AGENTIC AI IN THE POST–OPEN WEB

This essay theorizes the emergence of the post–open web, a digital environment increasingly authored and governed by agentic AI rather than humans. It argues that autonomous systems have replaced retrieval‑based architectures with generative, synthetic, and opaque knowledge regimes, dissolving the open web’s foundational conditions of indexability, linkability, and accountability. Drawing on the SignalRupture canon, the essay maps how agentic AI restructures gatekeeping, authorship, and epistemic stability, positioning machinic autonomy as the new substrate of the web. It offers a diagnostic framework for understanding how synthetic knowledge, infrastructural opacity, and non‑human agency are rewriting the conditions of digital life.