Perhaps the greatest illusion of the early 21st century was that the internet was our mirror. We gazed into it like a pool of water—sometimes fascinated, sometimes disappointed—but always with the belief that it reflected us. Today, that surface ripples. The image blurs. And it’s getting harder to say who’s looking at whom.

We are entering the era of the post-Internet. A reality in which the web needs humans less as users, and more as data sources. We no longer design for people, but for machines that will read, process, and synthesize the information. And I don’t mean to sound dystopian—though it's tempting. Maybe it's just a shift in the nature of the audience. And this new audience? You can’t look it in the eyes.

The internet once resembled a city built by many: diverse, contradictory, alive. Today, it feels more like a closed system—algorithms learning from other algorithms, bots writing for bots, AI evaluating content generated by other AI. This isn’t spiral evolution—it’s a loop. A digital Ouroboros.

I wonder if this self-referential mechanism is creating a new kind of aesthetic: the aesthetic of redundancy. Of course it is. Content as pure signal carrier, generated to be indexed, scraped, monetized. Images made not to be seen by you, but to be read by machines.

We all know it. You visit a site looking for answers, only to hit a wall of words devoid of meaning. Because the content wasn’t written for you. It was written so another bot would flag it as “relevant.” It’s not just frustrating. It’s an erosion of trust in the internet as a space for knowing. We design not so the user finds something—we design so they keep wandering.

In this new topography of knowledge, facts don’t matter—predictable behavior does. We search for answers that soothe the algorithm. Which makes one ask: what does it even mean to “know something” online today?
On the other hand, AI opens up more sensual ways of interacting: gestures, voice, gaze, even brain impulses. The interface stops being a space and becomes a motion. Experience becomes interface. Light no longer lands on buttons, but on intention. I can’t tell if this is evolution or a rupture in our paradigm. Maybe both.
It also means design might begin to vanish from view. Like air architecture—visible only when broken. Self-optimizing layouts, dynamic systems, shifting content. Designers become choreographers of instability. Or maybe just spectators of a system designing itself.

Even now, graphic design, web design, UX—they’re no longer about storytelling. More often, they resemble semiotic engineering. The craft of placing symbols so they hit the semantic vector of indexing machines. I’m not designing for the eye, but for the scanner. Not for emotion, but for structure. Is it still design?

The visual culture of the web trains users not to look. Icons are indistinguishable. Interfaces blur into one another. Sites all look the same. We are conditioned to ignore information.

A technocratic society, dominated by algorithms, databases, and corporate monopolies, forces designers and users to confront fundamental questions of autonomy, creativity, and authentic self-determination. Something escapes us. Something resists definition. Perhaps that’s where design begins.

We can’t speak of design without speaking of emotion. Because technology today doesn’t just suggest what to click—it begins to shape what we feel. It crystallizes preferences, turning curiosity into comfort. It mirrors our moods—but edits them before the reflection shows.

Emotionally charged content becomes a cognitive trap. Echo chambers amplify belief. Psychological flexibility fades. Design becomes the emotional architect of a space that trains us.

Does this mean there’s no room left for designers? No. But it won’t be a comfortable place.

The aesthetics of the future might not be seen. Layouts might not matter. Beauty—no longer a function of perception, but a by-product of computation. The future won’t be aesthetic in the classical sense—because it won’t be made to be seen. It’ll be made to be processed.

The prompt becomes the new interface. The designer—the operator of its logic. The interface—just a frame for an answer that will happen elsewhere.