Is it any surprise that the content available via a communications method that relies upon a massive intake of energy and rare minerals and upon a global industrial base including both slavery and worker exploitation on which very few businesses can make a profit and are propped up by gobs of VC money and a very strange regulatory environment in the Western countries is declining in quality as the feeds which go into it dry up?

Extraction of oil from conventional sources which have a break even point around $30/barrel (the OPEC countries aren't having financial issues because their state owned oil companies are losing money, but because they promised their people such lavish social services spending to stem unrest that they need much more money), while the unconventional "tight" oil sources that the media is so excited about break even at above $70/barrel, peaked in either 2005 or 2006 depending on how you slice the numbers.

In the past, when faced with a mineral shortage, people have just invested more energy in mining to prevent a shortage. For instance, the iron ore mined today in much of the world contains much less iron, maybe 0.3% by mass, than the ore mined in 1900, with 2-3% iron by mass. The reason iron prices haven't risen is the use of more aggressive mining methods to gather up extremely large quantities of ore and then purify them more intensively. These require large amounts of energy to undertake, so a shortage of oil will automatically make the growing scarcity of most minerals readily apparent.

The United States, which has secured and sponsored free trade and an open market around the world after World War II when Britain abdicated the role, is undergoing relative economic decline, accounting for less and less of the world economy, and absolute industrial decline with output of consumer goods having become highly negligible. Meanwhile, Russia and China are moving much closer diplomatically after decades of alienation and each is becoming increasing aggressive. Can the US manage to maintain its end of all of the bilateral treaties and alliances it entered into decades ago and uphold the current international order? Probably not. The Chinese have supersonic anti-carrier missiles, the Russians have pretty decent fighter aircraft and surface to air missile systems with a range greater than that of the artillery and bombers which the US would use to destroy them. In fact, they have such a great range that the Russians have kept them well back from the front, under giant piles of concrete where they evidently believe the systems are still capable of doing their jobs.

Since the American strategy for the last 70 years has been 1) establish aerial superiority, 2) win, having either aircraft carriers or the aircraft themselves destroyed in large numbers by missiles the launch sites of which cannot be attacked means that the US will be unable to attack either of these powers conventionally. As for a nuclear deterrent, China's 150 missiles are sufficient to make a war unprofitable for the United States. Even with the THAAD interception system set up in South Korea, only around 10 missiles (and no interception system is good enough to allow only this many through) have to get through to American cities to destroy trillions of dollars in capital and kill millions of people, making it very difficult to continue a war.

The decline of the internet as more and more people rush to escape from reality on a network that people increasingly do not have the resources to produce content for and might not be able to maintain at all in the near future should not be a surprise.