Remember the old internet? The weird, wonderful, chaotic library of blogs, forums, and independent websites you could get lost in for hours? Well, it's been bulldozed. In its place now stands a single, sterile, all-knowing answer machine. In this episode, I conduct a post-mortem for the open web, analyzing how AI search engines performed the greatest intellectual property heist in history by eating the free content of millions to sell it back to us as a bland, synthesized paste. This is the story of how we traded a universe of discovery for the convenience of a single, boring paragraph.