The Infinite Tunnel is a theoretical paper by Lee Sharks, dated February 27, 2026, and classified in its body as an Effective Act in design phenomenology and infrastructure criticism. Its object is the share link produced by Google AI Mode. Rather than treating the link as a convenience appended to a generated answer, the paper reads its interface behavior as an architecture of routing, attribution, engagement, and replication.
The first layer describes the citation link as a door: the user encounters Google’s compression before the underlying source, while the source is selected partly because it resolves as durable, indexed infrastructure. The second layer treats the reader as an indexing agent. Click-through, dwell time, subsequent searches, and sharing become signals capable of reinforcing the association among query, summary, attribution, and source. The third layer describes the share button as a branching distribution mechanism: each copied URL carries the summarizer’s framing into a new context and creates another tunnel back through the summary to the source.
The fourth layer is presented as the recursive corpus hypothesis. If persistent AI Mode share pages are crawlable and eligible for later retrieval or training, a summarizer may encounter its own prior summaries as apparently external documents, allowing attribution to compound through iterative self-reference. The paper states the null condition directly: if the pages are noindexed or contractually excluded, the recursive claim fails, while the first three layers remain intact. This explicit separation between observation and hypothesis is central to the work’s evidentiary architecture.