June 26, 2026
What's the Slow Boil?
This post is part of my Medium blog.
In 1999 I started working at TheStreet.com, which at the time was what passed for a real financial news website. If you go back and look at what news sites looked like in 1999 or 2000 — and the Wayback Machine makes this easy — you'll see something almost jarring: a news story. Just text on a page. Maybe a banner ad across the top and a sidebar with some links, but the thing you came for was right there. You could read it.
Go to just about any news story in 2026 and you might find a news story underneath. But first you'll hit a paywall, or a registration wall, or a cookie consent overlay that takes up the whole screen. If you get past that, you'll scroll through the article and hit a wall of Outbrain-style "recommended" links at the bottom — "You won't believe what these child stars look like now" — sitting there like a yard sale at a funeral. Those links are tough to distinguish from the actual content. And in several cases, the news stories themselves are essentially advertisements. Sponsored content. Native advertising. Branded content. Whatever the term is this quarter, it's an ad dressed up to look like the journalism next to it.
None of this happened suddenly. Each step was a small concession that felt reasonable at the time. Banner ads gave way to pop-ups. Pop-ups gave way to interstitials. Interstitials gave way to paywalls layered on top of ad networks layered on top of sponsored content. Each step was defensible on its own — news organizations needed revenue, print was dying, something had to fill the gap. And each step moved the line a little further.
That's the thing about a slow boil. You don't notice the temperature changing because you're in the water the whole time. The person who steps out and comes back later feels the heat immediately.
When Barrett Brown was released from prison in November 2016, Edward Snowden tweeted: "Best of luck in this very different world." Brown had been away for four years. He went in during the early-2010s internet and came out to post-Gamergate, post-Snowden, early-Trump internet. Snowden — himself still online every day from exile — recognized that four years had changed the information landscape enough to call it a different world.
Four years is nothing. It's a prison sentence, a college degree, a presidential term. But in internet time, four years is now enough to miss an entire era of decay.
Think about someone who went away in 2021 — before ChatGPT, before the slop flood, before AI-generated content was half the web. They come back in 2026 and open a news site. They'd see paywalls, ad networks, sponsored content masquerading as journalism, and AI-generated articles summarizing other AI-generated articles. They'd see search results full of SEO-optimized garbage written by machines for machines. They'd think: what happened here?
The rest of us were here the whole time. We normalized it. We installed ad blockers and learned to scroll past the sponsored content. We accepted that "recommended for you" meant "paid for by someone." We got used to news articles that were really ads, and ads that were really tracking pixels, and tracking pixels that were really the actual product. We adjusted our expectations downward one search result at a time.
Global advertising spend crossed $1 trillion in 2025 for the first time.[^1] Programmatic advertising — the automated buying and selling of ad space — accounts for over 91% of US digital display ad spending.[^2] Ad fraud — fake clicks, fake impressions, fake users — costs the industry an estimated $100 billion per year, and that's the conservative estimate.[^3] Nearly 30% of internet users worldwide — 1.77 billion people — now run ad blockers.[^4] Almost a third of the internet has installed software specifically to avoid the thing that funds the internet. That's not a healthy ecosystem. That's a hostage situation with better analytics.
But here's what should worry you more than the advertising numbers. The web was already broken by ads before AI showed up. The slop flood I wrote about earlier in this series — AI-generated bug reports, AI-generated pull requests, AI-generated articles — that's layer two. The advertising layer was layer one. The web was already a machine for extracting attention and converting it to ad revenue before AI started generating the content that fills the slots.
You could assume AI will make it worse. It probably will. But it might not — and the reason it might not is that the advertising model already broke the web as thoroughly as anything AI could do. The slots were already full of garbage. AI just makes garbage faster.
The question I keep coming back to is simpler than AI or advertising. If we didn't notice the advertising slow boil — if an entire generation of internet users accepted that news sites would become ad delivery systems with journalism as the loss leader — what are we normalizing right now?
What's the slow boil we're sitting in today that will be obvious to anyone who steps away for four years and comes back?
The advertising decay took twenty-five years. The AI slop flood took two. The next one might be faster.
If you want to see the slow boil, find someone who wasn't in the room. Ask them what's different. They'll tell you.
[^1]: Global advertising spend projected to reach $992 billion in 2025, with total media spending expected to exceed $1 trillion for the first time. Source: dentsu, "Global Ad Spend Forecasts 2025," https://www.dentsu.com/news-releases/ad-spend-forecast-to-grow-by-four-point-nine-percent-in-2025-despite-a-reduced-economic-outlook; Insider Intelligence, "Worldwide Ad Spending Forecast 2025," https://cloud.insight.insiderintelligence.com/20250331-LiveRamp-Report_RegPageProgPro.
[^2]: Programmatic advertising accounted for 91.3% of US digital display ad spending in 2024. Source: AI Digital, "What is Programmatic Advertising?" https://www.aidigital.com/blog/programmatic-advertising. Persistence Market Research reports programmatic channels account for 96.8% of new display ad dollars in 2025. Source: https://www.persistencemarketresearch.com/market-research/programmatic-advertising-market.asp.
[^3]: Ad fraud estimated at $100 billion globally in 2025, projected to reach $172 billion by 2028. Source: Juniper Research estimates, via ClickGuardian, https://clickguardian.ai/click-fraud-statistics. Anura estimates ad fraud cost advertisers over $140 billion in 2024. Source: https://www.anura.io/ad-fraud-ultimate-guide/ad-fraud-statistics. The ANA found $26.8 billion in programmatic ad spend was wasted in 2025, with only 43.9% of budgets reaching consumers as viewable impressions.
[^4]: 29.5% of internet users worldwide use ad blockers as of Q2 2025, equating to approximately 1.77 billion users. Source: GWI data, via Backlinko, https://backlinko.com/ad-blockers-users.
In The Slop Codex, this pattern appears as the Slow Boil — the field-guide monster for how each small concession moves the line, and how the temperature you're sitting in is never the temperature you'd choose. The counter-move is simple: step out of the water, look at what's changed, and decide whether the new normal is something you actually accepted.