The Dead Internet Theory: A Few Thoughts

You may have heard of the "dead Internet theory" holding that most of the activity we see online is not human-originated, and indeed being used for the purposes of controlling the public by way of its perceptions.

I think it easy enough to understand why people believe it. Certainly there is an enormous amount of "bot"-generated and related content and traffic online (perhaps half of it is such by this point), while much else is indeed deliberately manipulated (for what difference is there between a bot and a professional human troll in the end from this standpoint?). Meanwhile the more prolific and active users of the Internet (the kind who comment in fora, etc.) who are actual humans who are not playing games may not be really representative of the population as a whole (on the whole more affluent, and inclining more toward certain politics than others), while the black-boxed algorithms fulfilling purposes concealed from the public but obviously influenced by ad money, manipulation, flak and the commercial and political imperatives of the masters of the online platforms indisputably amplify some voices and mute others as those searching the web find themselves less and less satisfied with their search results, which seem less and less what they are actually looking for and more and more what someone else wants them to see.

By and large it works in favor of the opinions that the powerful want the public to have, which is not necessarily the same thing as what the public is thinking. At the same lots of people who are active online are finding contact with people they can feel reasonably sure are actual humans rarer and rarer--partly because the "action" keeps deserting once popular fora for others (goodbye Facebook, hello TikTok, as Myspace is no longer even a memory for many), partly because people's ways of behaving online keep changing (with the switch from desktops to smart phones making them incline toward less involved engagement), but also because the Internet has grown ever more fragmented and enclosed, a wasteland of garbage-filled search results pages, and unbelievably obnoxious demands that people log in and turn off their adblock and prove they are not a robot, inhibiting their movement and their participation, and making people give up "free-range" Internet search in favor of other ways of getting information, and certainly other pastimes (continuing the long decline of "web surfing" to the point that the term itself may be falling into disuse, in part, I suppose, because the fun that the word "surf" evoked is no longer part of the activity, and we do it only when we really have to do so). Those who are competing in the ever more brutal attention economy are especially attentive to the fact--especially those among them who find it harder and harder to get an actual, human, audience. (Thus have those who began blogging in an earlier era, and remember having readers who found them and left comments before there was much bot activity online, been left wondering what happened to that--even as they see their page views and other metrics of traffic surging.) The result is that there really are fewer humans about in the places that they know, and which are what matter to them.

All that makes the dead Internet theory at worst an exaggeration of much that is indisputably happening online, rather than some completely baseless fantasy--all as pretending otherwise the way self-satisfied and endlessly condescending centrist types who love to toss around terms like "conspiracy theorist" would have us do gets in the way of what is always the really important question, "Where do we go from here?"