In contrast to last week's post, let us now take a look as to where the internet is today. It should not surprise anyone to see that it is a far different place. Not only that, but it is slowly on the way out as a valuable ecosystem, being strangled to death faster than any we've ever dealt with before in all of human history.
The Golden Age of the Internet, is over.
In a mere quarter century, the internet went from an outlandish wild west to being a ghost town of corporate bots and automatic processes repeating itself into a void. Yes, we've talked about Dead Internet Theory before, but that's only because it's self-evidently real to anyone who has been here since the internet became ubiquitous in the late 90s--kids and teenagers who grew up where people could be found everywhere, subcultures all had their own spaces where you could find and discover new things. Independent works were as discoverable as corporate ones, and everyone was willing to show it off to everyone else. It was one of the few things that didn't collapse when the 20th century hit, but actually grew larger.
This was what made the internet a bright spot at a time in Cultural Ground Zero when everything else was dying. Perhaps this explains why so few folk over the years have seemed to take notice of the West as it has faded. They could instead distract themselves with the internet as it grew. But now that it is also dying, all of that nonsense once overlooked is harder to ignore than ever before.
For those unware of Dead Internet Theory, here is a short description from Wikipedia:
"The dead Internet theory is an online conspiracy theory that asserts that the Internet now consists almost entirely of bot activity and automatically generated content that is manipulated by algorithmic curation, marginalizing organic human activity. These intelligent bots are assumed to have been made, in part, to help manipulate algorithms and boost search results in order to ultimately manipulate consumers."
I couldn't tell you why so many are still trying to frame this as conspiracy theory, but like many such conspiracy theories recently, it has turned out very true. Perhaps not in the way it was originally described, but the Dead Internet is a very obvious reality to anyone who has used the internet for any extended period of time. It is dead and very much over.
Take a look at how it once was contrasted with how it began:
Those days are gone.
There is no conspiracy here. The above is exactly what has happened to the internet. You can also tell its real because journos (who are fast being replaced by said AI and will be in the coming years) have attacked it as false, even as they screech about AI threatening their employment opportunities. So much of the internet is artificial, and it is only becoming more so as the years pass and eggheads attempt to patch over what they already irreparably broke in their bid for control. But once you deliberately and deeply fracture the base it will not take too much time for the whole house to cave-in on itself.
It is the same everywhere online. Surely you have noticed this, too. This is an unavoidable reality.
Being a writer, I have had to try and understand some of these algorithms myself and can tell you that it is impossible to do so--because they are broken. They are broken because those in charge have spent so much time tweaking them for their own gain that they busted them and have no idea how to repair it again. It's completely borked.
Not only that, but the recent explosion of AI in arts and in chat bots has shown how fast this technology has come along. So much of it is fake, and almost all of it is 100% artificial.
What is incorrect about the original Dead Internet Theory is the idea that anyone actually controls any of this. No, it's very much the opposite. The original push was an attempt to do such a thing, but their attempt was absolutely fumbled until those in control lost the plot not unlike so many post-apocalyptic plots from cyberpunk currently authors salivating over government control. No, it is another human failure that led to problems for everyone else.
So what you end up having here is a former wild west as open and free as the real one being taken over by its own iron fisted government to pave the land over. Except in this case, they had no idea what they were doing in the slightest and instead broke it completely. The Dead Internet is a result of a failed takeover of wannabe kings which led to a flood of broken bots and artificial pages and sites that will soon overwhelm everything else.
Essentially, this happened from turning the internet into what it was never meant to be in the first place. It was never meant to be controlled by anyone--it was meant to be a communication gateway. And this result is what happened when Silicon Valley egghead types tried to do just that and crown themselves Lord Emperor of the digital world.
They essentially destroyed their own wonderland in an attempt to make themselves kings. Certainly not a story humanity has not played out before, nor will it be the last, but it definitely is the best example of one we've had in a long time. Sin really does make you stupid.
But you can still remember the good times, and remember what it was all meant for. Once again, humanity's own hubris will be its undoing in something else that could have been far greater than it ended up being.
The internet is dead, and it has no future ahead of it.
And who knows exactly what will come up next? Perhaps it will be better than what came before. We might not even screw this one up this time! There is always a chance, no matter how hard that might seem at times.
Who can tell what we might have to look forward to? No one could have predicted just what the internet was, after all.
Nonetheless, like last time, it is the weekend! Have a good rest and keep looking ahead. Perhaps the internet will hold together enough for communication like this to survive for longer than the destroyed and converged parts of it will. You never really know what the future might hold. Only time will tell on that one.
I know I have a lot I'm still looking forward to sharing with you, so I hope you have the same. We are what made the internet what is was, not corpos, eggheads, or politicians, and we will continue on despite their continued interference to destroy what has been made.
Let us show them what it means what they forgot. Let us remind them just what it means to be human, to be alive!
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