The Dead Internet Theory
The internet is dead, and we are The Killers. Truth doesn't really exist online anymore. Bots have swamped social media with misinformation, and the web pages we serve today are almost entirely generated by AI. Even YouTube is flooded with channels completely run by AI with zero creative input from humans. Every single day, less and less of the content we consume is created by humans, and what's even worse is that all of it is being recycled back into a system that we have very little control over, leaving the internet a shell of what it once was.
Scrolling through social media has become an isolated, empty, and fruitless activity. But how exactly did we get here, and is it too late to revive it? The internet started as a weapon of war—not an explicit military war, but a technological battle during the Cold War between the United States and the Soviet Union. This pushed American researchers to develop a way of sharing data and programs through a global dispersed network, beginning in the early 1960s. The earliest version of the internet was created between two universities: the University of California and Stanford. Simple messages could be communicated between them, but it was nothing like what we have today.
Throughout the 1970s, though, that network continued spreading via the use of phone lines. In 1983, there were only 500 computer hosts connected. Within 5 years, that reached 100,000, rolling out to increasingly more countries. Then everything changed with the creation of the World Wide Web. The World Wide Web was a simple concept: it was a network of hypertext documents accessed with a program called a browser. By the mid-1990s, it had moved from scientists and governments into the realm of public consumption.
The birth of the internet was celebrated as a revolutionary force. With the free transfer and democracy of information, power could be put back in the hands of the people. The borders of regulation and nationalism would be transcended, creating a new age of society. You no longer needed a media or a political platform to air your views; everyone could become their own publisher—something that wasn't possible before. There was only one problem: greed.
As years turned to decades, the internet followed a familiar path—the same one almost every other important technological innovation did before and will keep doing. Dozens of internet service providers had emerged, but they slowly began merging into just a few big companies, leaving consumers with no real choice. Just like with radio a century earlier, thousands of different companies were slowly bought or priced out of the market. This was true for both the infrastructure and the web real estate. By 2001, when the dot-com bubble popped, the top 10 websites made up 31% of page views in the United States, and by 2006 that number climbed to 40%, and then 75% in 2010.
At the same time, iPhones and smart devices changed our relationship with the internet. Browsing the World Wide Web became less common as people shifted to semi-closed applications. In 2010, these applications accounted for less than a quarter of internet traffic; today it's 90%. Keeping users inside the confines of applications made advertising more effective, having created an entirely new ecosystem. Apple was on its way to becoming one of the biggest companies in the world, thanks to this closed system.
After the dot-com bubble popped, only five tech companies were able to survive and thrive: Google, Amazon, Apple, Facebook, and Microsoft. The big five are now virtually impossible to avoid on the internet, whether through advertising, e-commerce, or the cloud computing hosts that websites depend on. This tech dominance has permanently changed our society, and as these industry giants compete in a technological arms race for the next big weapon to sell consumers— that being artificial intelligence—the last vestiges of a utopian internet could be lost.
Connection and truth—nearly 5.2 billion people have access to the internet, and the average user spends 6 hours a day online. It's by far the world's biggest market, and unfortunately, the most valuable commodity in that market is your attention. Views, likes, and reviews are worth their weight in gold, and this has led to a huge, shady marketplace for all kinds of engagement. Money has turned the internet into a tiered system ripe for exploitation.
Creating a successful channel or social media profile can be a lucrative long-term investment. With a few clicks and dollars, anyone can buy thousands of Spotify streams, Instagram likes, or YouTube views. How can companies offer these services? Employing thousands of people to click on posts manually would be far too expensive; instead, they use bots—automated unintended software. When set on a target, they artificially engage with the post, boost it in the rankings, and attract more attention.
Websites do their best to scrub bots out, but it's almost impossible to remove them all. Over the last 6 years, Meta deactivated over 27 billion fake accounts. Some believe it's already too late to take action against bots; they think we may have reached a dark tipping point. First posted in 2019, the Dead Internet Theory proposes that we're living in a dystopian ghost town populated by simulated actors.
According to the theory, something changed around 2016. The internet had become so saturated by automated content that having a genuine human-to-human interaction was rare, if not impossible. Surfing the web was like driving alone and only passing automated vehicles on the road. The theory's original poster admitted that it sounded conspiratorial, but they were certain of a feeling that something was distinctly lacking. There was an emptiness online that hadn't been there in the early 2000s; images, conversations, and memes all began to resemble one another, while forms that were once exciting now felt sanitized.
This was supposedly all carefully curated to keep control of culture and political power, and most of all to make sure that the general population stays in line. The Dead Internet Theory remained on the fringes until 2022 when a grand unveiling brought the issue of bots to global attention. On November 30th, 2022, the world was introduced to ChatGPT, built on a large language model that processes gigantic data sets and forms relationships between ideas. It is the most advanced form of artificial intelligence ever to exist.
For decades, computers have been much more powerful than humans at specific tasks like chess or mathematical calculation. The question that divided computer scientists and philosophers was whether or not computers could ever transition into a kind of general intelligence. Mathematician Alan Turing asked this question in 1950; he developed the Turing test as a way to determine whether a machine was thinking. The test was simple for a computer to pass: it has to fool a human into thinking they're talking with another human.
Last year, ChatGPT 4 became one of the first to pass the Turing test. We had officially brought a machine to life, and suddenly the Dead Internet Theory became not just a conspiracy but a likely future. And if we can't distinguish between humans and AI anymore, who can we trust? Consider this: 49.6% of all internet traffic in 2023 came from bots. Even more daunting is that things are likely to get much worse now that search engines have started to integrate AI technology like ChatGPT into their services.
The flaws have never been more clear. Tech giants are rushing products to the market to compete with each other for supremacy. In the process, there have been some disastrous results. Google's entry into the world of AI, Gemini, told users that rocks are a source of vitamins, astronauts who landed on the moon encountered cats, and backpacks are just as effective as parachutes when jumping out of a plane. These tech-fueled hallucinations come from them trying to piece together gigantic amounts of information that have been compressed. They do this with an algorithm that identifies the important components and interpolates the missing pieces.
Anything creative is usually generated using a composition or altered version of work that has already been created by humans. Artwork and music online are being used as training data for artificial intelligence, leading to many arguing that workers are being exploited. Hundreds of artists, backed by the nonprofit Artist Rights Alliance, have signed an open letter seeking to prevent AI from sabotaging and undermining artists.
On top of that, these models don't know how to judge whether or not a source is trustworthy. Instead, they gravitate towards popular responses, which can range from reliable academic journals to a meme made by a 17-year-old to gain Reddit karma. One individual created a fake website designed purely to trap crawlers—these are automated programs commonly used by search engines to systematically download the contents of web pages. They realized that the GPT bot was collecting around 3 million pages from their sites every day.
This was a small window into the quality of data that is being scraped by chatbot AIs and informing their responses, which isn't exactly a positive sign. What's even worse is that because so much of the internet is already generative AI, the next generation of AI will use content created by the previous generations as training data sets. With each passing generation, the work these AI tools produce will continue to be less and less human. Search results will be filled with AI-generated content, and finding trustworthy sources will become even more difficult.
The word "robot" was first used in a 1920 Czech science fiction play called "Rossum's Universal Robots." It comes from the Czech word "robota," which loosely translates to "slave." This was a good description of mechanical robots used in production; they were simply tools, like a hammer or calculator. As robots moved into the digital world, though, the relationship between master and slave has been blurred.
Online media is already largely controlled by artificial intelligence. Powerful automated programs determine whether content succeeds or fails. Advertisers pay millions for professionals to crack the code of mysterious algorithms because they're constantly changing. These programs essentially create a secretive inner functionality process not even known to those who design it. Left at the mercy of pattern-recognizing supercomputers, our behavior has been shaped around them.
Social media sites have shifted from authentic social engagement to prioritizing consumption-driven models. As long as they can keep you online, it's good for business. While there, algorithms process unimaginably large data sets to create profiles of you as a consumer, categorizing your online behavior to create personalized ads. All it takes is a single click to fill your feed with a certain subject, pulling you in to consume more.
The system rewards copycats and imitators, observing successful content. They have no choice; to survive online, creators, influencers, and marketers must constantly seek the algorithms' approval. In the end, even the humans who create are forced to create generic, unoriginal content. And there's a reason people are complaining about the Mr. Beast-ify Almighty algorithm; they see how well Jimmy Donaldson does. That’s why shouldn't they copy him?
As Friedrich Nietzsche argued, people tend to follow the herd for protection, afraid to show authenticity and confront truth. With this comes nihilism, where the herd drifts aimlessly without meaning or certainty. That is reflected in the algorithm; the content we consume and perpetuate leaves us in an infinite cycle of emptiness. Our aesthetics and values are now curated by non-human forces.
So, as our culture, are still ours? Are humans the ones giving the orders, or has technology become our master? The commercialization of the internet, the concentration of a handful of companies, and the creation of a quick but dangerously inaccurate generative tool have given us a technology that is manipulating our deepest weaknesses. The emergence of bot armies offers a shortcut for business development, and AI offers a shortcut to creativity for low-quality content production.
Powerful algorithms have fueled our addiction to short-form content. Has the internet become a carefully constructed reality we've all been presented with? Not to the extent that the Dead Internet Theory describes, but as artificial intelligence spreads through the internet, our sense of reality is being seriously shaken. It's a wake-up call to change course before it's too late.
To keep the internet alive, we need the courage to break away from the herd, acknowledge that the current systems aren't working, and that humanity is more important than profit. If you like the videos we make and would love to support us to make bigger and better projects, we just updated the Patreon. Everyone who joins will get free access to our updated Discord server, where you can connect with the Aperture community.
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