About a year ago, it became popular for Western media commentators to sound the death knell for the social web. Elon Musk “sunk in” as the new owner of Twitter, and the mainstream social media platform that had come closest to approximating a digital public square began its spectacular decline.

Social media was once a place to hear and express opinions, to get and report the news, to decide what might or might not be true. All these things beckoned us to interact with each other and also to understand, and sometimes challenge, the underlying technology. When content got censored or harassment got unbearable, users spoke up and pressured the companies to respond. Even if it was all happening in a privately owned “quasi-public sphere,” users behaved as if they had some rights. And every once in a while, the companies gave that idea some credence.

Watching artificial intelligence’s biggest purveyors soar to prominence in the global political imagination this year, I’ve found myself wondering: What will happen to all that democratic energy around Big Tech? What will happen to the idea of digital rights?

Unlike some of the mammoth social platforms that dominated the industry for the past decade and a half, the shiny new things we see on our screens now, like ChatGPT, reveal very little about their inner workings. The biggest and most consequential types of AI at this moment are being built inside black boxes, and it isn’t predicated on any of the ideas about human connection that were used to underwrite the social media industry. There is no illusion of democracy here, no signs of cohesion among users pushing companies to change in any particular way. The reason is simple: We really don’t know what’s going on behind the screen.