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The Dead Internet Theory

Orphia Nay

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Orphia Nay
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The Dead Internet Theory. Mostly true or mostly false?

The dead Internet theory is an online conspiracy theory that asserts that the Internet now consists mainly of bot activity and automatically generated content manipulated by algorithmic curation, marginalizing organic human activity to manipulate the population. Proponents of the theory believe these bots were created intentionally to help manipulate algorithms and boost search results in order to manipulate consumers. Some proponents of the theory accuse government agencies of using bots to manipulate public perception. The date given for this "death" was generally around 2016 or 2017.

The dead Internet theory has gained traction because many of the observed phenomena are quantifiable, such as increased bot traffic, but the literature does not support the full theory. Caroline Busta, founder of the media platform New Models, was quoted in an article in The Atlantic calling much of the dead Internet theory a "paranoid fantasy", even if there are legitimate criticisms involving bot traffic and the integrity of the internet, but she said she does agree with the "overarching idea". In an article in The New Atlantis, Robert Mariani called the theory a mix between a genuine conspiracy theory and a creepypasta.
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dead_Internet_theory
 
bots and algorithms have certainly made the internet an uglier place, but all you have to do to know is there's human content online is to see people (facebook friends, forum members, politicians etc) IRL
 
The backbone of the Internet has always comsited mostly of automatic processes.
And spam mail has always outnumbered regular email.

A.I. is a bit tardy to the party if it wants to take over.
 
And, naturally, anyone who disagrees with the conspiracy theory is a bot, and thus proves the theory.
 
Ok, machines outnumber humans on the net. Machines outnumber me in my home. And in my truck. And on my job. I... don't see what the panic would be about.
 
Add in cyborgs, and this would make a great premise for a sci-fi horror story.
 
the only dead internet problem I run into has been around way before AI (though that's made it worse) and it's all the webpages that are effort-free copies of existing content. For a brief time, search engines would discount pages that were verbatim copies of wiki etc... people got around it by doing machine translation rephrases then, and still use that and AI now. So much low or no effort machine-assisted or machine-generated web content. I hate it.

The new thing I hate is black-hat scam and grift assistance. Relative wants to buy fake sounding thing, you google search 'fake sounding thing scam' and get a video with that as a title card and a machine voiceover telling you 'wow the fake sounding thing is great and not a scam!'

Ooh and another thing I hate and also don't understand is when you do a google search and you get back results with exactly your search terms, but the page it's pointing to has nothing to do with them? Are those exploiting some kind of proceedural generation or what? (I don't mean just pages that put the dictionary in their seo terms headers or whatever.)
 
Other than YT videos, I mostly use the web to get technical, product and process data, which is still easy-ish to find. Most of my channel subscriptions are either to broaden news content or to continue on science and tech.

But nowadays, all around that is an echo-chamber aping my searches and coughing up trashy info-pron, unlike when I used to drill down into Yahoo categories, a peaceful and often rewarding endeavor back in the halcyon days of post-arpanet.
 
Weird to call it Dead Internet. I guess that sounds more macabre than saying machines are doing more work than humans? Which again, no ****. That doesn't make for instance this forum less of a human interaction, or goods bought on eBay or Amazon less real. Or my kid's online wedding plans updates and other friends and family connections on social media. Or the news of the eclipse with its tips and coverage, not to.mention most news sources themselves...

What the **** is so dead about it, in any real sense?
 
Conspiracy theories about a centrally-organized plan of operation, I'm pretty sure some of the stuff in my YouTube feed is being posted by bots, and then being commented on by bots. I'm also pretty sure this problem is going to get worse.

However, content by bots for bots doesn't make a whole lot of sense. At some point, there has to be a target audience of people. Presumably, when I see a clip of Putin walking down some stairs, and a hundred comments all expressing adoration and admiration in a dozen different languages, it's because Moscow wants to create in me the impression that Putin is ubiquitous and awesome and universally loved and on the right side of history.
 
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No doubt, but so what? Comments by actual humans catfishing you into believing that they are someone they are not is a tale as old as time, too.
 
It's a fun theory to think about. But if it pulls the onus of blame off the people ultimately responsible and dumps it on an arcane set of autonomic programs and faceless algorithms, it's probably not a helpful take on things.
 
novaphile said:
Yeah, I think the internet is still enduring 'eternal September'.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September

Good content is out there, but you have to dodge a lot of bot ******** everywhere.

(And I count 'useful idiots' among the bots)
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“Eternal September or the September that never ended is Usenet slang for a period beginning around 1993 when Internet service providers began offering Usenet access to many new users. The flood of new users overwhelmed the existing culture for online forums and the ability to enforce existing norms. AOL followed with their Usenet gateway service in March 1994, leading to a constant stream of new users. Hence, from the early Usenet point of view, the influx of new users in September 1993 never ended.”

Heh, I joined the internet in 1994 (though I’d used computers/intranets since 1983), nice to know I’m a noob.

Today, I think there are definitely enclaves where the population of bots is annoyingly high.

Xitter comes to mind. Also Facebook ad comments.
 
I'm going to vote for mostly untrue. I don't know what percentage of online content is created by bots, but that's not really the relevant metric anyway, what matters isn't how much content is created but how much is engaged with (either actively or passively). 1000 bot twitter accounts all following each other don't really affect any human beings. A human with a million followers does. I'm confident that those million follower accounts are real people, and more generally that the percentage of content that the average person engages with which is human created is high.

Similarly we all get spam email, but most of it gets filtered out and never seen, some of it gets through and you read the title of the email before deleting it. Most of your time looking through your emails is actually engaging with real emails sent by real people.

This may change over time, but so far, no, I don't think that the "Dead Internet Theory" is a useful framing of the current state of affairs.
 
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