The internet used to feel like a vibrant but messy patchwork of human curiosity. Websites, discussion forums, blogs, and conversations were stitched together by real people sharing unpolished yet real ideas.
Today’s internet remains full of debate and unfiltered opinions. Yet it feels much less alive — and much less human — than it once did.
The internet’s dominant force is social media, which produces infinite TikTok-style clips stitched from stock footage and narrated by a perky synthetic voice. These AI-generated clips (“Five simple hacks that will change everything!”) seem to exist only so that one AI bot can recommend them to another AI bot that dutifully clicks “like.” It’s a perpetual-motion machine whose sole product is noise.
There’s a name for this phenomenon: the Dead Internet Theory, which posits that a significant amount of online content is produced not by humans but by AI. The evidence suggests a hard kernel of truth at the core of this argument. More than 40% of Facebook’s long-form posts and more than half of longer LinkedIn posts are likely generated by AI. Engagement with this content is often powered by automated click farms.
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