single use tech in the fluid internet

diary entry on artifacts, technology as an ecosystem of material, and generative ui

if it hasn’t been coined before, mint it now with me: single-use tech.

as agents, chatbots and products such as claude spit “artifacts” as live machines to each prompt, the world blinks awake. as ai products struggle to break out of their chatbot forms, they manifest themselves – our ideas – the one-time brunch invite – the sudden worry to address – in living software.

you see it on the side of the digital street. whether it’s biodegradable or whether it’s starting its insidious seep into the techno-sphere is yet to be determined. what we know is that it’s everywhere now, and it’s changing our habits of creation in tech, and further driving technology as a material of ephemeral experience; code as a spectral, intermediary force of creation. does it dissolve clean? does it form a stepping stone to a fully fluid internet, with generative ui? is it already vestigial, or soon to be dangerous?

a “live artifact” is something made to be found again. it waits to be abandoned. it bristles alive already marked with dust. agents are eager to make, eager to overshoot an ask – the other day, i asked how they’d structure a day with a couple strange interdependencies, coffees and windy tasks – it returned a fully formatted html file, complete with bento boxes, thin lines around each “am” and “pm”. i would have been happy with a .txt. it felt like gift wrap three times the size of the object. i felt ceremonial.

but ceremony for the everyday is necessary. it’s the birthing place of connection, and innovation. a lift from the doldrums of what’s necessary, up to the level of what’s possible.

no longer do you have to save the custom napkins, invites, immersive experiences for a wedding. you’ll be able to buy a new dress for each dinner. you can celebrate and honor the everyday occasion. build portals on the all-consuming screen. create nooks to land in. there is less pressure to generalize when every website can be custom fit for the shape of every day, every occasion, every meeting.

without worry of maintenance, without the initial hurdles of creation, single-use tech fulfills the original dream of fun – customization – technology as a medium, a material.

it was partially celebrated around dot com. people had websites for their families, for updates, for a single fascination, for creation and customization – the way one would decorate a room in their house.

on instagram, carousels in serif lowercase abound with curations of “internet corners”. stop and sniff the flowers. burn your cd here. make a custom bow. draw a flower, with the mechanics of ms paint but the newfound glee of finding your mark on the digital world.

it’s the glee of after some years of corporations owning the search queue with ads, and products meant to generalize – not specify – finding something without immediate commercial use. as we stopped visiting the internet, and started living entirely within it, we’ve lost touch with the creative medium of a magical screen and power of wiring it up. (without even talking vr or hardware.)

it’s giddiness, it’s freedom, it’s the imagination of malleable screen and tech as a creative form. but it can also overlook some hungrier dangers.

coding agents’ explosive abilities create tinder with each generation.

it’s like we’re being served a matchbox and a quick-start guide:

1. many things can catch fire. (positive)
2. many things can catch fire. (negative)

on the flammable side is security. there are worries for personal projects that involve the private information of others; for products without proper infrastructure. for the soft underbelly of wonder (created with agents) to be attacked by the hunter for profit (also an agent).

from model companies, there is an understandable incentive for token-spending. these attempts for enterprise tooling, single-look dashboards, are ways to access intelligence outside of the chatbot structure. yet without the foresight behind them, many artifacts meant to serve as longer-term tools are mostly abandoned as yesterday’s structures. if the chatbot was our first gateway form factor to intelligence, the artifact is only our second – it gives us a glimpse of one-time customizability, but it doesn’t adapt to new and changing demands.

it is here where the imagination for a fluid internet is born. (some call it generative ui.) maybe the artifact is a helpful waypoint. maybe the artifact holds shape for one afternoon, speaking for the force underneath which wants to stay liquid.

perhaps we were never meant to traverse the internet in the language of architecture. by architecture, i mean columns, bridges, and buildings: things that have been planned for a purpose, designed rigidly around some spec, and brought to life by a dedicated team.

see: previously, the internet was built by humans. then, it was populated by endless system data. now, it is mostly being written by agents. soon, perhaps it will grow like a fluid, driven by demand, not by growth itself.

then, we would be traveling the internet as a material, a medium. like oobleck: the non-newtonian fluid from elementary school. generative video/world models will shape an internet that will shape itself to a user’s exploration. the virtual world will flex, opening itself up to a new mode of discovery. every surface will get equal weight; your journey will be attended to, evenly covered with technological material. we will click as a way of poking the universe. i will not need to search or sift the files, or scroll through pages with a filter in mind. a webpage will gain temporal depth, and ascend from webpage to platform, material.

(but immediately, there are other realities: when things grow non-deterministic, echo chambers lose their windows and drill further down; ads become more targeted; the world could predict us, pins us down even further instead of opening up.)

humans have always reached for the everlasting – the potion of immortality, the diamond, the theoretical equation, the authored mind.

but we have yet to create the continuum. for now, we have only perpetuated the cycle. whether that is our delightful fate – creating artifacts for ceremonies, calling for software that blinks awake for one afternoon and asks nothing after – or the mark of another vestigial structure? it’s a story yet to be told.