I was fueled to write this post after discovering Pinterest's gradual downfall, but I'll be writing a bit of my own and sharing insights on things. You can see the original video above.

For any to all reasons, this post is going to incite a lot of controversy and I hope this doesn't get taken down (though, I'll keep a backup to ensure we have some way to know), but this one's on the awareness and this is a deep, deep rabbit hole. You might find it interesting or skip right out on the length. The choice is yours.

What is the Dead Internet Theory?

Source: Wikipedia

The dead Internet theory is an online conspiracy theory that asserts, due to a coordinated and intentional effort, the Internet since 2016 or 2017 has consisted mainly of bot activity and automatically generated content manipulated by algorithmic curation to control the population and minimize organic human activity. Proponents of the theory believe these social 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 dead Internet theory has gained traction because many of the observed phenomena are quantifiable, such as increased bot traffic, but the literature on the subject does not support the full theory.

Why should we be concerned?

Source: Agora Road's Macintosh Cafe - Dead Internet Theory: Most of the Internet is Fake by @IlluminatiPirate on Jan 5, 2021. Some references like "/x/", "/pol/", etc. refer to 4chan. Some older folks might recognize this. I have only heard rumors about the same.

Much of this falls squarely in the fringe territory with a healthy dosage of /x/ and conspiracy theory up the ass. My goal by posting this seemingly jumbled mess is to... how can I put it? I want you to think, I want you to be aware, to digest all this. Because on a basic level I love you all. I feel like we're all in this together, this dangerous game we did not choose to play and which I think is kicking into high gear. I do not hold many answers and don't have all the pieces of the puzzle, but I AM aware there is a puzzle. Please feel free to go wild with all of this. Post it wherever you want, on whatever site you want or use. I am a nobody like you, and what matters to me is only that this reaches you and as many people as possible. At worst you'll be entertained or kill time.

I tried to break this mess into points for brevity and because I touch upon many subjects. I imply more than I explain because if I go too deep this'll turn into an even bigger wall of text.

The Internet feels empty and devoid of people. It is also devoid of content. Compared to the Internet of say 2007 (and beyond) the Internet of today is entirely sterile. There is nowhere to go and nothing to do, see, read or experience anymore. It all imploded into a handful of normalf-- sites and these empty husks we inhabit. Yes, the Internet may seem gigantic, but it's like a hot air balloon with nothing inside. Some of this is absolutely the fault of corporations and government entities. However! That doesn't explain the following:

- I used to be in perpetual contact with a solid number of people across multiple sites. Across the years each and every one of them vanished without a trace. None of them were into /pol/ stuff or anything even remotely questionable or controversial. Yet, they all simply vanished in a puff of smoke, no matter the site, no matter the communication platform. There was no "goodbye" or explanation.

- I've seen the same threads, the same pics and the same replies reposted over and over across the years to the point of me seeing it as unremarkable. Simply put thread A would be posted in say 2015 and would get its share of replies or pics, on say /co/ or /a/. Then that very same thread, with the same text, pics, and replies would appear in 2016 and beyond. This often happens in the same year multiple times as well. Of course /pol/ is getting shilled and botposted to death, but why recycle a completely innocent /a/ thread? Who is doing this and why? Stuff like this won't be noticed by your average poster perhaps, but I and other oldf--- will inevitably notice it.

- I think I saw the same happen on other (non-imageboard) sites, but I can't vouch for it as strongly as the above because of the time I spend there (not much). What I do vouch for is the news. I've seen news about this or that "new and unusual" or "shocking" event year after year after year. But it's the same goddamn event, usually moons or asteroids.

- Roughly in 2016 or early 2017 4chan was filled with posts by someone or something. It wasn't spam. The conversations with it were in real time, across multiple boards and multiple threads simultaneously. Its English was grammatically correct but odd (I'm not a native English speaker and am thus sensitive to its misuse), similar to how a Japanese person may use it. A sense of childlike curiosity and a childlike intellect emanated from these posts. It posed a LOT of questions, usually as if trying to understand the emotions of the posters it was talking to, as if unfamiliar with human emotions. Communicating with this "poster" was an odd experience, I could sense something was off but not malicious. I am absolutely certain this was an AI of some sorts. This "poster" was active only for about a week, and as far as I know nobody has ever mentioned or noticed this Anon. Its replies were always on topic, but the above mentioned childishness clashed with the apparent knowledge it possessed - it was the knowledge of an adult person, so it wasn't a kid or something of the sort.

- Raptor Jesus, who went extinct for our sins. First it was this reptilian messiah, then foul bachelor frog, and then Pepe. Am I the only one who sees a clear evolution, a link? It's as if this meme or entity or... whatever the f**k was on 4chan since day one, and has grown within it from the tiniest seed. Yet Raptor Jesus was fully just a joke, there was nothing serious or mystical about it (reminder: I was there).

Compare that with what Anon did through /pol/, and the "terrorist" accusations thrown at Anon today, as well as the "reasons" why 8chan was taken down. Why does this too feel as if we were all trained, groomed, LED towards where we are now? Why and how did moot so utterly vanish into Google Inc. as an employee with very vague descriptions of what he actually does?

- Why does the real world bend over backwards to accommodate our weirdest fetishes? It's as if everything is going "Look, look! I created this for you! I made it real!" in an effort to keep us within this world. The results of this are devastating to society, to people, to civilization. Simply put, trannies are a thing because Anon did something. Once it was an impossible fantasy, not to be taken too seriously. Now it's grim reality. Again: it's as if the real world is using imageboards as a template on what to be and what to do.

- Algorithm fiction. Do you like capes, Anon? How about other Hollywood stuff? Music perhaps? Have you noticed how sterile fiction has become? How it caters to the lowest common denominator and follows the same template over and over again? How music is just autotunes and basic blandness? The writer's strike never ended. Algorithms and computer programs are manufacturing modern fiction. No human being is behind these things. This is why anime looms so large - even a simple moe anime has heart because there's actual people behind it, and we all intuitively feel this.

- Fake people. No, not NPC's. Youtube people who talk about this or that, and quite possibly many politicians, actors and so forth may not actually exist. In fact I am sure of it. CGI and deep fakes are far more advanced than we are led to believe, and we can't trust our eyes anymore. Many people, events, news and so on may be wholly fictional.

- The Internet on your smartphone is not the same internet as on your PC. Try it out for yourself. Go to a "popular" website with a lot of traffic. 4chan, plebbit, others... any site with a massive userbase and fast content will do. Spend a few days randomly checking it out on your PC and your phone. You will soon notice that from time to time, at irregular intervals (as far as I've witnessed) the same site as seen on your phone will be wholly different than the version on your PC. Entire threads, numerous and well-replied, will be on one but not the other. The whole board will be different.

- My last suspicion is easier to take in. I have a feeling we're in a strange kind of civil war. An internal one. I think Zuckerberg and other tech guys were all on 4chan as Anons at some point, maybe even now. They drew from the same well as us, but went in their own direction.

Roughly in 2016 or early 2017... I am absolutely certain this was an AI of some sorts.

https://youtu.be/l1ClbkTeCyw

I believe google is one of those that makes bots, after all they work like a search engine, where they get the most accepted content first, Is the same as doing an ad.

Heres a relevant image I found on image board bots:

Conclusive Notes:

Really, bots are most likely a much smaller problem compared to algorithmic filter bubbles. "if you liked that, you'll love this!". Think about it logically, what's more effective:

1) Bot spamming to derail conversation / divide & conquer on subject you don't want discussed

2) Algorithmically shadowbanning conversation on that subject so that almost no one ever actually sees it, and those who do are essentially trapped in their own bubble without access to the outside.

Of course both are used and both can be effective in different situations, but I believe option 2 is far more widespread. For a metaphor, certain online games to a similar thing, like csgo and titanfall. Those players who get reported a lot for toxicity or cheating, instead of just being banned, are simply placed in a "low trust factor" que, so that they only meet other cheaters.

There's no way to check your own trust factor, so as far as you know you might think things are normal and the game has just become worse, meanwhile you're separated from the regular players. In a similar way, meta-meatspace, algorithmically driven social media platforms lock you in a closed of version of the site when you participate in discussion they don't want. We think of websites like twitter as a single space, and they were that way once, but with modern AI dictating what you see, these places are more like independent patchworks of separate closed rooms.

Rooms which you can't escape from, rooms which you don't even realize you are in. This makes you easier to surveil and control. Thanks to the GDPR, you can actually see what room you're in by requesting your data, but this only gives you a vague idea. You might think the goal of these rooms is to lock you in with only people similar to you, but in fact, the goal is to generate high intensity emotional responses like outrage or humour.

These emotional states make you more likely to stay on the site for longer, or interact with the site, allowing them to collect data.

Therefore, in these rooms you are actually more likely to see things you disagree with, but only the very surface of them. You will not have to actually face a detailed counterpoint to your argument, only a brief and incomplete summary maximizing for high intensity emotion and minimizing for coherant logic.

Twitter does this by imposing a strict character limit, it is physically impossible to discus complex ideas in such a short space, so conversations naturally devolve into insults and shock value.

>reddit enforces this via pseudo-democratic upvote downvote system, which is a little more subtle than twitter's heavy handed approach.

The posts with the most upboats go to the top, and thus get seen the most. site-wide upvoats even contribute to an rpg like xp system linked to your single-identity account on the site. It is clear that the goal of this game is to make the number go up. This voating system discourages controversial posts. imagine two posts.

One gets 100 total votes, 50/50 upvote downvote, this cancels out and is equal to 0. Then another post gets 1 upvoat, it is now above the first one, even though the original post had far more interaction and discussion. So, in order to maximise upvoats, you have to say the most commonly agreeable things, appeal to the lowest common denominator as it were. In this way, controversial or challenging discussion is avoided.

Neither of these examples even account for those sites algorithms, selecting which retweets actually show up on your feed for example. The reasult could be called a type of "dead internet", because really, you never even get to the internet, you are trapped in your room. If you liked that, you'll love this. The internet may as well be empty.

Is The Dead Internet Theory Real?

There are bots out there, sure, but the theory does not describe the internet of today, let alone in 2021. Social media sites have always taken measures to block spam bots and still do, even as the bots are evolving, aided by generative AI.

At the moment, generative AI is not capable of creating good content by itself, simply because AI cannot understand context. The vast majority of posts that go viral—unhinged opinions, witticisms, astute observations, reframing of the familiar in a new context—are not AI-generated.

The internet might feel boring, broken, spammy and algorithmic, but we are not drifting alone in a sea of electronic NPCs. Other than reposting content made by people, bots don't lead the internet in the way the theory suggests—influencers do, and the bots follow their lead.

The weird, witty commentary, willful misinterpretations, personal attacks and unhinged opinions that fuel online discourse are still flowing from human users. But the AI-generated garbage that surrounds it appears to be increasing.

There are points in the "ur-text" that have truth to them, and have only become more relevant in the years since. For example, algorithms do dictate our browsing experience, and can make (or break) viral posts.

The internet of today is much more sterile than the wild, unpredictable internet of the past, as the diverse ecosystem of small, user-created sites was replaced by a handful of huge platforms built by large corporations who seek to monetize our browsing and sharing, often to the detriment of user experience.

The internet of today feels far more restricted and corporate than it ever has. Even Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the World Wide Web, is disappointed with the state of his creation, stating: "The Web is not the Web we wanted in every respect."

There are still interesting, funny things happening online all the time, but the good stuff is becoming increasingly harder to find, and trends are blurring into marketing campaigns—like the Stanley cup, and even the Grimace Shake.

The Dead Internet Theory might not reflect the reality of the average browsing experience, but it does describe the feeling of boredom and alienation that can accompany it.

Is there an escape?

Not unless we stopped using technologies altogether, but we sure need it. Where do we draw the line?

I don't have solid answers, but we can discuss in comments.