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A decade and a half ago, all of this was rural, and there were no gates to be set in it. The internet surprised us with an immediate, simple, and free way to consume cultural artifacts, and an ocean of people who until then had saved up to buy CDs and happily went to the local video store, overnight shared the vision of a new era in which everything that fit the definition of "culture" would be immediately, universally, and freely accessible. That was the guiding principle, and all other realities would have to transform or perish accordingly. A tiny business and a corporate group had exactly the same responsibility when it came to updating their business model, even though it was obvious which of the two had the resources to do so. The mainstream remained the same, with a few scratches, but independent production continued to become more precarious , reducing access to creative professions to anyone with a good family financial cushion. But for the gurus of that time, these diversities weren't part of the debate because culture was a promise delivered en masse, all at once, and for the same price. The responsibility with which one chose to buy a real work instead of a mechanized rip-off no longer existed because both were already included in a content dump that was already ours by right.

The term Google Zero , coined by Nilay Patel, editor of The Verge , refers to the growing disappearance of traffic once distributed by the most used search engine on the planet. Today, every Google search receives an AI-generated response summarizing the content of other websites. Although the fine print warns that the resulting text could be erroneous , more than half of users don't see the need to visit the original sites, which end up relegated to the role of a source of content to be refined. All of this results in damage to the digital ecosystem that, once again, fails to distinguish small businesses from corporate groups.

But if Google ends up strangling all media outlets within its reach, where will it get the information it needs to feed its AI? I don't think it's unreasonable to imagine that, by that time, Google Press will already exist, a global network of agencies and newsrooms dedicated to the mission of providing constant, up-to-date information to a single interface. A window that any citizen of planet Earth can look into at any time and ask, with confidence, "What happened?"

With confidence because in this future, the answer is no longer flawless. It's as perfect as the silence of a tree falling.