For some time now, large technological platforms have been in control of information distributing and reorganizing the way in which we access knowledge and becoming the new guardians of the information flow. In these times in which news competes for human attention as if they were products in a digital supermarket, access to knowledge is just another mercantile transaction. In this scenario, Perplexity appears as an alternative to saturation, an attempt to restore meaning to the news experience with its Discover section, a system of curated news organized in levels that allows the user to choose how deep they want to go into each topic. On the surface, seems like an elegant solution, an answer to the anxiety of digital overload, but behind this sophisticated presentation is a problem we have seen before: a platform that places itself between the source and the reader, capturing the value without generating the content.
This is not the first time this has happened. Google News already provoked a battle with the media by offering headlines and snippets without compensation, forcing countries like Australia to legislate to protect content creators. But Perplexity goes further: it not only organizes news, it reframes it, distills it, turns it into summaries that satisfy the user’s curiosity without requiring them to visit the original media. And here is the dilemma: if nobody clicks, if readers stay in the summary, journalists stop receiving income, and without income, journalism dies. It is a logic of extraction, a model that is reminiscent of what we have seen in the music industry and digital culture in general, where content has become something that platforms package and distribute without needing to pay those who create it.
Jaron Lanier has warned about this before. In Who Owns the Future? he argued that digitalization has generated a system of unequal redistribution, where value is absorbed by the big platforms with no return for those who generate content. The Perplexity model fits perfectly into this logic. It does not charge users to access quality information, but neither does it pay those who produce it. Instead, it offers an efficient interface, designed so that the reader does not have to leave its ecosystem. It is a form of digital colonization in which the information still exists, but the link to its origin is weakened. In the end, what remains is a layer of increasingly sophisticated, increasingly invisible intermediation, which turns the act of getting information into something passive, fragmented, reduced to the logic of rapid consumption.
This problem is not only economic, it is also epistemological. Maryanne Wolf has shown in Reader, Come Home how digital reading has altered our way of processing information. We have become accustomed to scanning texts instead of reading them, to consuming fragments instead of developing critical thinking. Perplexity reinforces this trend with its level system, giving the illusion of control over the information when in reality the is pre-filtering, simplifying, shaping knowledge according to what its algorithm considers relevant. The risk is that we end up trapped in an environment of information mediated by artificial intelligence that makes us believe we know more than we really do.
The very structure of these platforms introduces invisible biases. Safiya Umoja Noble has demonstrated in Algorithms of Oppression how algorithms reflect biases, amplify inequalities and select information based on criteria that are not neutral. If we let systems like Perplexity decide what news matters and how it should be presented, we are delegating the construction of reality to a machine that does not think, but optimizes. It is not only a problem of what information we receive, but of what information we fail to receive, of how nuances are diluted and complexity becomes a series of preprocessed data designed to maximize the efficiency of information consumption.
Journalism is already in crisis. Advertising revenues have fallen, paywalls have fragmented access to information and media are increasingly dependent on subscription models that only part of the population can afford. Perplexity and other aggregators are accelerating this process without offering real solutions. They could share revenue with the media, as some have proposed, or they could design micropayment models that allow content creators to be compensated. But that is not what they are doing. At instead, they are refining the aggregation machine, perfecting the way reorganize information so that the user doesn’t have to leave their environment, ensuring that the value stays within the platform and doesn’t flow to those who have actually produced the news.
History has shown us how this ends. In The Net Delusion, Evgeny Morozov warned that the promise of a free and unlimited internet can become a trap if mechanisms to sustain independent knowledge are not established. If we let these platforms dominate access to information without fair retribution for those who generate the content, we will end up in a scenario in which journalism will be reduced to an input for machines that reformulate and synthesize without generating anything new. It will be a world in which information continues to flow, but without root, without depth, without memory.
We can either accept this future without resistance or we can ask ourselves what alternatives exist. Jaron Lanier has defended the idea of an Internet in which content creators receive direct compensation, in which each contribution to digital knowledge has a real value and is not simply free raw material for the platforms. Perhaps the solution lies in there, in a system in which information is not only accessible, but also sustainable. If we do not find a way to balance the relationship between aggregators and media, what today seems like an advance in the way we inform ourselves could become another step towards an ecosystem where truth no longer matters, where information is nothing more than a waste optimized to maximize the time spent in an application.
Discovering Perplexity is a solution to the digital information crisis, but it is also its symptom
. It gives us access to news without noise, without distractions, without the heaviness of clickbait. But
does this by eliminating the path to the original source, creating an environment in which
artificial intelligence decides for us what is relevant and what is not. It’s not just a question of
web traffic or advertising revenue, it’s a question of who owns the information and how
we decide to distribute its value. If we continue in this direction without rethinking the model, what
today seems like a solution will end up being part of the problem.
