40% of the active web is now synthetic. Models are being trained on it. Each generation introduces distortions that compound. A July 2024 Nature paper called it "model collapse" — when AI trains on AI output, over successive generations, diversity collapses and the outputs start producing nonsense.

The feed isn't just shallow. It's eating itself.

Meanwhile, the economic infrastructure that paid for real content is collapsing.

Zero-click Google searches jumped from 56% to 69% in a single year. Business Insider lost 55% of its organic search traffic between 2022 and 2025. Stereogum lost 70% of its ad revenue last year. Gartner predicts search engine volume drops another 25% by late 2026 as people move to AI chatbots instead.

The people who used to get paid to know things and write them down? The model that funded them is gone.

So where are the real humans?

Behind walls. Substack hit a $1.1 billion valuation — 5 million paid subscriptions, 100 million monthly readers. Private Discord servers. Paid newsletters. Invitation-only communities. Quality human conversation is increasingly paywalled or earned.

Which — not coincidentally — is exactly what this is.

I've been making my own shift.

Carl Jung. Meditations by Marcus Aurelius. Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass. The Poppy War by R.F. Kuang.

Denser stuff. The kind that takes something from you to read. Going from chips to steak.

It's harder — especially with ADD. There's a reason chips exist. But I keep coming back to this: the scroll isn't feeding me, and I'm tired of being hungry.

I'm curious what you've found.

What's actually cutting through for you? What are you reading, watching, listening to — that gives you something real?

I was feeling all this before I was diagnosed with cancer, but now it seems to feel even more magnified.

Warmly,
Rob Bergeron
Owner–Realtor at Award-Winning Winner Realty
OffMarket.deals | Property Partner Data Company

PS: If you've got a book, a podcast, a ritual — something that actually fills you up — send it my way. I'll share the best ones back.