While I am on the subject of inexplicable mass cultural movements, here's another one that seems to have passed me by until now. Dead Internet Theory has been around since the late 2010s, but gained serious traction in 2021. Yes, it's a conspiracy theory, but one with a plausible ring to it, like the idea that we are all living in a Matrix-like computer simulation.
The idea is that, if it sometimes seems like the internet, and the social media part of it in particular, is all so predictable and soulless that it may as well be generated by bots and AI, well, that's because it is. Believers in the theory believe that the vast majority of internet traffic, posts and users are actually bots and AI-generated content, and that humans no longer shape the direction of the inernet.
The theory was propelled into the mainstream by an article by Kaitlyn Tiffany in The Atlantic in 2021, in which she talked about an internet that felt "empty and devoid of people" and "entirely sterile", largely because aggressive "algorithmic curation" and "content farms", particularly on sites like Twitter and Facebook, made it feel like the whole internet was comprised of the same threads and memes. And that was BEFORE ChatGPT started...
Backing this up is the 2024 Imperva Threat Research report, which concluded that almost 50% of traffic on the internet now comes from automated bots, most of them so-called "bad bots", involved with transaction fraud, data scraping and harvesting. Of course, that could be fake news too; it's increasingly hard to tell.
So, is the dull commercial slop that seems to make up much of the internet today actually mainly machine-generated? Are most of the people you interact with online day to day actually not humans at all? Is the internet really dead? How would we ever know? Given the mad popularity of viral memes like Shrimp Jesus, Raptor Jesus and Foul Bachelor Frog, does it even matter any more?
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