Dead internet theory

The modern internet feels fake, full of iterative, low value communication. The theory known as “Dead internet theory” suggests that it’s not real people but an AI or multiple AIs generating the content, posting the comments, having the conversations.

The general feeling that everything online feels artificial is, at its core, rooted in reality, but the true conclusion is more banal and in some ways more disturbing.

This is all real. All this sterile, cold, feelingless bullshit is created by actual people. This is what we’ve become. It’s not the AI writing this way, it’s the AI motivating people to write this way, for the algorithm.

My current day job is in marketing and I absolutely do this. I create sterile, empty, fake content, no real emotions, just a facade. We all do this in our personal lives as well, adapting to the marketing flavored, sterile, fake content because that is the only kind that succeeds under the rule of the algorithm.

The algorithm doesn’t think, it doesn’t care. It’s a single minded entity, with a single mission: increasing “engagement”. (Engagement, of course, in the metrics-and-analytics sense, not in the human, I-give-you-my-emotional-attention sense.)

We are currently at a local maximum. On this horrible hill engagement is highest for empty but controversial content, for content that fits in nicely with standardized emotions.

It’s not that AI is creating content (although that does happen sometimes). It’s that AI came to rule human thinking and creativity. It’s that we’re the cooks and the waiters and the kitchen workers, diligently feeding the AI’s hunger for buzz, engagement, communication.

And who’s behind this nebulous, unconscious but all powerful AI? Billionaires and multinational tech giants. They are the masters of the AI and in turn their master is the profit motive. Profits don’t care how they’re generated, they have no relation to emotions or humanity. To profits, humans are machines to be optimized. The human OS is emotions, so that’s what gets tweaked.

The idea that the internet is mostly fake, filled with AI content masquerading as real, is scary. The idea that humans are being exploited and trained to act in this sterile, empty way for profits through many layers of abstraction is what’s truly terrifying.