Dead internet theory, the internet, me and you
It's been a while since a blogpost has appeared here on my blog, and a common theme for the past 2 and a half years has continued on into the present - which is a time of constant change but also new responsibilities, and I am so grateful for the things going on at the minute. Anyway, enough about me, now about what was on my mind recently.
Dead Internet Theory
According to the summary from Wikipedia, the Dead Internet Theory is a conspiracy theory about the coordinated and intentional effort to flood the internet with bot activity - whether that means generating traffic or generating content on platforms like Twitter/(X), it is all a vehicle for controlling the populace through the media they consume via curation algorithms and boosted search results, and for all you know, I could be a bot pretending to be a human with images generated by SoraAI or something... but that's besides the point.
The Internet has moved on from its infant days, a wild west where anyone could do anything with little-to-no repercussion. Shock sites and the like sat side by side with independently developed software pages, and even normal people could make their own things with tools like Neocities or Yahoo! Pipes.
Most internet nowadays is centralised on big sites with curation algorithms, and even the iterations on older forms of internet content such as blogs, are now centralised on curated sites like medium.com, which itself has been infected by the scourge of GPT generated nonsense, and people haven't noticed, or cared that it is.
Some careful digging of this example account peels back the skin on what is a dubious character.
A case study - "John"
At a first glance, this blogger is very keen on geopolitics, particularly surrounding current affairs in the constant soft power and hybrid war between the US and its adversaries (China, Russia, etc). John declares an interest in History, philosophy, politics, and culture, and more in his about section, yet all of his (more often than daily) posts are centred around politics.
A few interesting things to note immediately is the use of AI generated images for his profile image (the lighting is consistent with images generated by AI and obviously isn't a real photo), and for his posts, where there is no relevant real photography to lift from an AP journalist. Another thing to notice is the disconnect between the language and tone in his about page, and his articles. Articles are written in the style of legacy news media blogposts - think of BBC, CNN and the like, vs his about which doesn't refer to "the Universe" as an interest, and instead just "universe".
These inconsistencies are further exacerbated by his medium handle "@shutanweizhi01", clearly displayed at the top of the page in the URL bar, where the first result on DuckDuckGo is a TikTok account "@shutanweizhi" who runs a solar panelling business for Chinese Americans - with use of simplified chinese text in his posts.
Such oddities only contribute to the idea that the internet is not being used as a vehicle to express individual thoughts and creativity into an infinite void, discoverable via (what were) unbiased search engines, but now a tool to spread propaganda for actors unknown, with goals and intentions unclear. Our thirst for unending content and information has led to the rise of algorithms designed expressly to capture our attention and subversively feed us with whatever is deemed to be good enough for us to know.
Where do I fit in to all of this?
Who knows? No one knows, no one ever knew in the early days of the internet, and no one knows now, and I doubt you will in the future unless you are a part of the lucky few that the algorithms collectively shine upon, and even so, who knows how long you'll enjoy that spotlight...
The truth is, the internet has always been messy, and all sorts of strange things have happened on it, and will happen on it, and even more so than before, it seems like it is a void of truly interesting and new stuff - where people dare to dream and make cool things, and instead make the same websites, doing the same things, with the same JavaScript frameworks. And even if the internet was a void before, before the advent of Google, and even in its early days, now it's a void, filled with so much, that we don't even know what's real anymore, and that scares me, but also makes me sad.
What now?
As a takeaway from all of this rambling about how I feel more alone than ever on this small corner of the internet that I can mess around on, I just request that you, and me (reminding myself here), stop consuming the shovelware slop that continues to grow on the internet. Low-effort short-form content, AI generated/managed channels, content factories, clip farming factories, and even "commentary" channels that serve to only summarise whatever they are discussing, instead of giving us critical analysis.
Support people who do well researched things, come up with creative new ideas, or just want to make us laugh, and even though many of these people reside on these curated sites, but maybe we'll flip the tide on the unending madness that is the passage of time in the AI age, and appreciate what is good about being human, and appreciating the world around us for what it is.
