The network of networks has become fertile ground for the spread of completely ridiculous ideas that can be neutralized with a minimal dose of information... but some conspiracies are like villains: They scare more when they make a little sense. That brings us to the so-called Dead Internet Theory. What does it propose? Very simple: The vast majority of the content we see on the Internet is not created by humans, but by a global network of artificial intelligences with the aim of manufacturing consumers with a specific cultural profile.
One of the most striking examples is Twitter: A tweet becomes popular, and within seconds an army of accounts will proceed to retweet it nonstop, or worse, post a variant of the original tweet seeking likes. We've also noticed it on YouTube, with automatic systems that pick up comments well-received by the public, translate them, and post them on other versions of the same video.
It's no coincidence. I know you've seen something like this in one way or another. And the feeling is much older than we think... the feeling that the Internet is almost entirely controlled by a relentless army of bots. It even has a name: The Dead Internet Theory.
Dead Internet Theory: Where Does It Come From?
All arrows point to the Agora Road's Macintosh Cafe forum, where the user IlluminatiPirate presented his case in January 2021. IlluminatiPirate describes himself as someone old, a former rider who started exploring 4chan in 2006. Obviously, that gives us a pretty solid idea of the content we can expect in his description, a mutant hybrid formed by anons' posts in the paranormal section of 4chan and the Wizardchan forum. But beyond the colorful language, the message suggests that at some point in 2016 or 2017, the Internet died to become a sterile shell devoid of content, occupied by bots.
The theory's thread is much longer than we imagine. An article published by New York Magazine in December 2018 indicates that less than 60 percent of Web traffic is generated by humans. A more extreme example? For a brief moment in 2013, half of YouTube's traffic was the responsibility of bots. And as expected, the theory is gaining traction.
From click farms in China to Facebook's falsified statistics, through how easy and cheap it is to maintain a bot these days, and the cyclical discussions on Twitter about economy, politics, food, diets, sex, radioactive 5G, graphene vaccines, and even "supermoons" in plural because apparently there's more than one and NASA is hiding it (?). The Dead Internet Theory is ridiculous... but it makes us uncomfortable. What can I say in my defense? Simple: A bot doesn't complain about back pain or lose an hour with Internet tech support to get their connection back... or does it...?
Source: The Atlantic
