I was one of the internet’s first influencers. AI just killed the whole category — and created something better

About 28 years ago, I was reporting a story from my desk at Wired titled “The Hot New Medium Is … Email.” This was an unusually personal report because I was partly its subject — a creator of a then-novel phenomenon: the viral internet newsletter. Think Substack circa 1995, made by hand, when maybe there were only 16 million people on the internet. As I explained to Wired readers back in the day: “Meme is my newsletter, delivered once a month via electronic mail to 4,400 subscribers… What counts is who reads it.” I was, in today’s language, an early influencer. The early internet offered “an idealized picture” where “ideas flow freely” — and I desperately wanted to believe it could work. What began as a land of artisanal knowledge-makers cultivating gardens of wisdom became an industrial farming operation powered by social media platforms. On the internet of 2026, people speak of “infobesity” — gorged on processed information from unknown sources, an intellectual abattoir where bits of everything are thrown together with one purpose: to hook us on the feed. We know it’s bad for us. We can’t put it down. In this slurry of addictive information, people craved the authentic — and influencer culture emerged as a tonic. Here were native guides doing the research for us, helping us make sense of the low-stakes (handbags, smoothies) and increasingly the high-stakes: longevity, retirement, parenting. Yet as with so much that starts as sincere human-to-human connection online, the higher the stakes, the more conflicted the influencer’s role became. Is it entertainment or discernment? In spring 2020, it became a survival technology. A terrifying pandemic with no vaccine and no easy explanations sent millions of us to our screens for answers. Into this panicked information vacuum stepped people with charisma — “rizz” — who did their own research on COVID and taught us, maybe, how we