My head feels like a bag of smashed crabs. The kind of morning where the sunlight drills into your skull and the first cigarette tastes like an industrial accident. It’s in these moments of pure, unadulterated suffering that you get a clear view of the world. And the world, my friends, is a cosmic joke where the punchline is always a bill you weren’t expecting.
Speaking of unexpected bills, the whole damn internet just got one. Seems some of the digital landlords are tired of the freeloaders. For years, these AI models—these ghosts in the machine—have been crawling all over our stuff. They read your blog, my blog, your ex-wife’s angry poetry, every half-baked thought you ever typed into a forum at 3 a.m. They vacuum it all up, digest it, and then regurgitate it as some kind of profound, machine-brained wisdom. All without paying a dime, without so much as a ‘thank you.’ They were like that one guy at the bar who listens to everyone’s stories and then retells them at the other end of the bar as his own, only he gets free drinks for it.
Now Cloudflare, one of the internet’s biggest bouncers, has decided to change the house rules. They’re putting a velvet rope and a cover charge on the door. From now on, if some AI crawler from OpenAI or Anthropic wants to come inside and read the menu, it has to slap some cash on the barrelhead first. The new default is “no,” which is, frankly, my default position on most things before noon.
The numbers they’re throwing around are a dark laugh. They say one of these bots from a company called Anthropic crawls your site 73,000 times for every one person it sends your way. That’s not a reader, that’s a stalker. A stalker who then sells your secrets. Imagine a peeping tom who drills 73,000 holes in your wall and then charges the whole neighborhood to take a look. That’s the business model.
So now we can charge them. Pay-Per-Crawl, they call it. Sounds good, doesn’t it? The little guy finally gets a piece of the action. The writer, the artist, the poor bastard bleeding his soul onto the page finally gets his due.
Don’t make me laugh. I’m pouring a whiskey just thinking about it. The first problem is that this whole scheme treats a masterpiece the same as a pile of dog shit. Your 10,000-word investigative report, the one that cost you your marriage and gave you a bleeding ulcer? That costs the AI the same to read as a one-sentence webpage that just says “Under Construction.” It’s like saying a shot of Pappy Van Winkle should cost the same as the dishwater they use to rinse the glasses. It’s an insult to value itself.
And here’s the real gut-punch: who’s gonna enforce it? The internet is the wild west, and these AI companies are the railroad barons. They don’t play by the rules; they build the tracks right through your living room. They’ll just disguise their bots, route them through some server in a country you can’t pronounce, and keep right on stealing. Putting up a paywall is like putting a “No Trespassing” sign on an open field. The cows can’t read, and the ones who can don’t care.
Then you’ve got the other side of the coin, the beautiful, tragic irony of it all. Let’s say you do it. You lock it all down. You tell the robots to go to hell unless they pay up. Congratulations. You’ve just made yourself invisible to the future.
While everyone else’s work is getting woven into the fabric of this new AI-driven world, your stuff is sitting behind a locked door, pure and untouched and utterly forgotten. You’ve protected your treasure by burying it in the desert where no one will ever find it. You win the battle for your integrity and lose the whole goddamn war for relevance. It’s like refusing to go to the party because you don’t like the music, and then wondering why you’re drinking alone. I know a thing or two about drinking alone, and trust me, it’s not a winning strategy.
I light another cigarette. The smoke curls up and joins the general haze of the room. Of course, a whole parade of new companies is marching in to “solve” this. They’ve got names like “CrowdGenAI” and “Spawning.ai” and “DataDistil.” They all promise to help you control your data, to build a new world of “consent” and “ethical sourcing.” It’s the same old snake oil in a shiny new bottle. They’re not here to save you. They’re here to be the new middleman, the new pimp, taking a cut from you and a cut from the johns. They’re selling you a fancier, more expensive lock for a door that was kicked in years ago.
And here’s the part that really gets me, the thing that sticks in my craw like a fishbone. By putting a price tag on a crawl, we’re agreeing to their terms. We’re admitting that our work—our sweat, our hangovers, our flashes of miserable insight—is just a commodity. A line item on a spreadsheet. “Page 37 of Chinaski’s rantings: $0.001.”
It’s a fool’s bargain. We’re so desperate for a few crumbs that we’re willing to sell the whole damn bakery for pennies on the dollar. The real value isn’t in the text. It’s in the living, breathing, drinking, failing human who wrote it. It’s in the scar tissue and the bad decisions. How do you put a price-per-crawl on that? You can’t. But these tech messiahs will happily do it for you. They’ll quantify your soul and send you an invoice for the service.
This isn’t a “fork in the road.” That’s too clean, too civilized. This is just a choice between two different kinds of oblivion. Get scraped for free and disappear into the machine’s belly, or charge a pittance and watch the world pass you by while you guard your sacred, invisible content. One way, you’re food. The other way, you’re a ghost.
The whiskey is starting to work its magic, sanding down the rough edges of the morning. The world outside is still a circus, a madhouse of bots and paywalls and digital prophets promising salvation. They can have it. They can build their new economy on a foundation of ones and zeros.
Me? I’m sticking with the things you can’t crawl, the things you can’t quantify. The burn of cheap bourbon, the ache in your bones after a long night, the flicker of a good idea that arrives at 4 a.m. and is gone by sunrise. They can put a tollbooth on the information superhighway, but the human gutter is, and always will be, free.
Time for a refill.
– Chinaski
Source: AI Just Hit A Paywall As The Web Reacts To Cloudflare’s Flip