15 years ago if someone had told me about the dead internet theory I’d have laughed in their face. To quote Wikipedia a definition of it is:
“The dead Internet theory is a conspiracy theory which asserts that, due to a coordinated and intentional effort, the Internet now consists mainly of bot activity and automatically generated content manipulated by algorithmic curation to control the population and minimize organic human activity.”
Doesn’t sound too far fetched in 2025 does it? Just yesterday my Android phone installed an update and notified me of improvements to “Gemini”. Namely that it could now do deep research on a prompt, and convert those generated results into a podcast style summary. Curious, I gave it a go. The topic I’d been debating online (who knows if I was talking to a bot) was whether or not we need to use cases and screen protectors on modern smartphones anymore. So that was what I asked.
About a minute later I’d been given a huge wall of text on the topic, and a click of a button and another 1 minute later a 10 minute “podcast” was ready to listen to. I popped in my earbuds and pressed play. I was deeply disturbed at the results. There were two voices in this audio, a male and a female conversing on the topic. This didn’t sound like text to speech at all, there were breaths taken, pauses in the right places, consistent accents and what sounded like organic conversation taking place.
If LLM generated audio can sound so convincing, there is little to no chance we’d be able to discern between true human written text and the “AI” content. I’ve seen videos exposing the uncanny “AI” generated videos, that unless told we would have no idea weren’t real.
These tech companies have scraped through all of humanity’s history on the internet, our books, our movies, our music, our conversations and even our photos. In a very simplified explanation they’ve boiled all this content together and given it to very powerful computers that can now recite all of this knowledge and do it in a manner than appears very human. It can create images from a prompt, videos from an image and new music from artists that have long since passed.
This is undoubtedly an achievement like no other, even 5 years ago I would never have believed any of this would be possible this half of the century let alone the same decade. But at what cost?
It’s rapidly destroyed our online communities that closed the gaps between continents, allowed for collaboration in ways never seen before and more importantly gave people that struggled to fit in places they felt at home. Government regulation has closed down all but the biggest of these communities, and most now rely on their own little spaces within the major social networks. Namely Facebook and Reddit.
Facebook is never something I’ve been comfortable. My online identity and my “IRL” identity have always been kept separate. A platform trying to force me to combine these identities was never going to sit well with me. For that reason (amongst others!) Facebook is a no go for me, and I’ll never have a profile on there.
Reddit used to be what felt like the final outpost of humanity on the internet, but now I’m not so sure. Regulation has been weighing it down for some time, as the owners have been deemed ultimately responsible for any content posted on there censorship has increased dramatically. Recently the “Online Safety Act” has come into play which has made things much, much worse. To even be aware of the existence of what Reddit deem to be “adult content” on Reddit, you now need to be logged in and have your age verified with either a selfie or your national ID. Aside from being absolutely dystopian this now puts it in the same boat as Facebook. Your online identity and your real life identity become one.
Anonymity online is essentially dead anywhere it actually mattered now. No longer can you enjoy discourse around your hobbies online without it being linked back to you. No longer can you vocalise political views without risking a knock at your door.
As an old school internet user I vehemently oppose regulation of the internet, I promote open source collaboration and promote free speech whether I agree with the opinion or not.
Unfortunately the internet as we knew it is dead. The only certainty in browsing it in the way we used to is that you will be spoon fed marketing and propaganda. We can no longer guarantee that anything we read on there is real, especially when it’s claimed to have been posted by an individual.
Does that mean our communities and collaboration are dead? Absolutely not. The communities will just migrate to places that have less regulation. Encrypted chat channels, tor networks and private online communities to name a few. The downsides of this is it’ll be much harder for newcomers to find their way, and that actually nefarious communities such as black hat hacking groups and people that have interests or beliefs that are actually a risk to the public will be harder to find. However the latter is not our problem, and is a direct result of the lawmakers actions. Surely these people would learn from history, just one look at the results of alcohol prohibition and the criminalisation of drugs would tell them that! Overnight the population of the UK’s knowledge of VPN’s increased dramatically, a very bad result for what can only be described as a nanny state if you ask me.
Anyway, I digress. What, if any value can be extracted from the internet in it’s new form then? In traditional use, very little. Unfortunately, the only way to interface efficiently now is to use the new tools. Use “AI”. While “AI” is still in its early phase the tech companies are still very keen on improving their algorithms. That means they want people to converse with it, en masse. As a result, there a very little ads being served and very little if any cost passed on to the consumer. Use “ChatGPT”, “Gemini”, “Deepseek” or whatever you fancy to trawl the web for you. But use it as a starting point only, it generally gives you its sources of information so use those links to your advantage. Don’t blindly take its output as gospel, it’s often inaccurate, or slightly but importantly incorrect and misleading.
Will I follow this advice myself? I’m not sure I can bring myself to feed its language models, nor do I want to help them build up an even clearer profile of me. There’s also a part of me that feels like it’s completely destroying peoples ability to think critically. For some though, especially those that really learn how to extract value from it, it’ll be an opportunity to get ahead of their peers. For me, maybe I’m just happy to be left behind.
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