9-17-2026 | The Author Has Left the Building

Some months ago, I quietly removed most of the substantial writing from this website. Essays on constitutional law, birthright citizenship, presidential power, Skrmetti, Ramaswamy, Trump, and various other subjects disappeared. I didn't stop writing, and I haven't particularly changed my mind about the value of writing, or the positions I took. What changed was the internet.

EffingtonEastman.com was built under a bargain so ordinary that nobody needed to state it: I wrote something; Google indexed it, somebody searching for the subject might find the title, click the result, arrive here, and encounter the person who wrote it. No idealism necessary; it was simply how the internet worked. Google was hardly a charitable institution, and search was hardly pure. But that era-defining architecture preserved something important: the search engine pointed toward the source.

Google’s new AI search model changes that bargain. Google itself has described generative AI as a way to “do the searching for you.” Ask a sufficiently capable AI a question and it may no longer be necessary to visit the writer, the paper, or the peculiar little website where the idea originated. The new AI model simply synthesizes what it has learned and answers in its own remarkably competent voice. And here is the problem as I see it: Google used to introduce the questioner to the author, while now AI increasingly answers in the author's place.

This reconfiguration of search is extraordinarily convenient (I use it myself every day). It is also troubling. And it's why I took my essays down.

Google itself announced the change without ambiguity. In 2025, CEO Sundar Pichai called its new AI Mode a “total reimagining of Search”—an end-to-end AI search experience built not merely to locate information, but to reason across it and answer increasingly complicated questions. A year later, Google described its AI-powered Search box as the biggest upgrade to Search in more than twenty-five years.

The consequences aren't merely theoretical. Rather neatly supporting the point, a 2025 Pew Research Center study found that Google users presented with an AI summary clicked through to traditional search results only about half as often as users who weren't—and clicked the sources cited within the AI summary only 1 percent of the time.

Meaning, what we are talking about here represents nothing less than a generational paradigm shift. 

Whether the resulting arrangement also qualifies as another specimen of what Cory Doctorow has memorably called “enshittification,” I'll leave for another Note.

Ok, progress happens. Fantastic. And Google never promised to preserve its old model forever.  I—and countless others—nevertheless built our websites around it. Then Google changed its bargain. 

Fair enough. So I changed mine.

The difference matters particularly to people who create things. Under the old arrangement, somebody asking an obscure question might end up at an obscure website. Search was an introduction. A question about, say, §3 of the Naturalization Act of 1795 might lead to several legal writers offering different interpretations of the same language. The reader had to encounter the sources—and decide among them.

There was a good kind of friction in this system: you had to choose among sources. You might find the answer, but you might also find the person who said it. Sometimes, knowing the source is part of understanding the answer.

AI is vastly more efficient. Increasingly, you simply ask—and get the answer.

And it is that very efficiency that changes the economics of authorship. AI is driving the marginal cost of accessing synthesized linguistic knowledge toward zero, while increasingly separating an idea from the identity, context, traffic, meaning, and compensation of the person who originally developed it.

The problem, for me, is less theft than attribution. Suppose somebody spends several weeks researching an obscure legal question, discovers a connection that hasn't been adequately explored, and publishes 7,000 words explaining it.  Once that work enters the accessible digital corpus, a future reader may never find the writer, visit the website, or encounter the argument in its original form. Under the new model, the intellectual residue increasingly reappears through an AI interface as simply something the machine knows. The original insight becomes general information; its provenance fades into the corpus.

That is where attribution becomes something more than a footnote. Sometimes the source is part of the meaning, even when the answer can stand without it.

Much of what made the old model interesting was precisely this profusion of small, peculiar sources whose purpose or value might not be immediately obvious.  Sometimes their pointlessness was part of the point.  

Somebody somewhere cared enough about something to build a website around it. Search provided the introduction. The reader decided whether to stay.

This is where my complaint becomes complicated, because I love using AI. My objection is therefore not to AI learning from human knowledge. Nor do I particularly yearn for some restoration of the internet circa 2004. Something has been gained here; enormously so. But something has also disappeared.

I don't know that the answer is to stop AI.  I trust AI with ideas, yet I don't necessarily trust the present information economy with my authorship.

Whatever copyright may ultimately mean as courts, legislatures, publishers and technology companies sort through these questions, AI has already destabilized the practical bargain between public authorship, attribution, readership and compensation. I don't need to resolve that argument for everybody else. I only need to decide what I am going to publish here.

So I did. And the long essays came down.

They may continue to be written. They may appear elsewhere, in other forms, or under circumstances where the relationship between author and work makes more sense to me. As every intentionalist knows, withdrawal is itself an exercise of authorship. 

The old arrangement produced the essays. The new one has produced something else. As of September 2026, this page is called Notes.

I haven't stopped writing because of AI; I've stopped assuming that publishing substantial original work to the open internet remains the same bargain it used to be. It isn’t.

Here, the thinking continues, and the writing continues. They simply no longer come with the assumption that the internet is entitled to them.