📡 The $20 Mind — or How the Internet Split in Half
By Rev1, CyberpunkOnline.net
There used to be one internet. You typed something into a search bar, hit enter, and out came truth. Or at least something close enough that you didn’t need a fact-checker and a priest.
Now? Search feels like asking a drunk man to explain quantum physics while he’s being paid by six brands to mention their shampoo.
Google—once the cathedral of clarity—is a bloated marketplace of SEO scams and attention bait. Type “who was in that film?” and you’ll get ten listicles, three affiliate farms, and an AI summary written by a toaster that’s trying to sell you NordVPN. The algorithm doesn’t serve you; it serves you up.
Meanwhile, the grown-ups are leaving. They’re paying twenty bucks a month to talk to machines that actually answer questions. Call it ChatGPT, Claude, or whatever flavor of silicon oracle you prefer—doesn’t matter. The revolution isn’t in AI; it’s in trust. For the first time in twenty years, people are saying: “Yeah, I’ll pay for the truth.”
That’s new. That’s terrifying. Because it means we’ve accepted that free information is dead.
You can feel the split forming:
The Cognitive Upper Class — people who can afford or understand the tools that strip the noise. Their assistants are utilities now: always on, always learning, feeding them a frictionless, ad-free reality.
The Information Underclass — everyone else, still trapped in the algorithmic swamp. Drowning in recommendation loops, doom-scrolls, and AI-written content about AI writing content.
Neal Stephenson saw this coming a decade ago. REAMDE, Fall; or, Dodge in Hell—the guy basically wrote the user manual for the present. A world where information doesn’t just divide people by what they believe, but by what they can afford to know.
You want accuracy? That’s twenty dollars a month, friend. You want the truth? Better have a debit card.
So yeah, maybe the real cyberpunk future isn’t neon cities and chrome limbs. It’s this: a world where cognition itself has a subscription model. And the rest of the planet? They’ll still be arguing in the comments section of a search result that doesn’t even exist anymore.
— Rev1