Dead Internet Theory: Fact or Fiction?
If you're here, you might remember the internet as it was decades ago. Most websites were made by people like you and me, people looking to make a place for themselves in the digital age. A place to express yourself, where you could define what you are, with the only limits being your 800 x 600 CRT monitor and whether your phone line was free.
- - -
Look at the web today. The endless sea of quirky personal websites, half of them never finished, the others with garish backgrounds, blurry gifs of dancing babies, loud music that couldn't be stopped... Those pages are gone now. The humanity those pages exemplified, flaws and all, have been replaced with cookie-cutter social media sites, like capsule hotels, giving you a speck of the internet that looks, feels, and behaves like everyone elses. Worst of all, you have to share it with bots - AI crawlers, human impersonators, rouge-state machines that want to incite you, or corporate shill machines that want whatever scraps of money you got left.
- - -
So, the dead internet theory, that the internet as we know it has been killed, replaced with largely AI and botnet controlled content... Doesn't seem so far-fetched, right? Social media feeds seem to be mostly AI generated images meant to get you angry at the "other political party", or convince you to buy god knows what. That 20-something socialite "influencer" you bought that ice maker from could just as easily been a guy like me, mixing GPT's, AI image generation, AI voice generation, even AI video generation, all to make the girl of your dreams make you want to buy her expensive knock-off goods.
- - -
Is this the internet the people on top want? A inter-connected control machine, influencing what we buy, what we listen to, who we vote for? WHen it comes to conspiracy theories, I always like to temper them with the reality that the government is not likely as competent as we assume they are. But those Silicon Valley billionaires, more money and tech wizardry than sense... They wouldn't mind a populace too busy nose-deep in internet political arguments and buzzfeed quizzes to realize they are being spoonfed and kept content while they go unchecked...
- - -
All I know is, AI can replicate human speech, human, language, even human faces. If the fat cats of Silicon Valley want to weaponize this stuff... most would never know until it's too late.
Read more here.
BACK TO MAIN PAGE
