Dead Internet
“All the fun accounts are gone.”
“This site used to be fun.”
“Their search engine is broken.”
If you’ve made any of the above complaints, you are justified, and it’s not just you.
The Dead Internet Theory is a loose term used to describe a range of changes and oddities in the structure and content of the internet, which have become increasingly prevalent in the last decade.
This includes:
A massive increase in bots, including the idea that their presence and activity may now be far greater than that of actual people, or at least to a much greater extent than people have been led to believe.
The homogenization and centralization of online content.
The death of a once-rich landscape of smaller communities dedicated to a vast array of subjects, hobbies, niches – all now replaced primarily by disorganized, impermanent, and easily controlled discussion on platforms such as Reddit, Twitter, Facebook, etc.
The idea that AI, considerably more advanced at present than we have been led to believe, is being utilized online for subversive or malevolent purposes, including the creation of increasingly bland and mindless media of the modern world.
This take largely jibes with previous reports of algorithms run amok and social engineering carried out by those haywire algos.
The OP opines on the root cause of the Internet’s demise.
In my view, this was caused more by the economics of the internet itself. The model of a decentralized community works when people are of roughly the same ability level and inclination, as they were back in the 1990s when most were Anglo-American college students.
Once AOL came around and the internet was opened up to the general population, following the idea of Crowdism, the medium adapted to the audience: the internet came to resemble daytime television more than a Wild West of outlaw intellects.
With the rise of internet companies, the need to earn advertising income took over, and consequently, the message tailored itself to the wishful thinking, emotions, and shopping habits of the audience, but this audience was defined by media, which wanted to find a new set of hippies to use as its rebellious sub-culture in order to promote liberalization, or erasure of cultural norms so that more products can be sold.
Those dynamics are certainly in play. However, assigning an economic motive to the internet’s murder smacks of the same reductive logic that leads basic Conservatives ascribe 19th century political ideology to the Death Cult.
Twitter didn’t purge everyone who had anything remotely interesting to say out of greed.
YouTube doesn’t push Death Cult propaganda for money.
Google didn’t have a profit motive for making their search engine useless.
If you’ve gotten the sneaking suspicion over the past couple of years that the internet is purposefully being changed to make you miserable, you’re right. Because the internet has fallen into the hands of oligarchs that hate you.
If you don’t know what a company you deal with produces, you are the product.
What I produce is gritty, not bleak, adventure fiction with heroes you can root for.
