@mjd (thanks- this made me write down some of the thoughts I've been kicking around for a bit!)

"publish freely and for free" is also my site's situation, but it is a privileged one.

My mom's website is a funnel for her books, courses, services, etc. It is useful for her to publish helpful things for people to learn from; and to have those indexed in search; so that when people look for an answer to a question, they find out about her, and may wind up giving her money in the future.

Someone *can* scrape what she writes and re-post it, sure. And that's (in my opinion) a bad thing to do, because now the person who has done the work doesn't get any benefits from it: reputation, income, whatever. People *can* do that- SEO farms, image-sharing sites, whatnot- but as long as there is enough traffic going to the author/creator, there's still a viable business in "write for the web". (There is at least some legal consensus around this idea in the form of copyright law- that an author should be compensated for their work.)

What happens to that business model if "search" leads, not to the author's site, but to a hologram of it? Without providing the author any benefit, in citation (reputation), ad revenue, or sales funnel?

Some authors (like you, maybe? and like me?) will still write and publish. Wikipedia editors will still edit! The web doesn't fully disappear.

But...the incentives to provide that information *professionally* are degraded; the income has to come from somewhere else. And there's a lot of bad ideas that have better funding than some good ones.

If Anthropic scrapes the Crochet Answer Book (they did) and answers questions from it (it does), then who is going to write the next edition? Are Anthropic, Google, OpenAI going to pay for the one copy each they need to buy? Or is it necessarily the effort of someone who is not fairly paid for it?

If we get fully automated luxury space communism, fine, share everything for free; but, in the world we're in-- I'm worried that there's no longer a *financial* incentive to share reliable information openly. So some of those sources will dry up.